Murray Gell-Mann: Beauty and truth in physics
Jan 9th, 2008 by Brad
At last year’s TED conference one of the lectures that was taped was by the polymath and physicist Murray Gell-Mann. I highly recommend taking a look. http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/194
He talks a lot about symmetry. Symmetry goes way beyond simple mirror images about a line. Amazing symmetries also exists in magnificantly complex structures such as as E8. E8 is the largest possible immense structure with unique symmetry. Basically things with some form of symmetry have characteristics that don’t change under change. What a better way to understand things that change and those characteristics. Beautiful.
And if you want to read more you can read his very approachable book, “The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex.”
Gell-Mann in 1964 postulated the existence of quarks. Then later described hadrons their puzzling physics, proposed the name “quark”, and won a Nobel prize for the quarks. He has a wide and eclectic set of interests from Buddhism, East Asian antiquities, linguistics, bird watching, archeology and many others. He also invested a lot of effort into the study of complexity theory where he also was instrumental part of Santa Fe Institute (where complexity and other multi-disciplinary things are studied).
To learn more about symmetry, try these podcasts…
