By: Veronica Draayers and Brin Gibson

Murray Gell-Mann

Personal Story• Born September 15,

1929 in lower Manhattan• Child prodigy• Entered Yale at the age

of 15 as a member of Jonathan Edwards college

• American physicist and linguist

• Received Noble Prize in physics in 1969

• He is currently the Robert Andrews Milikan Professor of Theoretical Physics Emeritus at Caltech

Idea of the atom• He developed the

quark diagram• He found that all of the

particles in the nuclei, such as the protons and the neutrons are made up of quarks

• Protons and neutrons are called hadrons

• Protons are made up of three quarks

• Quarks are the fundamental building blocks of protons and neutrons

Quark Model (way to classify hadrons in their valence quarks)

Experiments / Area of Study• Quantum Mechanics• By the 1960’s nearly 100

different particles had been discovered in the nucleus of the atom.

• Gell-Mann classified them using their electrical charge and “strangeness” in octets or “the eightfold way”.

• noticed that there was an empty spot and estimated the charge and “strangeness” number to develop quarks.

• Proton smashing

Major Scientific Contribution• He helped come up with

the accepted theory of quantum chromodynamics (fundamental force describing the interactions between quarks and gluons)

• He is also known for the see-saw theory of neutrino masses (helps describe the masses of neutrinos relative to quarks)

• He helped keep the idea of string theory alive when the concept was unpopular

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Gell-Mann

http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/gel0bio-1

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laurestes/1969/gell-mann-bio.html

Bibliography