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

No contemporary scientist has done more to shape our understanding of the universe than Murray Gell-Mann, the Nobel Prize-winner many consider the most brilliant physicist of his generation. His discoveries of the quark and the Eightfold Way were cornerstones for all that has followed in particle physics, the effort to explain the very stuff of creation. In this first biography of Gell-Mann, George Johnson tells the story of a remarkable life. Born on New York's Lower East Side, Gell-Mann was quickly recognized as a child prodigy. Propelled by an intense boyhood curiosity and a love for nature, he entered Yale at fifteen. By age twenty-three he had ignited a revolution, laying bare in his groundbreaking work the strange beauty of the minute particles that constitute the ultimate components of physical reality. Particle physics is the most competitive of sports, and Johnson shows us the precocious polymath holding his own with giants like Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, and Richard Feynman -- Gell-Mann's favorite intellectual sparring partner and sometimes antagonistic rival. We see Gell-Mann the self-taught linguist (who couldn't resist correcting visitors on the pronunciation of their own names); Gell-Mann the birdwatcher and amateur archaeologist; Gell-Mann the Aspen socialite, world traveler, and environmental crusader. We watch him making his scientific breakthroughs, his abrasive, competitive drive leaving behind a growing trail of enemies. The early death of his first wife and a family crisis sent him veering in new directions. Turning from the physics of simple particles, like quarks, he began exploring how complex phenomena like life can be understood scientifically. George Johnson's informed and insightful biography goes far in helping us understand the complexities of both the man and the science in which he has loomed so large. Editorial Reviews Amazon.com Review Murray Gell-Mann is a leading light in 20th-century physics, yet his name rings bells only for those interested in particle physics. Science writer George Johnson was fortunate enough to develop a friendly relationship with the great scientist, and his biography, Strange Beauty, glows with a rare intimacy gained from a notoriously private and irascible man. From his childhood in New York City to his current scientific elder-statesman status in New Mexico, Johnson explores Gell-Mann's life in glorious detail. A passionate, jealous, and brilliant man, he was capable of both profound insight and bitter lifelong rivalries, but Johnson finds there's much more to the man than these two simple poles; Gell-Mann's volatile family life and deft academic maneuvering also find room in this expansive biography. The reader finds that Johnson's careful attention to detail shows more than it tells through enlightening stories of Gell-Mann's troubled, romantic, or pretentious dealings with peers, family, and even strangers. Explaining his strange surname means investigating old phone books, scientific legend, and family history, as the scientist is unwilling to shed light on the mystery (it turns out that his father hyphenated it, and Murray dreamed up etymologies as needed--giving rise to the tangled web of myths). Johnson is up to the challenge of recording the life story of a man nearly as strange as the quarks he discovered and named, and Strange Beauty lives up to the promise of its title. --Rob Lightner From Publishers Weekly Up, down, top, bottom, strange and charm aren't just states of mind: they're kinds of quarks, the mind-bending, omnipresent sub-subatomic particles co-discovered and named in the early 1960s by the American physicist Murray Gell-Mann. New York Times science reporter Johnson (Fire in the Mind) has written a brisk, accessible life of the Nobel-winning scientist, who will turn 70 next month. Gell-Mann grew up poor in New York City, the son of Eastern European Jews. Still in his teens, he attended Yale and MIT, and soon afterward won notice for his work on cosmic rays. Gell-Mann followed up his insights about quarks with important work at Caltech and elsewhere on superstrings, supergravity and mathematical complexity. His adult life has had its hardships: his daughter gave much of her life to an American Stalinist fringe group, and his wife died of cancer in 1981. (He's since remarried.) Johnson makes clear that Gell-Mann's direct, sometimes arrogant manner could make him difficult to work with; admired by physicists, he failed to achieve the wider fame of his media-friendly colleague, the late Richard Feynman. While Johnson relates such troubles sympathetically, the story of Gell-Mann's life is in large part the story of his and others' researches and discoveries. Explaining difficult fields like quantum physics, Johnson uses as many analogies, and as little math, as he can, while trying always to give some picture of what scientific problems Gell-Mann and his fellow scientists solved. The result is a careful if colloquial biography, perfect for readers who aren'tAor aren't yetAworking scientists. (Oct.) Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Publishers Weekly Up, down, top, bottom, strange and charm aren't just states of mind: they're kinds of quarks, the mind-bending, omnipresent sub-subatomic particles co-discovered and named in the early 1960s by the American physicist Murray Gell-Mann. New York Times science reporter Johnson (Fire in the Mind) has written a brisk, accessible life of the Nobel-winning scientist, who will turn 70 next month. Gell-Mann grew up poor in New York City, the son of Eastern European Jews. Still in his teens, he attended Yale and MIT, and soon afterward won notice for his work on cosmic rays. Gell-Mann followed up his insights about quarks with important work at Caltech and elsewhere on superstrings, supergravity and mathematical complexity. His adult life has had its hardships: his daughter gave much of her life to an American Stalinist fringe group, and his wife died of cancer in 1981. (He's since remarried.) Johnson makes clear that Gell-Mann's direct, sometimes arrogant manner could make him difficult to work with; admired by physicists, he failed to achieve the wider fame of his media-friendly colleague, the late Richard Feynman. While Johnson relates such troubles sympathetically, the story of Gell-Mann's life is in large part the story of his and others' researches and discoveries. Explaining difficult fields like quantum physics, Johnson uses as many analogies, and as little math, as he can, while trying always to give some picture of what scientific problems Gell-Mann and his fellow scientists solved. The result is a careful if colloquial biography, perfect for readers who aren'tAor aren't yetAworking scientists. (Oct.) Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal One of the most notable physicists of the Nuclear Age, Murray Gell-Mann worked closely with Enrico Fermi, Richard Feynmann, and others to help unlock the secrets of the subatomic world. In 1969, he received a Nobel prize for his work on the interaction of elementary particles and their classification. Now New York Times science writer Johnson (Fire in the Mind) has written a well-balanced biography of this renowned scientist's complex life and work. Noting Gell-Mann's idiosyncrasies, his faults, and his accomplishments, Johnson follows his subject through his passions (nature and conservation, art collection, anthropology, ornithology, and linguistics), his struggles with chronic writer's block, and his incredible scientific achievements. While it is necessarily dense in parts, this book is free of mathematics and is accessible to the advanced lay reader. Recommended for large public and academic libraries.AJames Olson, Northeastern Illinois Univ. Lib., Chicago Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Scientific American 'Strange Beauty' brings together an irresistible subject -- the difficult polymath Murray Gell-Mann -- and a talented writer who spins an enthralling tale out of the kind of esoteric physics that generally flies right over our heads. Johnson is one of the best science journalists writing today, known for his books 'Fire in the Mind' and 'In the Palaces of Memory' and for incisive reporting in the New York Times. This is his most ambitious project yet -- communicating the fascination of a kind of science that only an elite of superbright people fully understands. He succeeds brilliantly. From Kirkus Reviews Part biography, part textbook on quarks and other phenomena discovered by one of the great particle physicists of the twentieth century. Johnson (a New York Times science writer) first introduces us to Murray Gell-Mann in the present day, as a likable retiree living in Santa Fe. He sets his personal experiences with Gell-Mann against Gell-Mann the legend, cutting colleagues down to size if their viewpoints didn't coincide with his own, or calling them by unpleasant and sarcastic nicknames. Gell-Mann's broad scope of knowledge started in his youth in New York City, where he would visit museums, the zoo, anywhere he could learn about the world around him. In school young Murray was always eager to show off his knowledge, winning a spelling bee at the age of seven. At fourteen, he won a scholarship to Yale, moving from there to MIT, where he reveled in the unsolved problems in physics. It was these problems, theories about particles yet to be discovered, that Gell-Mann would spend his career solving. Johnson is not afraid to present these theories in great detail, giving crystal-clear descriptions of some of the most abstract and convoluted ideas in physics. Nor is he afraid to delve into the personal side of Gell-Mann, including his relationship with his colleague Richard Feynman, a friendship at times strained by the fame that Feynman achieved from his best-selling book of autobiographical anecdotes. Gell-Mann wanted to write one, too, but for all his knowledge he was crippled by a lifelong case of writer's block. The limited success of his autobiography once it was finished presumably led to Strange Beauty. A must-read for anyone studying physics or its history, and for others not afraid to swim in the sometimes deep and murky waters of cutting-edge science. -- Copyright ®1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. Review George Johnson has nailed this biography of the brilliant and irascible Murray Gell-Mann. Strange Beauty is complex, mind-expanding, beautiful, and true. -- James Gleick When you have one of the world's most accomplished science writers recounting the life and times of one of the world's most accomplished scientists, readers' expectations are justifiably high. They are fully met. Johnson gives us an extraordinary view of an extraordinary man, and navigates through science that ordinarily would seem difficult, with such skill that it is not difficult at all. Strange Beauty is a masterpiece of modern biography. -- Roger Lewin Gell-Mann could not have written such a perceptive book about himself as Johnson has....Reads like a detective novel. Johnson does a wonderful job of describing the competition and cooperation among scientists, the egos and insecurities, the disappointments and triumphs, and the disputes, suspicions and shifting allegiances. -- The New York Times Book Review Skillfully and engagingly written . . . Johnson paints a convincing portrait of Gell-Mann's personality, which is in turn charming, irritating, and generous . . . Johnson captures well his subject's inner scientific conflicts. -- Science Few physicists have displayed the poetic inspiration of the Nobelist Murray Gell-Mann....In this biography he emerges as brilliant and often insufferable, relentlessly curious, hopelessly pedantic, and one of the best synthetic thinkers in the history of his field. The book [offers] a vivid sense of Gell-Mann and his contemporaries (including his collaborator and competitor Richard Feynman).... --The New Yorker From the Publisher A conversation with George Johnson, author of STRANGE BEAUTY: Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in Twentieth Century Physics Q. Why do you call the book Strange Beauty? A. When Gell-Mann was in his early 20s, physicists were baffled by cosmic-ray particles, bombarding the earth from outer space, that seemed to defy the known laws of physics. Gell-Mann solved the problem by proposing that the particles were affected by a previously unknown phenomenon that he decided to call strangeness. The theory, weird name and all, created a sensation. It was the first example of the strange beauty he kept finding in the universe -- mesmerizing patterns that lie beneath the surface of reality. Q. What happened next? A. From there he went on to discover The Eightfold Way and quarks, always bestowing his creations with whimsical names. There are top quarks, bottom quarks, strange quarks, charmed quarks. They're held together by things called gluons. Physics was never again the same. Q. What is the Eightfold Way? And where do quarks fit in? A. Before Gell-Mann came onto the scene, there were hundreds of tiny subatomic particles of all shapes and sizes. Gell-Mann saw in a flash of insight that they could all be arranged into patterns. He saw order where there had been confusion. The result was the Eightfold Way. Just as the Periodic Table of the Elements is used to arrange all the different kinds of atoms, the Eightfold Way is used to arrange all the subatomic particles. A little later, Gell-Mann realized that the particles line up this way because they are made of tinier things called quarks. A Nobel prize was around the corner. Q. One of the classic rivalries in science is between Gell-Mann and Richard Feynman. Why was there so much friction between these two intellectual giants? A. A favorite pastime of physicists was arguing over who was smarter, Dick or Murray. At any university in the world, each would have been the unquestioned star. But at Caltech they were crowded into the same small department, just two doors from each other (with the same poor secretary in between.) Each was always trying to upstage the other. And they had strikingly different styles. Feynman would speak in an affected Brooklyn drawl and refuse to wear a coat and tie. Murray was as impeccable in his dress as he was in his pronunciation -- and not just in English but in dozens of other languages. He's famous for sitting down at Chinese restaurants and ordering in Chinese, and for correcting foreigners on the pronunciations of their own names. Q. Gell-Mann is also known for being rather -- shall we say? -- difficult. Tell us your favorite Gell-Mann story. A. I first met him at a science conference in Santa Fe seven years ago. He coincidentally sat down across from me at lunch, and when I introduced myself as a New York Times editor he launched into a fullscale assault on science coverage in the Times. I was a little shocked, but I knew from the legends that I was seeing vintage Gell-Mann. Q. He was also a child prodigy, accepted to Yale at age 14. When did he show the first signs of genius? A. Supposedly, his very first words, sitting on a stoop on 14th Street in Brooklyn, were the lights of Babylon. In any case, he skipped three grades in elementary school, where he was known as the pint-sized Einstein and the walking encyclopedia. He was the youngest, the smartest, and usually the smallest boy in the class. No wonder he