Nobel laureate Marie Gell-Mann, the founder of modern particle physics, has passed away

Gell-Mann arrived at the quark theory at the same time as the Israeli Prof. Yuval Ne'am, who claimed that he too deserved a Nobel Prize

Marie Gell-Mann, one of the founders of modern particle physics, died on May 24, at the age of 89. Gell-Mann's greatest contribution was the development of the theory of quarks - fundamental particles that make up most of ordinary matter.

Gell-Mann was born in New York in 1929 and did most of his work at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, where he taught between 1955 and 1993. In 1984, he founded the Santa Fe Institute, a multidisciplinary center for complex systems research in New Mexico.

In order to bring order to the abundance of subatomic particles that were discovered in his time, Gel-Mann proposed in 1961 a set of rules based on symmetries in the fundamental forces of nature. The rules classified subatomic particles called hadrons into eight groups, a scheme called the Eightfold Path in reference to Buddhist philosophy.

In the years 1960-1961, at the same time as Abdus Salam from the University of London, his student Yuval Ne'man and John Ward developed a symmetry theory for the structure of the particles that make up the strong force, which explains the existence and properties of the subatomic particles with the help of a model based on the symmetry group. In 1962, Gell-Mann proposed based on Measurements in the laboratory, at the same time as Yuval Neman's proposal based on theoretical analysis, to add another particle, the omega minus, to the particles included in the theory until then. The discovery of this particle at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in early 1964, whose existence and properties were predicted by Gell-Mann's and Neman's model, confirmed the model and focused public attention on the theory.

In 1963 Gell-Mann and George Zweig hypothesized that all subatomic particles could be explained as consisting of a small number of elementary particles. Gell-Mann called these elementary particles quarks. The name, which until then was meaningless, is taken from James Joyce's "I'm sorry for Fingan": "Three quarks for Mr. Mark!" (English: !Three quarks for Muster Mark). (Wikipedia)

He also postulated the existence of gluons: particles that carry the strong nuclear force in a similar way to how photons carry the electromagnetic force. The quarks inside the hadrons are held together by the exchange of electrons.

Researchers at the Stanford Linear Accelerator in California confirmed the existence of quarks in 1968, and Gell-Mann received the Nobel Prize in Physics a year later. His theory of quarks and gluons was later successfully tested in countless, increasingly precise experiments in high-energy particle accelerators. Physicists currently recognize six different types of quarks, with their counterparts - antimatter.

Naman believed until his last day that he deserved to share the prize with Gell-Mann, and claimed that the University of London, where he was researching at the time, underestimated his importance because of his competition with local researchers, and that Israel did not have a standing in science at the time, which could have influenced the choice.

Gal-Mann was interested not only in physics but in the entire natural world, and in his book "The Quark and the Jaguar" from 1994 (which was translated a year later into Hebrew by Emanuel Lotem, published by Ma'ariv Library), he was concerned about the decline in biological diversity and cultural diversity.

"For close to four billion years, biological evolution on Earth distilled, by trial and error, an enormous amount of information about the different ways in which organisms can live among each other in the biosphere. Similarly, modern man has developed for more than fifty thousand years an enormous amount of information about the different ways in which humans can live in reciprocal relationships with each other and with the rest of nature, both biological diversity and cultural diversity are currently in danger, and there is a vital need to preserve them." Indeed, not only the quarks are components of a complex system, both humans and all other living creatures live in one large complex system - the biosphere."

Almost a quarter of a century later, with Gell-Mann's passing, we see the destructive results of human arrogance to control nature more powerfully.

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