Postulated and named quarks. Won a Nobel Prize for it. Certainly one of the greats.
Smart man. When they hired him he gave the condition that he would always be paid more than the football coach. Sad news.
Considering he worked at CalTech, that’s probably no major amount of money. However, Wikipedia says he also had a professorship at USC. That would be a significant chunk, if he made it a condition there.
A toast: Three quarks for Muster [del]Mark[/del] Murray.
Actually had breakfast once with him. I was at an Amazing Meeting (a one-time annual skeptical event featuring James Randi as host) and a friend who was helping organize things grabbed me and two others, gave the other guy some money and said 'he wants breakfast before we start." Next thing I know we’re at the restaurant with Professor Gell-Mann. Can’t remember anything profound about it, outside of him getting up from the table to go get the waitress, while we sat there like three little kids…
One of the great thinkers. Humanity will miss him.
I have no way of knowing if it’s true, but perhaps due to this stipulation he was paid a million dollars a year as a professor decades ago. He also was said to have been fluent in thirteen languages.
My brief knowledge of his theories was when I read the Feynman lectures 25 years ago. The two were close, but apparently MGM thought Feynman a bit of a blowhard?
Anyway, I was sad to hear about this.
I was actually idly wondering just the other day if he was still alive. He was the last great physicist of his generation. Absolutely crazy, of course, but his crazy ideas worked.
Well said!
I met him at the 2006 Amazing Meeting, and he autographed a copy of one of his books for me.
Huh; I would have liked to have met him. I went to a couple of TAMs, but a few years later–'09 and '10 IIRC. I don’t recall any mention of him being around. At least I got to see Penn and Teller in the Monkey Room.