Murray Gell-Mann - The Yang-Mills theory (72/200)

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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: In the ’40s mathematics moved from its traditional way of presenting results to a highly abstract approach favored by Bourbaki, this group of French purists. And it became forbidden to explain in a mathematics article what you were going to do; or what you had done when you finished; to give any motivation; to give any non-trivial examples even. You could give a trivial example in a line or two, but you were not allowed to give, to explore a non-trivial examples. And as a result mathematics and science, particularly physics, drifted apart where previously they'd had a lot of mutual stimulation. It was very sad and I'm glad that later on the trend moved in the opposite direction to some extent.

In any case, I was quite impressed with… with the Yang-Mills theory although I didn't see how in its precise form it was applicable to anything. An exact gauge invariant theory with the group SU(2), and I didn't know what that would apply to. But I assumed that it would be very important some day in some connection, especially if we could develop a soft mechanism for breaking its symmetry; but I didn't see how to do that at the time. I didn't… I don't imagine that in ’55 I was already thinking about how, in a Yang-Mills world, knowing about symmetries would tell you almost immediately about dynamics. That's something I understood only much later, but it's certainly true.