Remarks on the occasion of Murray Gell-Mann's more or less 60th Birthday

Summary

I first met Murray when he was a small child, a 19 year old graduate student at the Caltech of the East. I was an ancient of 26 at the time and was quite surprised when he announced upon meeting me that he knew who I was and that he had read all my papers. That was not such a monumental task at that time, but I found out that he had indeed read them. I discovered much more quickly than Viki Weisskopf that Murray was different from me and thee. We became friends and have remained so for nearly forty years.

When I went to Chicago in 1950 I began immediately agitating to hire Murray. It was no easy task to convince my senior colleagues that this was sensible since he had identically zero publications to his name. I did, however, prevail and we began a long collaboration that continued episodically for nearly 20 years. This was an exciting time in particle physics when there was a vast amount of experimental data and a paucity of theoretical tools to cope with it. It was a pleasure to work with Murray as we used everything we could lay our hands on theoretically to try to pick our way toward an understanding of what was a bewildering and complex landscape. His ingenuity, intensity, enthusiasm, and confidence that we could understand a great deal if we stuck to general principles and were not afraid to make bold conjectures was contagious.