Strange Beauty
George Johnson
"Science writer George Johnson brings his talent to the first biography of Nobel Prize laureate Murray Gell-Mann, the man who revolutionized modern particle physics with his theories of the quark and the Eightfold Way.". "Born into a family of Jewish immigrants on New York's East 14th Street, Gell-Mann demonstrated his prodigious genius from an early age - he entered Yale at fifteen, completed his Ph.D. at twenty-one, and was soon uncovering the secrets of subatomic particles and illuminating the elegant symmetries of the universe. Before long, a favorite pastime among physicists was arguing over who was smarter, Richard Feynman or Murray Gell-Mann."--BOOK JACKET.
Award History
0 wins · 1 total
| Award | Year | Result | Category / Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Royal Society Science Book PrizeMajor | 2001 | Shortlist | Secondary source |
Experimental book profileGenerated by GPT-5.4 nano · may contain inaccuracies
This is an unverified interpretation of the catalog description, offered as an opt-in discovery experiment—not as bibliographic fact.
01 Central figures
- Murray Gell-Mann78%
Show lower-confidence suggestions
These suggestions did not meet the normal display threshold and are more likely to be wrong.
- Richard Feynman38%
02 Central places
None extracted with sufficient confidence.
These suggestions did not meet the normal display threshold and are more likely to be wrong.
- New York's East 14th Street48%
03 Suggested argument
No argument inferred with sufficient confidence.
04 Reading orientation
35 / 100 academicSerious trade
An estimate of intended readership and scholarly apparatus—not quality or importance.
Confidence percentages are the model's own estimates. Profile confidence: 74%.