Murray Gell-Mann - My 'business trip' honeymoon in 1992 (136/200)

To listen to more of Murray Gell-Mann’s stories, go to the playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVV0r6CmEsFxKFx-0lsQDs6oLP3SZ9BlA 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] TRANSCRIPT: We began to think, Harald and I, about Yang-Mills theory and a Yang-Mills theory based on color, and we started to prepare a talk for the International Conference that summer, summer of ’72 in Chicago. And for a while what we were talking about was essentially quantum chromodynamics: Yang-Mills theory of color coupled to... with a color octet of gluons, coupled to quarks with color. But by the time we... I actually gave the talk with David Gross in the chair, that summer of ’72 in Chicago, we had gotten cold feet on various issues, and I describe all that in this little historical reminiscence, called Quarks, Color and QCD, which I gave at two meetings. I presented it personally at the Stanford meeting in the summer of ’92. It was just a couple of days after Marcia and I were married. We were married on a Sunday in Aspen by the mayor, John Bennett, our friend; the next day we left for Oxford where I got an honorary degree and I marched in the procession; the next day after that we left for Stanford where I gave this talk on quarks, color and QCD and then on to SLAC, and a meeting on recent history of particle physics; and then we left for Las Vegas, Nevada, for a meeting of the American Academy of Achievement, where the first few people we ran into were Colin Powell, Barbara Streisand and so on. It was all very weird. We also had two earthquakes in Las Vegas–Marcia's first earthquakes–and then by the Sunday after we were married we were back in Aspen. It was quite a week. We had told ourselves that we weren't really going on a honeymoon, it was just a business trip and that some day we would have to have a real honeymoon. But this week was a pretty exciting week. Anyway, to return from 1992 back to 1971 and ’72; so we backed off for various reasons. One reason was this: that string theory was becoming very important and we were hesitant as to whether the correct theory of hadrons would be a Yang-Mills theory or a string theory that resembled a Yang-Mills theory. And in my talk at Chicago I actually mentioned both of these possibilities, but in the written version I sort of glossed over the Yang-Mills and talked more about strings.