>>Michael Fitzgerald: Murray is a true polymath.
He entered Yale at age 15. I think he graduated
at age 16 or so. He went on from there to
really become the instigator of finding the
quark, for which he was awarded the Nobel
Prize in physics in 1969.
He's a linguist who is widely published in
that field. In fact, he's published myriad
papers on academic subjects.
He's also published books, including the book
that defined, kind of for a general audience,
his theories on simplicity and complexity
called "The Quark and the Jaguar."
He was a cofounder of the Santa Fe Institute,
which is a pioneering and a premier interdisciplinary
research center in Santa Fe, which was made
famous, in part, for what it brought to the
study of complexity, and I could go on.
But we are going to sit down and talk a bit
about just a couple of your ideas on how to
be a catalyst.
I mean, you have been, in many ways, a catalyst,
and so it's a privilege to get to sort of
sit down with you and talk with you a bit
about how you do that. And why don't we just
sort of start there.
Start with the quark, actually. How did that
theory come about?
>>Murray Gell-Mann: Well, that's a very good
thing to start with, because it can illustrate
something we ought to talk about.
What is a quark?
Well, we heard how -- and most of us know
anyway -- how atoms are made up of nuclei,
which in turn are made up of neutrons and
protons, and then there are electrons as well.
So we have a nucleus with electrons forming
around it. The nucleus, as I said, made of
neutrons and protons. But the neutrons and
protons turn out not to be the elementary
particles that everybody thought they were.
Instead, each neutron or proton is made of
three quarks, roughly speaking.
And people ask me, "How did you think of that?"
Well, turns out it was very easy.
If you look at a chart of various discovered
particles, some kind of thing you heard about
in an earlier talk, it's pretty obvious that
the neutron and proton ought to be made of
three quarks each.
[Laughter]
It's not -- but it is very difficult to believe
it.
That's why it wasn't immediately advertised
by everybody as a model or as a theory, because
it violated -- the quark idea violated some
well-known principles.
For example, that the neutron and proton are
elementary. Everybody knew they were elementary.
So of course they're not made up of smaller
things.
Second, an elementary particle should have
a charge that's an integral multiple of the
proton's charge. Could be in units of the
proton's electric charge, it could be -- the
charge of the new particle could be one or
zero or minus one or two, but not two-thirds
or minus a third.
But those are the electric charges of the
quark: plus two-thirds and minus a third.
The third principle: Nobody had ever heard
of a particle type such that the particle
was always confined inside something else,
the way that quarks are permanently confined
inside things like the neutron and proton.
Can't get out.
Nobody had ever heard of anything like that.
So we had three clearly defined ideas that
made the quarks wrong, but those three ideas
were themselves wrong. That was the problem
with them.
And that occurs over and over and over again
in science.
Look at the Maya glyphs in Mexico and Central
America, the two kinds of these characters
often chiseled in stone.
One set describe calendrical, astronomical
information, about the apparent rising and
setting of the sun in different places of
the sky, the motions of the planet Venus,
the motions of the moon -- apparent motions
of the moon and so on, all described in these
calendrical glyphs and they were deciphered
a hundred years ago or so.
But that left the non-calendrical glyphs.
What were they?
Well, the dictator of Maya studies at that
time was the Englishman Sir J. Eric S. Simpson
 -- S. Thompson, I mean. Sorry.
And this influential Englishman ruled that
the non-calendrical glyphs were not writing.
He didn't say what they were, but they were
definitely not writing, and anyone who tried
to publish a paper saying they were writing
was unsuccessful.
Anybody who wanted to be promoted at a university
had better agree that they were not writing.
There was only one trouble. They were writing!
[Laughter]
It took a Russian scholar, Uri Knorosov, to
carry out the first steps of the correct decipherment.
That's the kind of thing that goes on all
the time.
>>Michael Fitzgerald: So in the case of the
quark, how did you get people to come around
to your point of view?
>>Murray Gell-Mann: Well, two things.
One was that it was clear to a lot of people
that the quark picture explained a great many
things.
Second, some friends of mine at Stanford University,
at the accelerator there, were able to take
what amounts to an electron microscope picture
of the protons, and, roughly speaking, there
were the three quarks.
>>Michael Fitzgerald: So you had evidence.
>>Murray Gell-Mann: So there was certainly
evidence, yes.
But --
[Laughter]
But it often takes a long time to overcome
these rules that you mustn't think in a certain
way.
I was asked once by a company to appear in
a commercial on television for the company.
I wasn't supposed to praise the company nor
even mention it. I was just supposed to discuss
asking "Why not?"
Because that's what we've been talking about.
Why this negative prescription that you mustn't
think in a certain way.
Why not think in that way?
So I talked about it a little bit, and they
paid me a substantial fee, and then it turned
out it was a quite successful commercial and
they renewed it for another year, paying me
my fee a second time, as they were obliged
to do by the rules of actors equity. I also
got a second year's membership in the Screen
Actors Guild.
[Laughter]
And then they invited me to come to their
headquarters and talk to their important employees
on the intranet, and in fact talk to all their
employees who were awake at the time, given
that many of them were in different parts
of the world, talk to all of them through
the intranet, the company intranet.
So I did.
And I talked about how I don't know much about
business but I know a little bit about theoretical
science and I assume that there's some similarity.
And in theoretical science, it's good to ask
 -- when you're told not to think in certain
ways, it's good to ask "Why not? Are we sure
that we mustn't think in those ways?"
