Strange Beauty
by George Johnson
Knopf

The last page of George Johnson's Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in Twentieth Century Physics, shows the Nobel-winning theorist as a small boy, bent over a paper with ruler and pencil. "I've rarely seen a picture that captures someone's essence so perfectly," Johnson says. It is a fitting conclusion to Gell-Mann's life story, for Johnson's thesis – if he has one – is that Gell-Mann never grew up. Throughout the book he remains a wunderkind, for whom experience can do nothing to blunt either his childlike wonder at nature, or his childish need to be the smartest kid in class.

In that same last chapter, Johnson thinks back over his "Grand Unified Theory" of Murray, and that is indeed what it is: a set of simple principles that beautifully explain the physicist's complex behavior. Johnson may be right, but it makes for a curiously flat story: a chronicle of Gell-Mann's few defeats and many victories, with little sign of character development.

Johnson may be able to reduce Gell-Mann's personality to his brilliance but he can't do much to show us where that brilliance comes from. We first see little Murray as a child-prodigy, bored in class, already several grades ahead, and already delighting in Latin, in natural history, and in making fun of those less intelligent than himself.

Later in the book we hear numerous tributes from other physicists impressed with Gell-Mann's lightning mind, theoretical craftsmanship, and genuine love for all things natural. But how that mind works, what gave Gell-Mann his insight into physics, why he should have come out right on so many of the key theories in particle physics, Johnson's book never says. He is simply a genius. Even as a little boy.

Maybe it's the material. Johnson is an elegant writer whose previous books have dealt with scientific fields – still in their infancy – from artificial intelligence, to memory, to Gell-Mann's own "complexity studies." Where argument abounds, and even the best scientists must reach for their theories with metaphor, Johnson's gifts for imagery and diplomacy serve him well. But particle physics is a mathematical vintage four hundred years in the brewing. Its images – charmed quarks, strangeness, the "Eightfold Way" – are notorious for being unintuitive. And the biggest debate still open in particle physics – as Johnson seems to see it – is which genius deserves the credit for what.

To his merit, Johnson does his best with these questions. He is scrupulously fair about apportioning credit. And he does a fine job of showing how certain kinds of models – those that explained forces in terms of universal symmetries, for example, or others that maintained a "democracy" between the many kinds of particles, treating them as aspects of the same thing – have exerted a continual pull on physicists, who couple aggressive thinking with a simple faith that the universe must be essentially beautiful.

But without training, non-connoisseurs are at a loss to differentiate between quarks, S-bootstraps, or any of the other fancifully-named attempts to make sense of the world's tiniest objects, and perhaps there is not much any science writer can do to translate these mathematical objects into pictures and English. It may be impossible to understand what made Murray Gell-Mann such a great physicist without really understanding what makes good physics. All the common folk may do is admire the geniuses at play.

— Katherine Nagel (knagel@phy.ucsf.edu)