To listen to more of Murray Gell-Mann’s stories, go to the playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVV0r6CmEsFxKFx-0lsQDs6oLP3SZ9BlA
New York-born physicist Murray Gell-Mann (1929-2019) was
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a theoretical physicist. His considerable contributions to physics include the theory of quantum chromodynamics. He was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the theory of elementary particles. [Listener: Geoffrey West; date recorded: 1997]
TRANSCRIPT: I mention in the first few pages of the book, The Quark and the Jaguar, how on a... a trip to Central America to look at birds and mammals, I had a… I was... I had been looking for birds and trying to record them in an area of Belize full of unexcavated Maya ruins and thick forest and lots of birds and mammals, and it was the middle of the day and I hadn't encountered any new birds for a while and I was in sort of a... I was not paying too much attention to my surroundings, in... kind of a half-trance state as I walked through the forest, when suddenly I notice a jaguarundi standing crosswise across the trail not very far ahead. I was delighted to see this beautiful animal so close. I had seen jaguarundis before, but never had I had an encounter like this–a close encounter like this–all by myself as a lone person with a lone jaguarundi in the middle of a forest. With a jaguar it would have been even more exciting of course, but the jaguarundi is a splendid creature. Anyway, at that moment it suddenly occurred to me that my interest in diversity and evolution and individuality and so on and so on, and my other interest in elementary particles and the fundamental laws of the universe, that these did have a relationship to each other which I had begun dimly to understand, and I would like to discuss it with the public. And I decided right then I would write a book and Marcia, my wife, who's a poet, pointed out a… a verse by our friend Arthur Sze who is a local poet here, Chinese American poet, that included the line: 'The world of the quark has everything to do with a jaguar circling in the night'. That immediately gave me the title for the book, The Quark and the Jaguar, the quark symbolizing the simple laws, underlying laws of nature with identical particles and so on, and the jaguar representing complexity, diversity, evolution and so on. And Arthur perceived that these have everything to do with each other, so the book is about the relation between them: how complexity arises from simple laws, a simple initial condition, and the operation, the relentless operation over and over again of chance.
