Distinguished theoretical physicist Murray Gell-Mann, Ph.D, spoke in Harriman Hall on Tuesday, April 2, as part of the Provosts Lecture Series. The lecture attracted a full-house, comprised of both faculty and students. The event was a Sir Run Run Shaw Distinguished Lecture sponsored by Shaw himself, a prominent Hong Kong businessman and philanthropist.
Recent Sir Run Run Shaw lectures at Stony Brook have featured Nobel-Prize winning physicists William D. Phillips and Willis E. Lamb, Jr. Gell-Mann earned a 1969 Nobel Prize for his work on the theory of elementary particles. The cornerstone of his work is his finding that all particles are composed of fundamental building blocks that he named quarks. These quarks, he found, interact by exchanging gluon particles. He later worked with others to develop a comprehensive theory of the interactions of quarks and gluons, known as quantum chromodynamics.
Gell-Mann was introduced by Stony Brook physics professor and Nobel laureate Chen Ning Yang, who applauded Gell-Mann for a truly remarkable career that has shaped the progress of physics for the last 50 years. Yang, however, said he could remember a time when he considered Gell-Mann an enfant terrible in the physics world. Although he is a physicist, Gell-Mann has very broad interests extending into many other domains, Yang said. His pastimes include bird-watching, historical linguistics and archaeology. Before turning the microphone over to Gell-Mann, Yang recounted a poignant story. He explained that when he and Gell-Mann visited famed physicist Enrico Fermi on his hospital deathbed, Fermi said to the two younger physicists, Now I leave physics to you.
Gell-Mann spoke about phenomena of complexity and simplicity, and of regularity and randomness. He referred to the interplay of law and chance that is all around us, and gave examples to clarify the difference between randomness and complexity and to show how the distinction may become blurred. The U.S. tax code, he said, appears complex but nonrandom to an American, but appears entirely random to members of a tribal culture without connections to the developed world. Gell-Mann spoke on a wide range of topics. He discussed radio astronomy, noting that the field began when scientists discovered extraterrestrial random radio noise coming from near the center of our galaxy.
He also mentioned contingent history, which he called what if history, in which people speculate about how the world would differ if certain past events had or had not occurred. In physics, as in history, chance events, or frozen accidents, can play a vital role, he argued. As time goes on, entities of greater and greater complexity seem to arise, Gell-Mann said. The envelope of complexity keeps getting pushed out, because the results of frozen accidents accumulate faster than they are erased. But physics suggests, he continued, that in the very distant future, the arrow of time could be reversed. When the universe reaches an age greater than the assumed half-life of a proton, then the envelope of complexity may shrink. Gell-Mann argued that the existence of extraterrestrial life is extremely probable, but said that this is a contested issue.
It depends partly, he said, on whether Earths biochemistry is unique. It is unknown whether the biochemistry on this planet is the only one, or if there are thousands of possible ways to create life, he said. Intelligent extraterrestrial life probably exists as well, but there is certainly no intelligent life in Roswell, New Mexico, he punned. Gell-Mann also had some biting words for mathematician Stephen Wolfram, one of his former students, who spoke at Stony Brook as part of the Provosts Lecture Series on March 7.
He criticized Wolframs notions of complexity as pseudo-complexity, but restrained further comment. Well, Im happy that [Wolfram] has been successful, Gell-Mann said. Gell-Mann is a Nobel laureate and an emeritus professor of theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology, where he taught for almost forty years. He is the author of the popular science book The Quark and the Jaguar, Adventures in the Simple and the Complex.
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