Particle Physics from one of only a handful whom understand them. Murray Gell-Mann does an excellent job of describing the very physics in which he pioneered; this is a most read for any physicist.

First, this is a technical, academic book, targeting linguists, psychologists, cognitive scientists. Not introductory.

Having said that, I enjoyed the book tremendously. My background is in linguistics and computational linguistics. The various authors consider a) the ways in which language is a complex adaptive system (and what it means to be complex and adaptive) and b) the evidence we have about how language evolved, from various perspectives. For example, how human language differs from, but is related to, abilities and attributes of higher primates, and how the two might have been bridged. Evidence is drawn from medicine/brain science, as well as physical artifacts studied by archeologists. Other papers look at linguistic data from the perspective of various theoretical orientations, including the typological perspective, considering the types of variation that is and is NOT found in human language and what that may suggests about the language faculty. Language development stages in children, and the amazing area of creoles, in which children construct a complete language from fragmentary pieces are also of interest.

Anyone who has a good technical background in linguistics will find it accessible, and it is an engaging way to broaden your thinking about language and linguistic analysis.

This is a wonderful, heart-wrenching short book, a fictionalization of the migration of a lone Eskimo Curlew from the arctic to South America and back.

The Eskimo Curlew was once a plentiful shorebird that was highly sought after by hunters because of the succulence of its flesh and the ease with which it could be taken. Usually flying in dense swarms, a score or more birds could be brought down by a single shotgun blast. In some cases so many were killed, that the hunters left those that could not be transported to market in massive piles. And so it came to pass that by the late 19th-century, the Eskimo Curlew population declined rapidly, to the point where it was virtually extinct at the time Bodsworth wrote the book.

Although a work of fiction, this is a book that should be read by everyone who has an interest in Nature and the environment.

Bodsworth is brilliant in his capacity to provide the reader with an emotionally arrousing text, supported by fascinating technical details of bird migration. I cannot imagine that anyone having even a remote interest in birds, nature or life, would not be moved by this great piece.

I doubt anyone will ever see this review, but I thought I'd submit one anyway. Never have I experienced a book that so forced me to put it down every few pages, from its overwhelming sadness and beauty. Merwin, who championed this rare gem, once wrote: "If I were not human, I would have nothing to be ashamed of." Truly, this is the kind of reading experience that cuts to the core of our species' tragic history.

I enjoyed this book very much. Gell-Mann's contribution to quantum physics is explained well (to the extent that anyone can explain that subject). The author also did an excellent job of exploring Gell-Mann's complex personality and his (often stormy) relationships with other great physicists of the second half of the 20th century. The author's personal relationship with his subject (getting permission to do a biography, getting access to Gell-Mann) is an entertaining sub-theme to the book. My main disappointment with the book (and perhaps this unfair, since the author's subject is Gell-Mann, afterall) is that there is not enough about the interplay between Gell-Mann and his equally great contemporary at Cal Tech--Richard Feynman.

All in all, a well written and enjoyable book.

George Johnson beautifully describes the life and work of the Nobel-Prize physicist Murray Gell-Mann and the revolutionary history of elementary particle physics. In addition to how the important discoveries of the Eightfold Way and quarks were made, we learn Gell-Mann's diverse interests in linguistics, ornithology, archaeology, environmental problems and complex phenomena. The author writes not only about the physicist's brilliance and success but also his human frailties such as his experiences of writer's block and procrastination and his brooding temper, thus making the biography complete as viewed from every side. This is a good book for laypersons as well as for physicists.

This is an easy 5. George Johnson took care of the writing and left the physics to Murray. I have always felt an uneasy awe when hearing of the "next" Gell-Mann concept as I grew up hoping to someday become a scientist.

Johnson's book exposes the raw energy of scientific creation in a man so obsessed with "doing it all". It reveals personal traits of a driven human spirit. Based on the prose, Murray must have been something to deal with; but of course, wasn't it well worth it. I know I haven't; but I feel I have met the physicist that orchestrated the rag-tag "particle zoo" of Opie to perform its siren songs.

From the birds that he knew, and thru languages he expressed himself of which math was only one, Gell-Mann would have fit well in the Renaissance. Johnson also exposes Murray's personal life, its beauty, its tragedy, its strangeness.

