It must be elegant.
From 2007: Murray Gell-Mann on beauty and truth in physics.
Gell-Mann, theoretical physicist, is the man who borrowed the word “quark” from James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake and gave it to the subatomic particle. He and his colleague Richard Feynman were the main candidates for Smartest Person on Earth (both won the Nobel Prize, Feynman in 1965, Gell-Mann in 1969). Oddly Feynman remains a superstar physicist years after his death, but Gell-Mann doesn’t seem to get that kind of love. I thought it was because Feynman was funny, folksy, charming—but so is Gell-Mann, as this video from the TED Conference shows. So this Feynman fan is now also a Gell-Mann fan.
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March 10th, 2010 at 10:54
Timothy Ferris in his book Coming of Age in the Milky Way says Gell-Mann is an annoying frassum-wassum who thinks he’s better than everyone else (and maybe he is — who knows?) and has a habit of interrupting what his colleague was saying to correct the colleague’s pronunciation.