became so intellectually combative. Even after he got a Nobel prize, he had a hard time realizing he didn't need to compete anymore. Q. You describe in the book how hard it was, at first, to convince him to cooperate with the biography. How does he feel now that the book is done? A. I think he's as apprehensive as I am. As cooperative as he was in the end, this is still an unauthorized biography. That's the only way I could keep it honest. He'll read the book along with everyone else. I'm expecting the phone to ring any day now. From the Author I had always wanted to write a scientific biography. Nothing seemed more challenging than trying to understand a great thinker's work and how it intertwined with the twists and turns of his life and the foibles of his personality. So there I was, in 1992, sitting at a picnic table at a conference in Santa Fe, when Murray Gell-Mann, perhaps the most important particle physicist of his generation, sat down across from me. He began the conversation by insulting my craft -- science writing -- and some of my colleagues at the New York Times. I was hooked. I'd heard the stories about how brilliant and difficult he was. Over the next year I got to know him better, announcing one day, to his great apprehension, that I had decided to write his biography. It took another year to persuade him to sit down for the first of many surprisingly candid interviews. And before I knew it, he had given me access to his personal treasure trove of papers, including letters from some of the great scientists of the century. After five years and some one hundred interviews, the book was done. Just as exacting as the research was the writing: crafting each paragraph to make some of the most exciting and abstract ideas of modern science clear to others like me who are not scientists. My goal with all of my books is to elevate science-writing to literature without compromising on precision and accuracy, and without losing sight of the philosophical power of the ideas. From the Inside Flap ary scientist has done more to shape our understanding of the universe than Murray Gell-Mann, the Nobel Prize-winner many consider the most brilliant physicist of his generation. His discoveries of the quark and the Eightfold Way were cornerstones for all that has followed in particle physics, the effort to explain the very stuff of creation. In this first biography of Gell-Mann, George Johnson tells the story of a remarkable life. Born on New York's Lower East Side, Gell-Mann was quickly recognized as a child prodigy. Propelled by an intense boyhood curiosity and a love for nature, he entered Yale at fifteen. By age twenty-three he had ignited a revolution, laying bare in his groundbreaking work the strange beauty of the minute particles that constitute the ultimate components of physical reality. Particle physics is the most competitive of sports, and Johnson shows us the precocious polymath holding his own with giants like Robert Oppenheimer, En From the Back Cover George Johnson has nailed this biography of the brilliant and irascible Murray Gell-Mann. Strange Beauty is complex, mind-expanding, beautiful, and true. -- James Gleick When you have one of the world's most accomplished science writers recounting the life and times of one of the world's most accomplished scientists, readers' expectations are justifiably high. They are fully met. Johnson gives us an extraordinary view of an extraordinary man, and navigates through science that ordinarily would seem difficult, with such skill that it is not difficult at all. Strange Beauty is a masterpiece of modern biography. -- Roger Lewin Gell-Mann could not have written such a perceptive book about himself as Johnson has....Reads like a detective novel. Johnson does a wonderful job of describing the competition and cooperation among scientists, the egos and insecurities, the disappointments and triumphs, and the disputes, suspicions and shifting allegiances. -- The New York Times Book Review Skillfully and engagingly written . . . Johnson paints a convincing portrait of Gell-Mann's personality, which is in turn charming, irritating, and generous . . . Johnson captures well his subject's inner scientific conflicts. -- Science Few physicists have displayed the poetic inspiration of the Nobelist Murray Gell-Mann....In this biography he emerges as brilliant and often insufferable, relentlessly curious, hopelessly pedantic, and one of the best synthetic thinkers in the history of his field. The book [offers] a vivid sense of Gell-Mann and his contemporaries (including his collaborator and competitor Richard Feynman).... --The New Yorker About the Author George Johnson, a former Alicia Patterson Fellow and finalist for the Rhone-Poulenc Prize, covers science for the New York Times. His previous books include Machinery of the Mind: Inside the New Science of Artificial Intelligence, In the Palaces of Memory: How We Build the Worlds Inside Our Heads, and Fire in the Mind: Science, Faith, and the Search for Order. He lives with his wife in Santa Fe, New Mexico. From The Washington Post An insightful biography of physicist Murray Gell-Mann [that] splendidly