The Gell-Mann Age of Particle Physics

Summary

I find I am three and a half years older than Gell-Mann although I have always prided myself on belonging to the same generation as he does. I shall give you a contemporary's views and some early recollections of Gell-Mann and his influence on the subject of Particle Physics.

I believe I first saw Gell-Mann at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton in April 1951. He had brought from MIT the expression in terms of Heisenberg fields which would give the equation of the Bethe-Salpeter amplitude. I remember him and Francis Low working on this problem and producing the most elegant of papers, which has been the definitive contribution to this subject ever since.

I left the Institute for Advanced Studies in June 1951 and went back to Lahore. Later, in 1954, I returned to Cambridge and found that in the intervening period, the subject of new particles, the so called V⁰-particles (Λ⁰, K⁰) had developed into a full-fledged new activity. There was the Gell-Mann-Nishijima formula which gave the connection between the charge, the isotopic spin and the strangeness - the prototype formula for other similar equations which followed this in later years and whose influence in Particle Physics one cannot exaggerate.

In July 1954, there was a conference in Scotland where Blackett took the chair and where young Gell-Mann was an invited speaker.