The pioneering particle physicist, Murray Gell-Mann (1929-2019) died last week. Gell-Mann is best known for his contribution to the theory of quarks, and his classification, Eightfold Way. Those names indicate the wide range of Dr Gell-Mann’s interests.
The “Eightfold Way” is the less obscure reference, coming straight from Buddhist philosophy and the Eightfold Path of right thought, right action, and so on. The quark’s etymology is more complicated. Sometime in 1964, Gell-Mann and Richard Feynman, his rock-star colleague at Caltech, were discussing Gell-Mann’s idea that an unknown fundamental particle could explain experimental results, if these existed.
Feynman referred casually to these “imagined”
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