captures the energetic spirit of this golden age of theoretical physics . . . We gain a front-row seat at an exhilarating intellectual demonstration. . . . The elegance of Johnson's writing matches the beauty of Gell-Mann's discoveries. Excerpt. ® Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. It was Memorial Day weekend of 1996, in the middle of what turned out to be one of New Mexico's worst droughts of the century. The seemingly endless dry spell reminded many of the climatic disaster said to have driven the Anasazi, the original inhabitants of this land, from their stone settlements around Mesa Verde, causing the collapse of a civilization. To escape the heat, I left my house in Santa Fe and drove as high as you can go into the nearby Sangre de Cristo Mountains. After leaving my Jeep in the ski basin parking lot, already some 10,000 feet above sea level, I began walking higher. My destination, La Vega, the meadow, lay at the base of Santa Fe Baldy, an 11,600-foot peak of Precambrian granite that juts above the timberline. Almost as soon as I reached the trail head, I realized that, once again, I had misjudged the perversity of New Mexico weather. Looking out across the Rio Grande Valley, I could see the next mountain range, the Jemez, where just weeks earlier a fire had devastated fifteen thousand acres of one of my favorite places, the wilderness backcountry of Bandelier National Monument. Now storm clouds were boiling up over the Jemez and sweeping toward the Sangre de Cristos. The temperature began dropping, and before long snow flurries, of all things, were swirling around me. I was wishing I had worn a jacket and long pants instead of khaki shorts and a T-shirt, when, as I rounded a corner on the trail, I heard a familiar voice. Well, hello, a man in a floppy cotton hat and a windbreaker called out enthusiastically. He was walking toward me from the opposite direction. How are you? he said. It took me a few seconds to realize that I had randomly encountered the subject of this biography, my Santa Fe neighbor Murray Gell-Mann, hiking with his stepson, Nick Levis. For weeks now I had been trying to pin down Gell-Mann for another interview. He had been running hot and cold ever since I had told him, two years earlier, that I intended to write his life story. Lately he had been more helpful. But now I was worrying that his second thoughts were being followed by third and fourth thoughts, and I had no idea what stage our relationship was in. I was relieved that he seemed genuinely pleased to see me. And I was struck again by how much, contrary to so many of the legends, Gell-Mann liked people and conversation, the easy camaraderie of encountering someone familiar on a mountain trail. The physics lore is filled with stories of Gell-Mann cutting down a colleague with a withering remark, of the mocking names he assigned to people whose ideas he didn't respect. Particle physics is the most competitive of intellectual sports, and faced with a theory or a theorist he didn't like, Gell-Mann could be merciless. But up in the mountains, in New Mexico, he seemed almost able to relax. He introduced me to Nick, who like me was shivering without a jacket. When I said I was headed for La Vega, Gell-Mann was delighted at the coincidence. La Vega, he said, his mouth stretched wide to mimic as perfect a northern New Mexican accent as you might hear in the villages of Chimayo or Truchas, down the other side of the mountain. He and Nick had also been heading to La Vega when the drop in temperature caused them to turn around, a little way up the trail, at Nambe Creek -- NAM-be, Murray said, with just the right amount of padding around the b. Now they were heading home. If Gell-Mann was disappointed about not reaching this particular goal, he didn't show it. His eyes sparkled, and he seemed happy just to be out in the woods again. A few weeks earlier, the cardiologists had stuck a catheter in his chest, checking on his progress since a recent heart attack. They were relieved to find that the artery they had scraped out -- a Roto-rooting, Gell-Mann called it -- was still open. There was another, less threatening obstruction further downstream, but the doctors decided to leave it alone. I was tempted to turn around and join Murray and Nick on the hike back. But somehow it seemed improper. This was not Murray Gell-Mann, the Nobel laureate, the discoverer of the quark and the Eightfold Way, but simply a man on a holiday with his stepson. My strategy all along had been to avoid making him feel cramped. I was in this for the long haul. After a few minutes, we parted ways. I made it about a mile past Nambe Creek. Then, just before the descent into the meadow, the clouds went black and I also decided to save La Vega for another day. Heading back down the mountain, I thought about how much I had come to like this brilliant, complicated, always fascinating, and often exasperating man. When we visit the ruins of ancient civilizations, we reserve a peculiar fascination for those giant, elaborate structures that seem to serve no practical purpose whatsoever: the pyramids built by the Egyptians on the Nile and