Though a biography, Johnson's book is also an excellant account of the competition to paint a picture of the physical world. There is little physics, but the events and descriptions of the breakthrus are a must read for any serious physicist.

I hope to hear more from Johnson and more from Murray Gell-Mann.

If you're interested in the future uses and directions of digitized images, Alan Rath's joining of digitized images with kinetic sculptures is worth considering. Rath doesn't see kinetic art as alienating, so he's a bit baffled by commentaries on kinetic art such as those in his interview with Meredith Tromble ("There are undoubtedly more electronic circuits in my home than there are bits of painted canvas, yet when I imagine art about daily life I still think of a still life or a family portrait."). Rather he sees our relationship to technology as being just as intimate as our relationship to more culturally established forms of art. His digital video sculptures--built from circuit boards, memory chips, frame buffers and wires--are meant to be playful investigations of people's relationship to machinery and technology. For example, though Rath uses digitized videotaped images of the human eye to lend a psychological presence to his kinetic sculptures, he resists tendencies to anthropomorphize his sculptures in order to discover and create new modes of exchange and social relationships. In Rath's "Watcher," a wall-mounted monitor showing a shifting pair of eyes-neither quite inanimate nor animate-the effect of the image isn't to create a kind of portrait, or suggest any real perceptual ability, but simply to draw attention to our emotional responses as our traditional modes of relating are questioned and thwarted.

A 2-D book format is obviously not the optimal format for experiencing Rath's kinetic sculptures. Nevertheless, if you don't have the opportunity to go to one of his exhibits, the photographs of Rath's exhibited works at SITE Santa Fe is the next best thing.

I recommend the reading of the interview of Gell-Mann with J. Horgan published in the book: "The End of Science". The Quark and The Jaguar replicate the "excellence" of its author (GM). Following the "profile" of GM, we can say that the book is pretentious, very "ignorant", archaic, wrong and partial. PRETENTIOUS because present the world as completely known. For example, he says that a quantum physicist could solve anything problem on chemistry! This is stupid! "IGNORANT" because he recites about some aspects of science and philosophy that he does not know. My search-tool ONLY found 40 significant works of GM on scientific databases! ARCHAIC because some aspects of GM discourse were discarded 50 years ago! WRONG since he ignores works published in scientific journals. PARTIAL because he only shows own unusual ideas or others imported as if they were originated on Santa Fe Institute (The "revolutionary" SFI idea of studying the simple and the complex is well known in usual physical chemistry and statistical physics. One studies the "simple" (the particle) and the "complex" (collections of molecules and aggregates). The book has some good points (see others reviews) but I don't recommend it. I suggest other books by Prigogine, Weinberg, Wolfram, Hawking, etc.

Really, there is only one great contribution and knowledge of GM: quarks theory (QCD). The contributions on biology, geology, neurology, physiology, chemistry, philosophy, linguistic and others are easily summarized: none. Moreover, some aspects of GM dissertation are completely wrong for the expertise. What are the contribution and knowledge on chaos, thermodynamics, cosmology, atomic theory and chemical physics, fluctuations and critical phenomena or on dissipative structures? The response is none, and all this is well observed in the book!

I'm sorry, but the supposed "Polymath" is not an expertise on quantum physics. He WAS a great expertise on quarks theory but his contribution and knowledge of electronic and nuclear structure theory, GUT's, and others are in fact nulls. In no doubt, the ideas of the book on quantum chemistry are completely wrong. For instance, chemistry has not been reduced to QED. See the chapter on electroweak chemistry of the book "Chemistry for the 21st century". I know that the quantum chemist Brändas develops (since 1971!) more advances theories than standard QM. The book reflect the ignorance of GM on crucial aspects of standard or generalized quantum mechanics as CSM, Austin-Brussels theory, AIM, TFD, etc. The contribution and knowledge of the author on non-equilibrium quantum statistical mechanics (ESSENTIAL for our knowledge of nature) and its presence on the book is zero.

