Murray Gell-Mann, Who Peered at Particles and Saw the Universe, Dies at 89:
Murray Gell-Mann, who transformed physics with his preternatural ability to find hidden patterns among the tiny particles that make up the universe, earning a Nobel Prize, died on Friday at his home in Santa Fe. He was 89.
The author of the obit wrote Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in Twentieth-Century Physics.
I’m not as broadly read today as I was when I was younger. Much of my teen years were spent reading popular science books on physics. Murray Gell-Mann regularly made a showing, whether as a principal character, or a cameo. He was one of the great ones of our world, and his passing makes us all poorer.
Like so many great physicists, his early career was world changing and profound, and his late career involved lots of digging into rabbit holes. Einstein and Newton were the same. Einstein spent most of his later research trying and failing to unify classical electromagnetism and general relativity. Newton spent much of his later career on Unitarian theology.