the Maya in Mexico, or the large circular kivas of Chaco Canyon in northwestern New Mexico. They stand meaningless now, rock-solid projections long outlasting whatever ideas they were meant to represent. Catholicism still survives, so we can understand some of the rationale behind Chartres, St. Peter's, and the other great cathedrals and basilicas of Europe. But we have barely a hint of the ideas that motivated the construction of the Sphinx. It is sometimes said that the cathedrals of the late twentieth century are the giant particle accelerators, monuments to the belief -- far from obvious on its face -- that buried beneath the rough surface of the world we inhabit is a crystalline order so beautiful and subtle the mind can barely grasp it. Engaging in a fantasy, we can imagine, centuries and centuries from now, archaeologists (from this planet or perhaps from beyond the solar system) perplexed and captivated by the remains of the seventeen-mile-circumference particle accelerator being constructed at CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research, near Geneva, or the four-mile ring at Fermilab in Illinois. These atom smashers are among the largest, most powerful machines ever built by the human race -- not for the purpose of generating power, like the dams and nuclear reactors, or for predicting the weather or simulating nuclear explosions, like the supercomputers. Their sole purpose is intellectual: to find the faintest glimmers of evidence that, despite so many appearances to the contrary, we live in a mathematically symmetrical universe. How is it that a civilization long ago became so obsessed with this idea? That will be the riddle of these twentieth-century sphinxes. If our parchments and our data banks survive along with the wreckage of our great machines, the archaeologists will learn a remarkable story: How the elders of the church of science came to believe that, despite what we perceive, matter is not continuous; it is made of invisible particles linked together in a beautiful architecture. As the atomists would show over the years, the seemingly infinite variety of the world is generated by some one hundred elements, neatly arranged in the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev's periodic table of the elements. Viewed from the heavens, any hint of geometry on the earth -- land divided into rectangles and circles, rock cut into blocks and piled straight and high -- is usually a sign of intelligent creatures imposing order on an irregular world. But surely, the scientists believed, this harmony we find so soothing runs deeper. Beneath the world's confusion of forms is a scaffolding built according to a geometry as pleasing to the mind as a Gothic cathedral. Since no one could directly see this geometry, the best one could hope for was to study its shadows. And so the physicists began to build the machinery they believed would provide an indirect glimpse. At first these devices were as simple as a jar enclosing gold foil leaves that seemed to waft in the wind of an invisible essence called electricity. By the early twentieth century, scientists were making gas-filled tubes that glowed in the dark with what they took to be mysterious beams of positive and negative charge. By studying and measuring these weird emanations, the physicists reached a powerful consensus: The world was even more elegant and symmetrical than Mendeleev and the atomists dared imagine. The variety of atoms found on the earth and in the sky were made up of combinations of just three particles: the proton, the electron, and the neutron. But this newfound simplicity was short-lived. Not content with their instruments, the scientists built bigger and bigger machines. With the first particle accelerators, small enough to fit on a tabletop, they began smashing their elementary particles into each other and discovered that they weren't so elementary after all. They could be shattered into fragments. When they built bigger accelerators to smash the pieces even harder, they were left with fragments of fragments. Placing carefully designed detectors on mountaintops or sending them aloft in balloons, they found traces of still other particles, the cosmic rays bombarding the planet from space. Soon, there were so many of these elementary constituents that they threatened the very desire for order that had driven the search. The physicists were in despair. And then, leading them out of the confusion, came the young scientists whose string of discoveries would do so much to make sense of it all, to find pattern hiding beneath the confusion. Viewed through these magicians' wonderful new lenses, the clouds lifted and order shone through. But it came at a curious price. To restore beauty to the core of creation, humanity was asked to believe in truths stranger than any that had come before. The most remarkable of these wizards was Murray Gell-Mann. Graduating from Yale University at age eighteen, by the time he was twenty-one he had earned a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Less than three years later, he began his revolution with an astonishing theory explaining the unlike...