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By Root 2186 0

Benedict, had chosen that simpler spelling. Many people leaned the other way, toward a pedantic, European style of pronunciation, the accent on the second syllable and the a broad: gel-MAHN. This, too, was wrong. Later, when he had secretaries, they sometimes upbraided malefactors: “He’s not German, you know.” Of course the g was hard, despite the unconscious tug of the soft g in the word gel. Natives of New York and other regions that distinguish between the a’s of man and mat suspected rightly that the second, flatter a must be better for Gell-Mann. It was safest to stress the two syllables almost equally. By then anyone who knew anything about Gell-Mann knew that his own pronunciation of names in any language was impeccable. Supposedly he would lecture visitors from Strasbourg or Pago Pago about the niceties of their own Alsatian or Samoan dialects. He was so insistent about differentiating the pronunciations of Colombia and Columbia that colleagues suspected him of straining to bring references to the country into conversations about the university. From the beginning most physicists simply referred to him as Murray. There was never any doubt which Murray they meant. Feynman, preparing for a cameo performance as a tribal chieftain in a Caltech production of South Pacific, taught himself a few words of Samoan and then resignedly told a friend, “The only person who will know I’m pronouncing this wrong is Murray.”

Gell-Mann attended Columbia Grammar on full scholarship. His father, born in Austria, had learned to speak a perfectly unaccented English and so, in the early 1920s, decided to start a language school for immigrants. It was the closest to success that he came, as his son saw it. The school moved several times—once, as Murray recalled, because his mother was afraid that his brother would catch whooping cough from someone in the building—and went out of business a few years later. It was his brother, nine years older and so adored by his parents, who taught him to read and to take pleasure in language, science, and art. Benedict was a bird-watcher and nature lover before nature became a practical field of interest; dropping out of college at the height of the Depression, he stunned his parents and left a complicated impression on his younger brother.

Murray did not find his way immediately to physics, talented as he was in so many subjects. When he applied to the Ivy League graduate schools, he was widely disappointed: Yale would take him only in mathematics, Harvard would take him only if he paid full fare, and Princeton would not take him at all. So he made a half-hearted application to MIT and heard directly back from Victor Weisskopf, whom he had not heard of. Gell-Mann decided to accept Weisskopf’s offer, though grudgingly. MIT seemed so lumpen. The joke he told ever after was that the alternatives did not commute: he could try MIT first and suicide second, whereas the other ordering would not work. He reached MIT in 1948, close to his nineteenth birthday, just in time to watch the exploding competition in quantum electrodynamics from the vantage point of an office near Weisskopf’s. When Weisskopf advised him that the future belonged to Feynman, he studied the available preprints. Feynman’s struck him as a cuckoo private language, though correct; Schwinger’s version struck him as hollow and pompous; Dyson’s as crude and sloppy. He was already inclined toward scabrous assessments of his famous fellow physicists, though for now he kept them mostly private.

His own work was not quite living up to his severe expectations, though he was finally beginning to impress other physicists. After a year at the Institute for Advanced Study he joined Fermi’s group at Chicago. He was in time to join the tumultuous effort to find the right concepts, the right ordering principles, the right quantum numbers for understanding the many new particles. There was confusion and there were regularities—coincidences in the experimental plots of particle masses and lifetimes. There were mesons that seemed to exist, and mesons that