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New York-born physicist Murray Gell-Mann (1929-2019) was a theoretical physicist. His considerable contributions to physics include the theory of quantum chromodynamics. He was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the theory of elementary particles. [Listener: Geoffrey West; date recorded: 1997]
TRANSCRIPT: I think it was in ’57 that I proposed the global symmetry, and it didn't give a very good mass formula and of course I wasn't very happy with it. And its predicted power wasn't very great and of course, we know it was wrong. I assumed that some version of Yang-Mills theory was to be used for both the weak interaction and the strong interaction. The big problem with that, which got more and more serious over the years, until color made its appearance, was that the two got in each others way if they operated in the same space of charges, and… and that was a serious obstacle to thinking that both the strong and the weak interactions were somehow Yang-Mills theories.
[GW] You weren't concerned about the mass loss in itself, the gauge bosons?
Well, I knew that you had to modify the Yang-Mills theory if you wanted to get the intermediate boson for the weak interactions along with the photon. You had to violate its symmetry somehow and get massive particles. I didn't know how to do that. When I wrote my Eightfold Way pre-print in January 1961 I actually advertised for what I called a soft mass mechanism. But this was a year or two after my collaborators and I had used the sigma model as an example of a number of things. And of course starting from the sigma model it's very easy to get to the correct explanation of how the Yang-Mills theory can have its symmetry violated in a soft manner so as not to violate renormalizability. Salam and Kumar in London, Imperial College, while I was visiting there or near the time when I was visiting there in ’59 and '60, pointed out that Yang-Mills theory would be okay, renormalizable, if… if the symmetry weren't broken; but if it were broken in any brute force manner, just by sticking in a mass for the bosons, for example, then it was no longer renormal izable. So it was clear that a soft mass mechanism was needed and well , if I had been thinking carefully I probably would have found it a lot earlier than… than it was found, but… but I didn't. Playing with the sigma model we were very, very close to… to the correct answer. Actually it was Phil Anderson working in condensed matter physics who found the mechanism for getting a massive intermediate boson. The so-called Higgs, Kibble and so on and so on and so on mechanism should also be named after Anderson. And I said in my book, kidding him, that if the elementary particle physics community had given him adequate credit for this idea he… we would have been spared his public objections to the construction of new accelerators.