And usually there's a damn good reason why
not. But not always.
Sometimes it turns out this prohibition is
misguided. And we've just talked about two
or three examples of that.
But I was careful to mention that you must
ask -- you must check and make sure there
isn't a simple reason why not.
"For example," I said, "in business I assume
you always have to worry about profit and
loss and you always have to worry about legal
and ethical considerations."
What was the company?
Of course.
Enron.
>>Michael Fitzgerald: Enron.
[Laughter]
>>Michael Fitzgerald: So
why do you think in that case --
[Laughter]
>>Michael Fitzgerald: -- they took the other
view of "why not," which is "Why not ignore
this stuff"?
>>Murray Gell-Mann: Well, of course. The whole
idea is to be able to distinguish those negative
prohibitions that are there for a damn good
reason and the ones that are not.
And in this case, there was a damn good reason
why you should pay attention to legal and
ethical considerations and there was a damn
good reason for worrying about profit and
loss.
[Laughter]
>>Michael Fitzgerald: And there we have it.
[Laughter]
>>Michael Fitzgerald: So you've been involved
with the Santa Fe Institute, which sort of
 --
>>Murray Gell-Mann: Oh, yes. From the prehistory
of the Santa Fe Institute up to now. That's
where I work every day.
>>Michael Fitzgerald: How did that come about,
and was that another example of this "why
not" thinking?
>>Murray Gell-Mann: In a way. In a way.
We met -- a group of us -- during the early
1980s in Los Alamos. These were people who
were employed by Los Alamos, in some cases.
In other cases like mine, they were consultants
to Los Alamos. And we talked about our dream
of starting a scientific institute in Santa
Fe, which we all love.
But it would be a civilian scientific institute.
It would not be run by the government, although
it might accept government money if it were
begged to on certain occasions. It would -- but
the main thing that I emphasized in these
discussions was that we ought to have no barriers
among the different fields.
At universities, you typically run into all
these walls between the disciplines coming
from curricula, from textbooks, from sections
of granting agencies, from curricula, and
so on and so forth.
So it's very difficult to have real interdisciplinary
cooperation.
It's possible, but it's very difficult. And
I said that we should set up an institute,
an institute where it was easy and where we
encouraged people to do it.
And that's the way it works now. We have little
groups that form after some discussion in
the kitchen, usually, at tea time to study
problems of mutual interest.
And each person can make a contribution whether
or not that person is trained in a relevant
field. Doesn't matter.
As long as the person has some knowledge,
intuition, is relatively bright, and so on,
a contribution can be made.
But we do have a rule that at least one person
in the group should know something about the
subject.
[Laughter]
>>Michael Fitzgerald: And that's all it takes
to overcome these barriers?
>>Murray Gell-Mann: No. It takes something
else. It takes a determination, a real devotion
to the idea of doing these things, because
the languages are different for different
fields, the way of judging ideas is different
in different fields, people have different
vocabulary in different fields, and overcoming
these differences and barriers is not easy
at all. But it is possible for people who
have always dreamt of doing that.
We had our founding seminars in the fall of
1984 at this room kindly lent us by the School
of American Research in Santa Fe. Beautiful,
beautiful weather. We had terrible problems
getting people to go home.
[Laughter]
And -- but anyway, I made the phone calls
for a lot of the invitations, and I knew what
people would say, because these were quite
important, interesting scientists in many,
many different subjects.
And I knew they were going to say something
like this: "I have my teaching, I have my
research, I'm writing two textbooks, and I
consult for several companies and I just don't
have the time. I'm terribly sorry. Don't call
me; I'll call you."
But that isn't what they said.
We had a list of people that we suspected
might be interested in this project, and it
turned out nearly every one of them said something
like the following: "When can I come? Can
I come sooner? I've been dreaming about this
all my life!"
Well, we hadn't expected that amount of enthusiasm,
but that's what we got.
>>Michael Fitzgerald: Which is great. We have
a -- and it's gone on to have a sort of story
of development since then. We have just a
couple of minutes left and I'm curious, is
there a question that you -- is there a problem
to which we wish we were asking "why not"
about now?
>>Murray Gell-Mann: Well, yes. It's something
I'm working on very hard with some bright
Russian linguists, and that is the question
of distant relationships among human languages.
To take the known families and see if they
aren't descended from superfamilies, and if
the superfamilies shouldn't be grouped into
a super-superfamily.
In other words, to carry the process of historical
linguistics back before six or seven thousand
years ago, because the experts in the field
mostly have this negative -- this prohibition,
this negative requirement: "You must not think
of anything before six or seven thousand years
ago. It's wrong, it's unscientific, it's prescientific.
It's misleading, it's not properly proved,"
and so on and so forth."
And I suspect that this is another one of
those fake prohibitions, wrong prohibitions.
I can't prove it rigorously at this time,
but I suspect it is.
>>Michael Fitzgerald: And in the world of
business, is -- is there something that you
think businesses should be asking "why not"
about, or can they do a better job of processing
"why not"?
>>Murray Gell-Mann: Well, why not do the things
that are represented here at Zeitgeist?
This is a marvelous, really splendid milieu
for thinking about important problems of business
and its relation to every other human activity,
including happiness, as we heard, including
all the things that lead to happiness.
Why not carry all that away from here and
actually do it?
Some people do, apparently, and I think it's
marvelous.
>>Michael Fitzgerald: Well, on that note,
we're out of time. Thank you very much, Murray.
It was wonderful.
[Applause]
