Strange Beauty

the long version

"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.