That encounter sharpened his awareness of the beauty of nature at its most complex, reminding him of its fragility. Coming from someone who is famous for his prodigious abilities this comes as quite an admission. Marcia, it seems, goaded Murray into completing the task, and as a nonscientist acted as a sounding board for anything that might be too technical.
On this second point she has only partly succeeded — although it seems unfair to blame any lack of success on her. Gell-Mann admits that there are passages where Marcia would have preferred more clarity. Me too. The book is occasionally quite tough going.
After some personal reminiscences on his childhood, he shows us some of the materials he uses to build those staircases. Then, buoyed along by the need to develop the bomb and the ensuing distrust of the Cold War, the United States vaulted into a commanding role-a position it retained for almost fifty years. Throughout this period, each new particle accelerator was a major campaign, each new particle a battle won.
With the end of the Cold War, U. Now CERN, for four decades the spearhead of the European fightback, stands as the leading global particle physics center. Today, particle physics is at a turning point in its history-how well Europe retains its advantage remains to be seen. In Quest of the Quark reinforces atomic theory for high school students, and links it with Elementary Particle Physics in a structured way that encourages literacy without heavy mathematics, by interrelating the particles which make up sub-atomic particles.
The particles of matter, called fermions, are the bricks of the universe, and the bosons which transmit the forces of energy, the mortar which binds them together. Shelves: popular-physics. At times, this book presents fascinating and powerful new ways of looking at the world. Also, his introduction to modern physics Gell-Mann is a Nobel Prize winner who basically built QCD, an essential piece of the current standard model is one of the clearest I have encountered and debunks the pop culture misinterpretations of quantum mechanics that pervade most discussions.
There are certainly interesting nuggets here but this book could do with some editing. Perhaps it shifts from neural net to genetic algorithm, etc. I will skeptically read more. Graining is a built-in assumption that we make at all times and must be considered in any analysis. Aug 24, Paul Brogan rated it liked it Shelves: science. Unless you're a whiz at maths and physics, the first part of this book will be heavy going for you. Fortunately, I have always had a fascination for quarks and quantum theory, Einstein and Heisenberg, calculus and statistical theory, so I found great reward from getting inside the methodical brain of a man such as Gell-Mann, winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics.
Indeed, it was he who coined the term 'quark', among others. By the time he moves onto to a discussion of the complex biologica Unless you're a whiz at maths and physics, the first part of this book will be heavy going for you.
By the time he moves onto to a discussion of the complex biological evolution, creativity, superstition, environmental protection, and world futures , however, I suspect that even the technical maladroit would find something of immense value from his thorough and analytical musings on the state of both humankind and our planet.
This said, I was glad I took the trouble to plough through those early chapters, without which I may have missed the precision that he uses to describe terms such as order and disorder, randomness, simple and complex, depth, and entropy, and without which I think I may have lost much of the beautiful logic of his conclusions. This is an ideal book to lend to your favourite scientist or engineer friend. When finished, invite him or her for dinner, drinks, and plenty of debate over Gell-Mann's ideas.
It would be animated, I'm sure, but stimulating. While the universe is in essence quite simple, humans and our society are complex, and that's worth celebrating. Sep 25, Brian Godsey rated it it was amazing Shelves: totally-awesome-books , nonfiction. I got this book as a prize from the math department of my college when I was a freshman or a sophomore. Though I liked the idea of learning more about quarks, I had a habit of not reading anything that wasn't required of me. So, The Quark and the Jaguar sat on my shelf for almost a decade before I took it seriously, and I'm glad for thatboth that I took it seriously and that I waited so long.
I'm glad that I [finally] took the book seriously because there's a ton of good information and ideas I got this book as a prize from the math department of my college when I was a freshman or a sophomore. I'm glad that I [finally] took the book seriously because there's a ton of good information and ideas in there. I'm glad that I waited because I think that even a couple of years ago I would not have fully understood or appreciated most of it.
Four years ago, I had only basic knowledge of physics, biology, genetics, evolution, machine learning, probability, and political science, all of which are discussed in this Nobel Prize winner's book. In these last four years, I've learned a lot about all of these topics, not that it's really necessary for understanding the book; it definitely helps appreciate its importance, though. Strictly speaking, The Quark and the Jaguar is about learning, albeit three distinct types of learning: 1 humans learning about our world and universe, 2 our world and universe learning what laws, rules, and configurations can function in the long run, and 3 computers designed by humans learning from data.
Learning type 1 is obviously what Gell-Mann has done for most of his lifetime as a theoretical physicist and general applied scientist. Learning type 2 is what Gell-Mann has discovered in his lifetime as a scientist: that every system in our universefrom quantum physics to genetic evolution to economicsis an example or result of that system having tried many possibilities and settling on the few that work.
