The hunting of the quark
Hugh Lawson-Tancred
STRANGE BEAUTY by George Johnson Cape, £18.99, pp. 434 Is it really coherent to speculate that science might be coming to an end, in the sense that we are running out of discover- ies to make? This view is remarkably often defended in current science journalism and even by philosophers of science. Yet it seems a curiously foolhardy assumption if we reflect on the changes of the last 100 years. As John Maddox has so persuasively explained, the end of science could have been confidently predicted, in the relevant sense, at the close of the 19th century, and since then, of course, we have had relativi- ty, the quantum, big-bang cosmology, the integration of Darwinism and genetics and the birth of a serious cognitive science. Surely, it would be prudent to assume that, when it comes to predicting the death of discovery, unless we can learn from the past, we will be destined to repeat it.
No doubt, we will simply have to wait to see when, whether and how our framework for explaining the universe, life or mind changes sufficiently to give colour to a use by followers of Thomas Kuhn of the expression 'paradigm shift'. But there is a more particular, if also more pedestrian, way in which the end of science can be quite plausibly hailed, and this is in the sense of science as saliently carried on by human beings rather than by the inventions of humans beings. Scientific discovery has been increasingly the prerogative of the hardware since Galileo, but it is perfectly possible that we are about to see a similar ascent of the machine in the business of scientific theory itself. It may very soon be the case that anything which can meaning- fully be regarded as an understanding of the state-of-the-art explanation of the structure of matter and energy will be of a conceptual difficulty which precludes the enjoyment of access to it by (moderately) evolved hunter-gatherer brains. The best human scientists would then be in the posi- tion relative to the computers which is occupied at the moment by attentive and well-informed readers of popular science relative to Nobel laureates. Quite apart from this speculation, it seems that there is another hard constraint on the possible fur- ther evolution of basic physics, at any rate, in the exponential increase of particle acceleration and hence public expenditure required to achieve ever diminishing returns in terms of the level of the struc- ture of matter-energy down to which it is possible for us to delve. Perhaps we will, for this reason, never be able to 'unify' gravity with the atomic forces.
If anything like this is right, then future historians will look back on the second half of the 20th century as the last great oppor- tunity for the human mind to make a con- tribution to the scientific explanation of the universe. In any case, that period was cer- tainly a golden age for scientists, especially in the USA, in that their work enjoyed unprecedented (and now long faded) levels of public appreciation, confidence and enthusiasm and attracted commensurate generosity from the funding agencies. A physicist born in the USA in the 1920s had timed his or her run very well indeed.
Nobody was better placed to exploit this opportunity than the subject of Strange Beauty, Murray Gell-Mann. A child prodi- gy, he was not missed by the talent scouts of East Coast academia, passing through Colombia and Yale on his way to MIT. Unlike Richard Feynman, with whom he can naturally be compared and contrasted, he was too young to take part in the Man- hattan Project, but he rapidly took his place among the elite established or entrenched by that extraordinary endeav- our. He was invited by Oppenheimer to Princeton and by Fermi to Chicago, before finally settling (on the same staircase as Feynman) at Caltech in Pasadena. His golden decade was from the mid-Fifties to the mid-Sixties, in which he made funda- mental contributions to the quantum field theory of the atomic nucleus and (not quite alone) broached the notion that the nucle- ar particles are themselves made out of still more fundamental (and necessarily impos- sible to isolate) components, which he labelled 'quarks'. This work brought order into what Oppenheimer liked to call the 'sub-nuclear zoo', and Gell-Mann was just- ly dubbed the Mendeleev of the 20th cen- tury. He is also as much as anyone responsible for the whimsical tone of the technical jargon now built into the standard model of particle physics.
Gell-Mann unquestionably enjoys a cen- tral position in any history of how that standard model was reached, but his inter- est as a subject of biography goes beyond that in at least two respects. In the first place, in more or less deliberate antago- nism to the prevailing ethos of the physics community, he has always sedulously culti- vated the persona of a Renaissance man, with wide learning in languages, history and anthropology, to say nothing of bird- watching. Secondly, he is, or can be, an abrasive personality, whose mastery of the art of suffering fools has often come under severe strain.
Johnson makes a good stab at dealing with the central scientific achievement, the peripheral penumbra of learning and the social interaction issues. His account of the scientific context is thoroughly competent but rather more plodding than that offered, for instance, by James Gleick in his out- standing biography of Feynman. As to the polymathy, he seems a little in awe of it, and he also betrays a desire to remain on good terms with his subject, which prompts the suspicion that it is too warm to accom- modate the throwing of much light on his notorious foibles.
Strange Beauty is extremely readable and well conveys the flavour of life among the late 20th-century academic elite in America, but it errs in the direction of superficiality (fundamental science as campus gossip) and, most seriously, it does not really attempt to explain why, in so bright a firmament, it was Gell-Mann who was so repeatedly the brightest star. Perhaps the real answer to that question, as with the quantum physicists of the pioneer generation, is that he grasped better than the others the fundamental reason for buying the theory: credo quia absurdum est.
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