Walking encyclopedia: "Father of Quark" Murray Gell-Mann

The Unknown Nobel Prize Tidbits [Walking Encyclopedia: Murray Gell-Mann, Father of Quark] (Winner of the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physics for "Discoveries and Contributions to the Classification of Elementary Particles and Their Interactions") As a child, Gell-Mann was known as a prodigy from an early age — his classmates considered him "a walking encyclopedia." At the age of 3, he was able to mentally calculate the multiplication of several numbers; at the age of 7 he won a spelling contest with a child 5 years older than him. Once, the piano teacher introduced Gell-Mann to an artist friend of hers, and Gell-Mann gave the artist an art history lesson. In addition, Gell-Mann is also interested in French and Chinese cooking, and he has taken people to Chinese restaurants to eat and ordered in Chinese. At the Nobel Dinner, he gave a speech in Swedish, which the organizers were overwhelmed by. In 1944, at the age of 15, Gell-Mann considered applying to Yale University, when his father advised him to study "engineering," but ironically, after a proficiency test, Gell-Mann was deemed fit to study everything "except engineering." So my father suggested, "Why don't we compromise and study physics?" No one would have thought that this simple sentence would have led to the later proposer of quark theory, the Nobel Prize winner, and the "emperor who ruled the field of elementary particles for 20 years"—although he did not win the Nobel Prize for the discovery of quarks, which is also a yin and yang error! Gell-Mann, though, had a fear of writing, which was "an unbearable lightness in his life." In the Nobel Commemoration issue, there is a blank page, which is left for Gell-Mann — because he did not turn in the official speech that needs to be published in the annual special issue.

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Source: Science and Technology Daily