Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in Twentieth-Century Physics

With a New Afterword

"Our knowledge of fundamental physics contains not one fruitful idea that does not carry the name of Murray Gell-Mann."—Richard Feynman

Acclaimed science writer George Johnson brings his formidable reporting skills to the first biography of Nobel Prize-winner Murray Gell-Mann, the brilliant, irascible man who revolutionized modern particle physics with his models of the quark and the Eightfold Way.

Born into a Jewish immigrant family on New York's East 14th Street, Gell-M...