This is Scientific Americans 60 Second Science. I'm Steve Mursky.

Marigelman was one of the great physicists of the 20th century.

Historian of physics Graham Farmolo.

Nobel Laureate Gellman died May 24th.

He was 89.

I spoke with Farmolo, May 30th at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, the morning after a

symposium related to his latest book, The Universe speaks in numbers, how modern math

reveals nature's deepest secrets. Gell Mann appears in Farmlow's book.

More I think than anybody else in the 1950s and 60s,

he helped to take us human beings deep into the heart of atomic nuclei, the core of

atoms, and help us understanding the bewildering variety of those

sub-nuclear particles. It was like a complete mess, but with Gell Mann's physical intuition,

his mathematics, his sure-footedness, he enabled us to organize our understanding of those particles.

And it was that that led him and another colleague George Vig to identify the quork, which is a particle that is a constituent

of these strongly interacting particles, like the proton and neutron.

So he was a really big figure a tremendously powerful theoretician. He liked to stay close to data as well. That's really important. This was a I think it fair to say that he was pretty much unrivaled as someone who could interpret these

weird particle tracks and what have you and somehow see the fundamental patterns of the universe

in terms of those particle tracks so to speak.

Gellman was admired by everyone, feared by some people because of his lacerating wit,

his poisonous put-downs and what have you but he there was no doubt

there was absolutely no doubting his intellectual quality gale man will be remembered

as what of the great theoreticias of the 20th century.

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