In the limits of my knowledge, nobody in elementary particle physics use his "genial" ideas or "seminal" theories, except the excellent quark model. For example, I do not find references to GM work on superstrings in my copies of CERN seminars. Already in 90's, particle physicists disbelieve of the questionable point of view of GM on the "last formulation" of physics and they began the "M-theory". Even in particle physics the book is incomplete and/or wrong!

The contribution and knowledge on mathematical-physics or foundations of physics are very deficient and it is reflected on the book. The "multiple-histories" formalism (a basis for "trivial" quantum, ecological, cosmological and biological deliberation of GM on the book) is NOT used by scientific community. The most of his supposed "rationalization" of evolution, of life's origin and self-organization are useless in scientific "serious" literature. His irrelevant insights to the dynamical sources of the second law or to cosmology are completely wrong (See the excellent Prigogine's criticism on his last book "The end of certainty").

Some of the philosophical points of view appointed in the book about the ontological structure of science are invalid! The knowledge of the author in epistemology is also shocking for us. For example, elementary courses of physical chemistry show that theories never are "correct" or "incorrect". Philosophers like to say that theories are "applicable" or "inapplicable".

The value of the book on "hot" topics of information theory is very questionable and here GM deliberate about strange and vague concepts as Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) no well accepted in current scientific literature. For a scientific criticism of the very wrong ideas of the book on information theory and entropy, I recommended the article "Science of Chaos or Chaos in Science?" (In: The Flight from Science and Reason, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 775, 1996, pp.131-175) by J. Bricmont (the coauthor of the book "Intellectual impostures"). CAS is only a "sound" name without physical or biological signification outside of the Santa Fe Institute (In chemistry, CAS signifies Chemical Abstract Service!).

Moreover, the book fails in the scientific details and then it is internally INCONSISTENT in several points. It is impossible sustain the standard model (dynamical groups) of QM in one hand and natural selection in the other (See "The End of certainty"). It is impossible sustain in one hand "archaic" quantum wave theory and quantum chaos in the other, or CPT symmetries of particle physics in one hand and the arrow of time in the other (see the book "The Direction of Time" by Zeh). It is inconsistent the standard view of quantum postulates and the old unresolved problems of measure theory (still today, there are investigations about the "Schrödinger cat problem" and the "parallel universes" in the more prestigious journals of physics), etc. However, the Polymath ("The Polymath Who Knows Everything") must ignore all this.

Translated by J.R. González-Álvarez.

The author presents a background in quantum mechanics(QM) with its obvious offspring of chaos theory well within the grasp of an interested layman in how the laws of physics in a non mathematical presentation effect varied disciplines and life itself.

The book in itself is a very interesting presentation of a particle physicist life in a somewhat auto biographical prose. There are numerous experiences which deal with creativity, the scientific method, and facing social and cultural obstacles.

Life of an individual and the community is analyzed within the context of QM as a framework for explaining its simplicity and how complexity arises from an apparent chaos. The chaos is the limitations that all humans and organisms face in their interpretation of the information within their immediate enviroment in their quest for survival and reproduction.

Discussed is the consilience of mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, philosophy, psychology, and socialogy by means of institutes like Santa Fe and other similar organizations throughout the world where scientists exchange varied inputs of their specific expertise. Some of these excerpts of how experts meet and discuss ideas is very stimulating. These institutes foster so called crazy ideas. The author digresses into past history of crazy ideas and finds a few of those as normal in today's context.

The book is a fairly easy read. It is lengthy with chapters appearing to be a bore except in later chapters the reference to past readings suddenly become very interesting. The reader should give the author leeway in these slow developing chapters.

Gell-mann is, quite simply, an expert in more fields than most people have a passing interest in. Added to this is a lucid, entertaining writing style, and the ability to knit together seemingly disparate concepts from the fields of physics, cosmology, genetics, information theory, evolution, behavioural psychology, sociology...you name it.

It seems a few people have been criticising Gell-mann for overextending himself, boasting about his own achievements or simply writing a dislocated, jumbled book. My advice to these people is to 'look for the patterns behind the apparent randomness', as Gell-mann might have put it (because they are there, all right), give him his due for his own (considerable) contributions to physics and admire his courage in even attempting to connect so many ideas, let alone succeeding as well as does.

I loved this book, and I think anyone interested in just about any aspect of science ought to like it too.