Murray Gell-Mann - Early days at Caltech. Working with Feynman (74/200)

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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 Wes; date recorded:1997]

TRANSCRIPT: Before I accepted the job at Caltech I visited there in Christmas ’54 with Margaret, and then I went back by myself. She had to return to her job in Princeton, but then I went back. After we went to San Francisco she flew back to Princeton and I went back to Pasadena, and I gave a couple of seminars. One was on mesons and baryons, and mesons theory and so on; the other one however was on the K01, K02 idea which impressed Feynman enormously because he said he hadn't thought of it and he was just amazed and... and then I talked also about the renormalization group work, which he hadn't thought of either; and he didn't think there was anything in quantum electrodynamics that he hadn't thought of. So they offered me a job immediately. At that time it didn't take a year or so the way it does now with all the government regulations and so on. It took two days or so for them to have a faculty meeting and… and offer me a job, and later on that… that spring I… I accepted it. And when I went there in… starting in April–yeah, in April or early May ’55--it was taken for granted that… that Richard and I would work together. And we did. We did a lot of very amusing things; we discussed things, we had lot of fun together at that time. Later on I got sort of fed up with his self-absorption–what I considered his self-absorption and his ego and so on. But that time that hadn't happened yet and we worked quite happily together.