Less than 24 hours after his arrival in Hanover, Murray Gell-Mann stands on the back porch of the Montgomery House and points out the kingfisher that rules Occom Pond as it flies over the water in search of lunch.
Gell-Mann, who is a professor and co-chair of the Science Board at the Santa Fe Institute, seems to have universal knowledge, from the sub-atomic level of particles to the animals at Dartmouth.
Although he won a Nobel Prize in physics for his work in the field of elementary particles, Gell-Mann is confident speaking about anything from quantum mechanics to archeology to linguistics.
In 1994, he published the popular book "The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and Complex."
Gell-Mann is the second Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth this term. He is visiting the College with his wife, poet Marcia Southwick, who will give a poetry reading in Sanborn Hall Thursday. Gell-Mann will deliver another public lecture on Friday.
Gell-Mann is perhaps best known for his work on particle theory, including his studies of the fundamental building blocks in neutrons and protons, which he named quarks.
He discussed his current work in an interview at the Montgomery fellow house Monday afternoon. Gell-Mann is a natural lecturer -- just as comfortable speaking to hundreds of people in an auditorium as he is talking to one person sitting on a couch. He can talk for half an hour in response to just one question, drawing on examples from everyday life to explain.
Gell-Mann said he is currently working on a new book and three different types of research which are "all vaguely related."
One of those research areas is scaling phenomena -- quantities in the world which are distributed by mathematical power laws. Gell-Mann said he is exploring "a number of scaling laws that have never been properly explained" and attempting to construct a typology of scaling laws.
For example, he said the distribution of metropolitan area populations fits one law. But such mathematics distribution laws also apply to the frequency of word usage in languages, the frequency and power of earthquakes and the amount of space between different galaxies.
Gell-Mann said his expertise in so many fields dates back to his childhood. "When I was a little boy, my brother got me interested in a great number of things," he said.
When he was applying to college, the Yale University application asked for his intended major, but he was not sure what to list, he said. "I was thinking of archeology or linguistics."
But Gell-Mann's father, who had lived through The Great Depression, thought Gell-Mann should pick a major which would be more likely to lead to a job.
"He was horrified," Gell-Mann said. "He suggested I become an engineer." But Gell-Man was not so sure. "Tests later confirmed that I have no talent for engineering.
Gell-Mann said he told his father he had done poorly in physics in high school, but his father had a response. "He said, 'Well, that's not physics, that's high school physics.'"
He said he had always enjoyed math, so he put physics down as his major thinking that if he got into Yale, he could always change his major. Gell-Mann never did change majors, however. "I was too lazy to switch. I was hooked," he said.
Gell-Mann said while he is in New Hampshire, he and his wife may visit a camp that is associated with her family -- she and her brothers went there, and her father is the chief camp doctor.
He said he is also planning to get some work done during his stay here, which will last until August 3. In addition to the book and his work on scaling phenomena, Gell-Mann is studying simplicity and complexity, a field he calls "plectics," and how the world of classical physics emerges from the very different world of quantum mechanics.
During his long and varied career, Gell-Mann has won many different awards for his work in physics. In 1988 he won the United Nations Environmental Program's Roll of Honor for Environmental Achievement. He also was given the Ernest O Lawrence Memorial Award and the John J. Carty Medal of the National Academy of Sciences.
Yale, Columbia University, the University of Chicago and Oxford University have all conferred honorary Doctor of Science degrees on Gell-Mann in past years.
The Montgomery Endowment, initiated in 1978 by Kenneth Montgomery '25, invites prominent individuals from various disciplines to come to the College.
