Chapter 10 Mary

Mary The one who really broke the deadlock was Marui.Mari Gell-Mann, a fifty-five-year-old Caltech professor, is a particle-physics looser. Gell-Mann called Cowan a week before the Aug. 17 meeting to say that Paines had told him about his vision for a research institute.Gell-Mann thought it was a great idea.All his life, he said, he wanted to do something like that.He hopes to study interdisciplinary and broad-ranging questions such as the rise and fall of ancient civilizations and the long-term sustainability of modern civilizations.But his efforts at Caltech went nowhere.So, the next time he comes to Los Alamos, could he be part of a discussion about creating a research institute? (Gel-Mann has been a consultant and frequent visitor to the lab since the fifties.)

Cowan could hardly believe his luck. "Please come," he said.Gell-Mann undoubtedly belongs to that 0.5 percent elite.Born and raised in New York City, Gell-Mann looked like an innocent Henry Kissinger in black-rimmed glasses and a crop of white hair.He was irascible, brilliant, charismatic, eloquent, and self-assured that bordered on arrogance.In fact, more than one person found him intolerable.All his life he was the top kid in his class.The late Caltech physicist, the bohemian Richard Feynman, wrote a best-selling memoir titled, and Gell-Mann is said to have called his own memoir You're Right Again, Ma Rui".On the rare occasions when he didn't get his way, he would act very childish: his colleagues noticed that he would poke out his lower lip, almost looking like he was smacking his lips in anger.

Still, Marie Gell-Mann is one of the twentieth century's scientific masters.When he first started out in physics as a young Ph.D. in the early 1950s, subatomic science seemed a clueless, chaotic field, a hodgepodge of particles with arbitrary Greek alphabet names.But twenty years later, mainly thanks to the new concepts pioneered by Gell-Mann, physicists were able to integrate the various forces between particles into a grand unified theory, and confidently clarified this hodgepodge as " Various combinations of "quarks" -- "quarks" are simple subatomic building blocks that Gell-Mann based on James Joyce's novel "Finnegans Wake" (Finnegans Wake) One of the invented Xiang named.A theoretical physicist who has known Ma Rui for 20 years said: "Ma Rui defined the central work of particle physics research for a generation. What Ma Rui thinks is exactly what every particle physicist should think about. He Knowing where the truth is, he leads people to find the truth."

On the face of it, more than three decades of devotion to the inner workings of the neutron and proton make Murray an odd figure in Cowan's far-sighted vision of scientific integration.It's hard to imagine anything more reductionist in thinking than Murray's research.But in fact, Marui is a person with a wide range of interests, he is curious about everything.It is said that on the plane, he would pursue the passenger sitting next to him for a long time to find out the truth, until he squeezed the other person to tell his life story.His initial love of science stemmed from his love of nature at the age of five.At that time, his brother often took him for walks in Manhattan parks, leading him to nature.“We thought New York was like a deforested hemlock grove,” he says, who has been an avid bird watcher and conservationist ever since.As chair of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation's World Environmental Research Council, Murray helped found an environmental think tank in Washington called the World Resources Institute.He was deeply involved in protecting tropical forests.

During his lifetime Gell-Mann was also deeply interested in psychology, anthropology, and linguistics. (He was originally admitted to Yale as a physics student, just to satisfy his father's wish. His father was afraid that his son would starve if he majored in anthropology.) Whenever a foreign scientist was mentioned, he was very concerned about it. The pronunciation of a scientist's name is always beautiful and accurate.He can do this in dozens of languages.One of his colleagues remembers him mentioning to Murray that he would soon be visiting his sister in Ireland. "What's her name?" Gell-Mann asked.

"Gilbes." "What does it mean?" "Well, I think it means 'bishop's servant' in Gaelic." Gell-Mann pondered for a moment, and said, "No. In medieval Scottish Gaelic, the meaning is closer to 'follower of the bishop's religious belief'." If there were anyone in Los Alamos who didn't know about the institute, Gell-Mann could talk them through with his persuasive eloquence.Carothers said: "Mary can give impromptu speeches on the spot. Maybe his inspiring speech is not as good as Churchill's, but the clarity and beauty of his speech really amaze the audience." Discussion of research institutes, his speech about creating a broad institute immediately gave most of the senior fellows a cohesive center.Metropolis and Rota's concept of a computer-focused research institute was immediately overshadowed.

