15/09/2025
Once upon a time, a particle met up with two other tiny particles. The three particles quickly realized that, although they were all remarkably similar, they were also all slightly different. Pretty soon, these three were stuck together so tightly that no one ever saw a single particle without its two friends again... How did you like this story? 😃Let me introduce you to an American man, who proposed the existence of such extremely tiny particles that he called . He is our "scientist of the day" today.
It's the birthday of , the father of quarks - - -
(Scientist of the Day - 15 September)
Gell-Mann was one of the chief architects of the standard model of particle physics. In 1964, he (and independently, ) went on to postulate the existence of quarks.
In 1961, Gell-Mann and , an Israeli theoretical physicist, independently proposed a scheme for classifying previously discovered strongly interacting particles into a simple orderly arrangement of families. Called the , the scheme grouped and (protons and neutrons) into multiplets of 1, 8, 10, or 27 members on the basis of various properties. All particles in the same multiplet are to be thought of as variant states of the same basic particle. Gell-Mann speculated that it should be possible to explain certain properties of known particles in terms of even more particles, or blocks. He later called these basic bits of matter “quarks,” adopting the fanciful term from James Joyce’s novel Finnegans Wake.
One of the early successes of his quark hypothesis was the prediction and subsequent discovery of the particle (1964). Over the years, research has yielded other findings that have led to the wide acceptance and elaboration of the quark concept.
He was awarded a in Physics in 1969 for his contributions and discoveries concerning the classification of elementary particles and their interactions. He is also known to have played a role in keeping alive through the 1970s and early 1980s.
He wrote a popular science book about physics and complexity science, "The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex" (1994).
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