The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex.

GELL-MANN, Murray.

Item Number: 5622

New York: W.H. Freeman and Company, 1994.

First edition. Octavo, original illustrated boards. Inscribed by the author on the title page, “To Shirley L. Maina.” Fine in a fine jacket.

In this sweeping synthesis, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Gell-Mann ponders the universe's mix of simplicity and complexity, regularity and randomness, as he ranges from quarks (the fundamental subatomic particles which he discovered) to complex adaptive systems like bacteria developing resistance to antibiotics, mobile robots, jaguars, and people interacting with and learning from their environment. Along with often technical chapters on information theory, time, biological evolution and the workings of the subatomic zoo of particles, Gell-Mann devotes special attention to superstring theory, the first viable candidate in physicists' search for a grand unified theory encompassing all the elementary particles and forces. "A stimulating, provocative, and uncommon cut across compartments of human knowledge that are usually hermetically sealed. It is always a pleasure to see a first-class mind grappling with the greatest mysteries, and at the same time resolutely resisting mysticism" (Carl Sagan).