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Murray Gell-Mann - A year at CERN. Parastatistics and color (133/200)

4,949 views · Published 12 May 2016 · 2:58 · Indexed 22 October 2026

Channel: Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People · 2016 · Science & Technology

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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: Fritzsch and I wrote about these things a little bit, but I… I don't think we contributed very much, just another point of view—pointing out that what these ideas meant was that somehow free field theory was the model for what was going on deep inside. But that was already clear really from the work of Bjorken and… and Feynman, and others. Then in 1971 I went to Europe to spend the year at CERN, and Fritzsch was there with me, and so was Bill Bardeen and the three of us began to talk about this whole set of issues. First thing we did was to look at parastatistics and color. By this time I had appreciated that a color variable would work. I'm not sure if I was aware even then of Nambu's paper of 1966, but in any case I now understood the point: that we would get the right statistics if we had another variable, a three-valued variable, and that variable were totally anti-symmetric; then we would get a totally symmetric state in the spin and… and SU(3) variable and that would be exactly compatible with observations of baryons. Then… however there were other states of this variable, and what Nambu had shown was that they would lie higher if you had a vector boson exchange between quarks. But what I suggested now was that they would lie infinitely higher, in other words that you would have restriction to the singlet in this new variable, a totally anti-symmetric state in this new variable. Nothing else would be possible. So we would have color, but color non-singlets would be prohibited. We called the colors red, white and blue at first, but then we decided maybe that was inappropriate so somebody—maybe it was Feynman, I forget who—somebody suggested that I use red, blue and green, which were the so-called primary colors in some very approximate theory of human color vision. But anyway, the idea of three so-called colors, and the restriction, absolute restriction to the singlet, so that no color non-singlets could be… could come out to be seen, that was something that we emphasized right away.

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