The theory and literature on learning type 3 provide the necessary framework and terminology with which we can discuss learning types 1 and 2 , since, in essence, all three types are one and the same, but with different physical objects at the center. Gell-Mann calls these objects "complex adaptive systems" and demonstrates how a machine learning algorithm can be very much like the process of evolution, the training of a dog, or even the settling of our cosmos into the physical laws we know and accept today.
The breadth of this book is incredibleespecially since it's less than pagesand what's even more amazing is that my only complaint about this book is that it was sometimes redundant and written at a level below my current scientific knowledge. It's clearly a book written for people who are not experts in any of the aforementioned fields, but Gell-Mann manages to make it relevant also for them.
The only scientifically difficult subject matter is on information theory or quantum physics, and these pages are by no means necessary to the rest of the book.
The best aspect of the book, though, which is referenced throughout but becomes clear near the end, is that Gell-Mann tells people in no uncertain terms to look at the big picture, an action that seems incredibly uncommon in the world at large. Not only does he stress this for science, but he tells us how to do it in our everyday liveswork, community, environment, and politics included.
There's even a concise summary chapter at the end in case you missed the message in between the examples throughout the book. What I'm left with in the end is a strong feeling that the world and universe are largely a product of learning and chance, the two aspects of every valuable complex adaptive system. I am a product of this universe, and I operate the same way. If I learn how to learn and convince others to do the same, I can be successful or change the world, or both, whichever I prefer.
Dec 10, Czarny Pies rated it it was ok Recommends it for: No one. This work has had its rendez-vous with destiny and it is over. Shelves: medical-science-autism. Gell-mann was the first person to postulate the existence of Quarks and ranks as one of the all-time greats in the field of quantum mechanics. In , he co-founded the Santa Fe institute which is dedicated to the physical, computational, biological, linguistic and social components of complex adaptive systems.
The jury is still out on the accom "The Quark and the Jaguar" is an engaging account of the life-long intellectual pilgrimage of Murray Gell-man , winner of Nobel Prize for Physics.
The jury is still out on the accomplishments of this initiative which unfortunately occupy most of the this book. Above-all, "The Quark and the Jaguar" seems dated. Gell-mann wrote the book at a time when the discipline of quantum mechanics had arrived at plateau. In the last 50 years, the scientific community has come a long way in explaining quantum mechanics to high school students and members of the general public.
The general reader can now find better explanations elsewhere. The passages on complex adaptive systems suffer from the inverse problem. The discipline was in its infancy at the time Gell-mann was writing and his comments in this area are not terribly enlightening at this point in time twenty-five years after the publication of the "The Quark and the Jaguar.
What it does offer the reader interested in the history of quantum mechanics is access to the personality, charm and thinking processes of one the great physicists of the 20th century. Dec 10, Jafar rated it really liked it.
Gell-Mann has a Nobel Prize in physics. Quarks and jaguars represent simplicity and complexity, respectively. The book, however, is full of interesting musings on a widely diverse set of subjects — from quantum physics to the preservation o Gell-Mann has a Nobel Prize in physics.
The book, however, is full of interesting musings on a widely diverse set of subjects — from quantum physics to the preservation of cultural diversity. I saw this poem by John Updike about neutrinos in the book. Neutrinos are elementary particles with no electric charge and almost no mass.
The thermonuclear reactions in the center of the sun produce neutrinos that rain down upon us during the day. During the night, with the sun behind our planet, these neutrinos pass straight through the earth and rain up upon us from below. Neutrinos, they are very small. They have no charge and have no mass And do not interact at all.
The earth is just a silly ball To them, through which they simply pass, Like dustmaids down a drafty hall Or photons through a sheet of glass. They snub the most exquisite gas, Ignore the most substantial wall, Cold shoulder steel and sounding brass, Insult the stallion in his stall, And, scorning barriers of class, Infiltrate you and me.
Like tall And painless guillotines they fall Down through our heads into the grass. This book describes the principles of complex signaling networks enabling spatiotemporally-directed macroscopic processes by the coupling of systems leading to a bottom-up information transfer in photosynthetic organisms. Top-down messengers triggered by macroscopic actuators like sunlight, gravity, environment or stress lead to an activation of the gene regulation on the molecular level.
Mainly the generation and monitoring, as well the role of reactive oxygen species in photosynthetic organisms as typical messengers in complex networks, are described. A theoretical approach according to the principle of synergetics is presented to model light absorption, electron transfer and membrane dynamics in plants. A special focus will be attended to nonlinear processes that form the basic principle for the accumulation of energy reservoirs and large forces enabling the dynamics of macroscopic devices.
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