The Original Fifth Interaction

Summary

This essay is dedicated to Murray Gell-Mann upon his sixtieth birthday. I assume he will be particularly gratified to read that the inspiration for a new look at the 1964 work came during a visit to the College of Judea and Samaria at Ariel and to the “Nir” Yeshiva in Hebron. Also, while travelling in the area, I came across one of the five types of pheasant-like birds (Hebrew “HoGLaH”) that he had enumerated to me on our 1967 tour of the Negev. There were no Malayalam-speaking immigrant Cochin Jews around this time as there had been at Nabatean Mamshit (Roman “Mempsis”, and in Arabic “Kurnub”) but I did visit Tat-speaking Daghestani “mountain Jews” in the Dothan valley in northern Shomron (Samaria). It is interesting that they have become important producers of goose-liver which is exported to France. Aside from Tat proper, they use “Judeo-Tat”, a Tat-based “Yiddish”.

QUANTUM FIELD THEORY, STRONG INTERACTIONS AND SU(3) IN 1964

In 1963–65, I was at Caltech as Murray's guest. We had met at CERN during the 1962 conference, at the end of the rapporteur session on strange particles. I have related elsewhere the events of that day and Gerson Goldhaber has added a witness-participant account. Anyhow, the outcome was a two-year stay at Caltech and the beginning of a lasting friendship.