Proposed and named quarks; would not give up his own nomenclature
This is Jonathan Hare's account, with its provenance shown. The person or organization named has not yet claimed or corrected it.
Nobel laureate in physics, co-founder of the Santa Fe Institute, and by any measure of influence rather than fame the most consequential living physicist of his period — everyone in the field used his work, and he sat on the NSF board approving grants. Died 2019.
He proposed and named quarks in 1964 and took the Nobel in 1969.
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He moderated the Einstein centenary at Aspen and walked Jonathan Hare into his own keynote. Hare suggested he adopt John Holland's nomenclature, as the most widely used and the more elegant. Gell-Mann preferred his own, and handed over a copy of The Quark and the Jaguar. His term for complexity theory was adopted by nobody.
Hare did not press it. He had named quarks; he had earned that deference, at least to his face.
Transformational figures frequently succeed because of enormous self-confidence and a willingness to defy orthodoxy, which often presents as an outsized ego. Giant egos are essential to progress — but only among those worthy of them. Gell-Mann's principal reward was a lifetime pass, exercised with regularity.
A field held back because one person's authority substituted for convergence is the exact failure the Trust Taxonomy mechanism prevents.
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