Strange Beauty - Tapa blanda

No scientist has done more to shape our understanding of the universe than Murray Gell-Mann, the Nobel Prize-winner considered by many colleagues to be the most brilliant physicist of his generation. His discovery of the quark and the Eightfold Way were cornerstones for all that followed in particle physics, the effort to understand the very stuff of creation, In this, the first biography of Gell-Mann, George Johnson tells the story of a remarkable life.

'Outstanding...enthralling' The Times

'Few apart from Einstein himself have achieved more. By 23, he had ignited a revolution, laying bare in his ground-breaking work the 'strange beauty' of the minute particles that 'make up reality'. An excellent book which does full justice to a truly remarkable man' Patrick Moore, Mail on Sunday

'An everyday tale of scientific genius, of fiercely competitive boffins trying to publish before each other, of arrogant intelligence and dazzling science. As a primer for work in fundamental physics of the last half-century, it is a brilliant achievement: Johnson writes with assurance, lucidity and charm' Financial Times

Winner of the 1969 Nobel Prize for Physics, Murray Gell-Mann entered Yale at fifteen and revolutionised physics and the way we see the world by the time he was twenty-three. His discovery of the quark was the cornerstone of particle physics, the effort to understand the very fabric of creation. A man of immense learning, Gell-Mann is also a self-taught linguist, an archaeologist, bird-watcher and a difficult perfectionist: in short, a truly remarkable man.