Murray Gell-Mann, recipient of the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physics, in 2003. Credit Jane Bernard/Associated Press.
Science, art and language collide a lot in the field of theoretical physics, it seems. There are appealing language touches in the work of Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann profiled in this article.
He “mischievously” named his theory of elementary particles “The Eightfold Way” after a Buddhist doctrine of liberation.
He named formerly unobserved particles “quarks” after a term encountered in Joyce’s “Finnegan’s Wake.” He called force-carrying particles that hold quarks together “gluons.”
“He proposed a physical quantity — “strangeness” — that would explain why some particles lasted longer than others.”
Gell-Mann helped found the Santa Fe Institute, which is today “the world’s leading research center on complexity.” Novelist Cormac McCarthy is a Fellow in that institute.
Last but not least: “His final research program was an expansive project to study the evolution of human languages.”
He was the kind of language maven who would correct people on the pronunciation of their own names, and complain to servers at French and Spanish restaurants about misspellings on their menus.
(Sean Carroll, “The Physicist Who Made Sense of the Universe,” NYTimes, 5-28-19)
Only a consummate theoretician who was also a “wide-ranging polymath, well-versed in archaeology, history and ornithology” could pull off such majestic effrontery.
(c) 2019 JMN
EthicalDative 
Two Takes
If there were a muse named Ironia, it strikes me that she would be an inspiration for Rutene Merk and Lynn Hershman Leeson. The two images below have little in common other than depicting females. They both incite interest, however, by appearing to be what they’re not.
“Aki” (2019), oil on canvas, by Rutene Merk in her new show, “Sprites.” Credit Rutene Merk and The Downs & Ross, New York; Jeffrey Sturges.
The gamey image of “Aki” with its “eerie, unpainterly appearance” had for me the initial impact of a velvet Elvis. It might beckon to teenagers from a video arcade. Then I read the following:
I still don’t warm much to the picture, but knowing how it’s made provoked a second look. When working as a programmer I dreamed of painting deadpan pictures of computer screens. For me it was an idle fantasy of kicking over the traces; artists like Merk have run with the notion in some sense. The digital world that worked so hard to look, act, and sound analog is impishly modeled with analog media made to look digital. Who gets to decide, by the way, that painting on canvas is old-fashioned?
Lynn Hershman Leeson’s “Roberta Getting Ready to Go to Work” (1976) portrays Roberta Breitmore, Ms. Leeson’s alter ego[,] in a multiyear performance piece that lasted throughout the ‘70s. Lynn Hershman Leeson and Bridget Donahue, New York.
My experience of “Roberta Breitmore” begins and ends with this article. In the photo she has an appealing zaniness conveyed on several fronts: the big hair, the skewed spectacles, the quizzical stare, the title-driven context (“getting ready to go to work”), the studiously applied lipstick. Knowledge that she’s a meticulously contrived fiction boosted the wry kick I got from the image.
Whatever fizz both pictures generated was heightened, for me, by revelation from outside the picture space.
(c) 2019 JMN