The Making of a Physicist: A Talk with Murray Gell-Mann [via Arts & Letters Daily]
Uncharacteristically, I discussed my application to Yale with my father, who asked, "What were you thinking of putting down?" I said, "Whatever would be appropriate for archaeology or linguistics, or both, because those are the things I'm most enthusiastic about. I'm also interested in natural history and exploration." He said, "You'll starve!" After all, this was 1944 and his experiences with the Depression were still quite fresh in his mind; we were still living in genteel poverty. He could have quit his job as the vault custodian in a bank and taken a position during the war that would have utilized his talents — his skill in mathematics, for example — but he didn't want to take the risk of changing jobs. He felt that after the war he would regret it, so he stayed where he was. This meant that we really didn't have any spare money at all.
I asked him, "What would you suggest?" He mentioned engineering, to which I replied, "I'd rather starve. If I designed anything it would fall apart." And sure enough when I took an aptitude test a year later I was advised to take up nearly anything but engineering. Then my father suggested, "Why don't we compromise — on physics?"
Interesting bit in the article about his first wife, archaeologist J. Margaret Dow, and her connection with the discovery of Linear B tablets. As for the coining of the term quark, I'd always heard that Gell-Mann got it from Joyce, but there are some who say this is apocryphal:
Posted by jim at July 11, 2003 09:21 AMDid Murray Gell-Mann take the word 'quark' from James Joyce? This origin, as related by Thomas Jones (LRB, 24 August [2000]), may be apocryphal. But if Finnegans Wake is indeed the source, there arise two questions: where did Joyce get the word, and how should it be pronounced? As an old German word still in use, the masculine noun, Quark, has the meaning: 'curd(s)'; and, figuratively: 'trifle', 'trash', 'filth', 'slime'. In Goethe's Faust, Mephistopheles, conversing with God in the 'Prologue in Heaven', says contemptuously about humans: 'In jedem Quark begräbt er Seine Nase.'
[Paul Pfalzner, letter to the London Review of Books, vol. 22, no. 18]