The account as dictated, preserved verbatim. Everything elsewhere on this site that derives from it is a distillation — and where the two differ, this governs.
Dictated by Jonathan Paul Hare in working sessions with Claude (Anthropic) and transcribed in-session. Lightly cleaned for typographic errors and false starts; wording, sequence and emphasis preserved. Not an audio transcript. Where the distilled page differs from the source, the source governs.
Gell-Mann, then the most famous living physicist for having won the Nobel Prize for discovering and naming Quarks in 1961 and co-founded the Santa Fe Institute, moderated the Aspen Physic's Institutes 100th anniversary of the Miracle Year event, including the opening keynote. Hare chatted with a dozen of his favorite physicist celebrities, and then ran into Murray Gell-Mann (who Hare had met dozens of times at the Santa Fe Institute. (Mostly because Hare spent a lot of time in the coffee break room, chatting with whomever came in for a fresh cup of coffee, and either telling them about Organic technology and Business DNA, or asking them about their research and how to generalize CAS to the general case. Murray Gell-Mann invited me to come to his keynote lecture, and walked me in the lecture hall. Hare sat in the back, so he could see all the physicists, in the audience, and was joined soon thereafter by Brian Greene and his future wife, who had just returned from a hike up Aspen Mountain. Hare got to know Brian Greene in person, having already ready his Elegant Universe and a few more, and met him a number of other times.
Hare was suggested to Gell Mann that he adopt the nomenclature defined by John Holland, since it was the most widely adopted and very elegant. Gell-Mann said "I prefer my terminology" and gave me a copy of "How the Leopard Got it's Spots", which covered all the topics of a dozen other complex adaptive systems books, but Gell-Mann invented his own terminology, and actually promoted his own term for complexity theory, which no one but him adopted. He named Quarks, so Hare didn't debate the matter. Gell-Mann had earned that deference, at least to his face. (Hare told everyone else that Gell-Mann's ego equaled his prodigious achievements, to was an obstacle to progress in the field.)
Most truly transformational leaders in science and technology succeed precisely because they have enormous self-confidence, brazenly defy doubters or the orthodox - which often manifests as gigantic egos. Hare's position is, giant egos are essential to progress, but only among those worthy of them. The main reward for Murray Gell-Mann's contribution is a life-time pass - he earned the right to wear his ego on his sleeves for the remainder of his life, and exercised that right with regularity. He was among my heroes - so much so that only suggested he might reconsider his nomenclature, rather than condemning him to his face.
Corrections applied downstream are recorded here rather than made silently. The source above is unaltered.
Corrections applied on the published page and flagged to Hare: quarks proposed and named 1964, Nobel 1969; the book is The Quark and the Jaguar, not the Kipling title. The 'most famous living physicist' framing was changed to a claim about influence rather than fame, at Hare's direction.
Each page below is a distillation of the account above. The chain is recorded in both directions so that a reader, a journalist or a future system can walk from a claim back to what was actually said.
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Correct or extend S-002 → All source records →