After Christmas 1983, Gell-Mann had a chance to really use his talents.Taking advantage of the fact that Gell-Mann, Rota, and Paines liked to spend Christmas in New Mexico (in fact, Gell-Mann had just built a house in Santa Fe), Cowan convened another meeting, hoping that the institute's preparations would Work can have a beginning. Gell-Mann cleared all obstacles in this meeting.These narrow views, he told his colleagues, were not grand enough. "We must set ourselves a truly ambitious goal. This is the great integration of science that is about to come out-this whole station will cover many branches of science." In the 19th century, Darwin's theory of biological evolution was such a great integration .The theory of biological evolution reveals that plant and animal species are clearly interrelated.Emerging geology proves that the history of the earth is ancient and long-lasting; paleontology proves that the animals and plants in ancient times are very different from the animals and plants now.More recently, the Grand Integrated Theory, known as the Big Bang, details how stars and galaxies came to be in an unimaginable cosmic explosion 15 billion years ago.

Gell-Mann said: "I think what we have to work on is the grand integration across different disciplines of science that is emerging today." Research on this has already begun in some fields, such as molecular biology, nonlinear science, fields of cognitive science.But there are certainly other integrative sciences in the pipeline.The task of this new institute is to bring about its birth. He said that we must choose those topics that can be assisted by huge, high-speed, and powerful computers for research, not only because we can use computers to build models, but because computers themselves are complex systems.Nick and Giancarlo are absolutely right on this point: computers may be part of this grand scientific integration, but let's not blindfold ourselves before we begin.If you really want to do it, do it right from the start, he concluded.

His speech stunned all the audience."I've actually said that before, maybe not as convincingly as that time," Gell-Mann said. Gell-Mann's eloquent speech sang the leading role of that meeting.He articulated with convincing eloquence what Cowin and most of the senior researchers had been trying to express for nearly a year.Since then, everyone's opinions have basically been unified.These patriarchs will work to create an institute as broad in scope as possible.If Gell-Mann is willing to come out and knock on the door of donors—and he apparently is—then perhaps now is the time to start working on the Institute.

With this major problem resolved, the group began to face a lesser problem: who would be in charge of the preparations?Who will facilitate the creation of this institute? All looked in the same direction. In fact, preparing this institute was the last thing Cowan wanted to do in his life.True, the institute was originally his idea.He believed in the necessity of creating this institute, that it must be done.But hell, he's been working in administration since he was an adult.He's tired of it.He was tired of always worrying about getting research funding, tired of always telling his friends that he had to cut their budgets, tired of always having to use weekends to do his research work.He was sixty-three years old, and his notebooks were filled with ideas he never had time to complete.Such as the detection of solar neutrinos, the study of an extremely rare and fascinating radiation phenomenon called double beta decay (double, beta decay).These are the scientific studies that he always wanted to do, and they are the ones he is going to do now.

But, of course, when Paines nominated him to be the institute's founder, he replied, "Okay." Now that Paines had told him that beforehand, Cowan had thought about it.This time, it was the same factor that had always tempted Los Alamos into management, and finally persuaded him to accept this new assignment. "Management is a job that other people can do. But I always feel that maybe they're not doing it right." Plus, no one else has expressed interest in taking on the job. Well, he said to the members of the group.At least until they were sure someone else was going to take over, he was willing to come and be the little red hen and do everything right.But he has only one request: at present, he needs Ma Rui to come out and help him lobby. "When you start pitching money to people, they want to hear that you can solve the energy crisis tomorrow," Cowan said. "But we're going to set the tone a lot lower than that. I think within a couple of years we've At most, it can only form a new view of the world, and it is impossible to obtain any very practical results. So what you say to others is: 'This is Professor so-and-so, in order to be able to devote more attention to your daily concerns He gave up the study of quarks. 'Even though they don't quite understand what you're saying, they'll listen to you.' Everyone agrees with this approach.Cowan will be the director of the institute, the actual person in charge.Gell-Mann will be chairman of the institute's board of directors.