Interviews with Murray Gell-Mann

Discover Interview The Man Who Found Quarks and Made Sense of the Universe (via 3quarksdaily). Excerpts:

"Then how did you settle on physics?
After my father gave up on engineering, he said, ‘How about we compromise and go with physics? General relativity, quantum mechanics, you will love it.’ I thought I would give my father’s advice a try. I don’t know why. I never took his advice on anything else. He told me how beautiful physics would be if I stuck with it, and that notion of beauty impressed me. My father studied those things. He was a great admirer of Einstein. He would lock himself in his room and study general relativity. He never really understood it. My opinion is that you have to despise something like that to get good at it.

Why is that?
If you admire it sufficiently, you’ll be in awe of it, so you’ll never learn it. My father thought it must be very hard, and it will take years to understand it, and only a few people understand it, and so on. But I had a wonderful teacher at Yale, Henry Margenau, who took the opposite attitude. He thought relativity was for everybody. Just learn the math. He’d say, “We’ll prepare the math on Tuesday and Thursday, and we’ll cover general relativity on Saturday and next Tuesday.” And he was right. It isn’t that bad.

You’ve known some of the greatest physicists in history. Whom do you put on the highest pedestal?
I don’t put people on pedestals very much, especially not physicists. Feynman [who won a 1965 Nobel for his work in particle physics] was pretty good, although not as good as he thought he was. He was too self-absorbed and spent a huge amount of energy generating anecdotes about himself. Fermi [who developed the first nuclear reactor] was good, but again with limitations—every now and then he was wrong. I didn’t know anybody without some limitations in my field of theoretical physics.
......
When you think about people like Feynman or Einstein or some of the other physics legends, do you think of them as geniuses? Is there such a thing?
Einstein was very special—I mean, creating that theory, general relativity [which describes gravity as a product of the geometry of space and time]. To do it today or to do it 34 years ago would be striking, remarkable, an utterly remarkable achievement. But to do it when he did, in 1915, that’s just unbelievable.

When you were at the Institute for Advanced Study, Einstein was also there, although he was near the end of his life. Were you able to absorb anything from him?
I could have. I could have made an appointment with his secretary, the formidable Helen Dukas, and gone in and talked with him. I could have asked him some questions about the old days. If it were today I would do it in a moment. But all I could see then was that he was past it. He didn’t believe in quantum mechanics, didn’t know about the particles that we were studying. And he didn’t know about this and that. If I showed him what I was doing, he wouldn’t make anything of it. And if he showed me what he was doing, I wouldn’t believe it. So I didn’t do anything. I would say: “Hello. Good morning.” And he would say, “Guten morning.” That was about it."

Another interview in Science News also discusses his views on linguistics Interview: Murray Gell-Mann . Further discussion and comments in The Holy Patron of String Theory and its Holy Grail (Not Even Wrong) and Murray Gell-Mann: 80th birthday and interview (The Reference Frame). The later has links to news of several other important physicists.
P.S. More from Edge.