Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in 20th-Century Physics
p. 3.The altitude of Santa Fe Baldy is 12,600 feet, not 11,600 feet.
p. 70. In the anecdote, I should have specified that it was, in particular, the isotope boron-10 that has spin 3.
p. 97. As stated correctly earlier in the chapter, the isospin is counterclockwise for the proton and clockwise for the neutron. I got it backwards on the second reference.
pp. 109-110. I may have implied that all fermions have 1/2 spin, but the spin of some short-lived, exotic particles can come in multiples of 1/2.
p. 170 and elsewhere. Gell-Mann spelled the name he and Feynman made up for the imaginary particle "uxl" rather than "uxyl." (The only place I can find the word in print is in Gell-Mann, "Status of Weak Interactions," Reviews of Modern Physics, Vol. 31, No. 3, 834-38, July 1959.)
p. 177. Philippe de Gaulle. I left out one of the p's.
p. 335. The author of Tao of Physics is Fritjof (not Fritjov) Capra.
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Some earlier printings also contain the following errors, which were corrected in subsequent editions:
The caption on photo #11 in the center section should read:
"From left: Victor Weisskopf (in background), Elisabeth Heisenberg, Niels Bohr, and Werner Heisenberg, in 1937. (The man on the far left is unidentified.)"
Also in the first printing pictures 2 and 3 were apparently taken after the Gell-Manns moved from 15th street. The caption has been adjusted accordingly. And in the same printing the caption for picture 15 should more precisely say that Chew's bootstrap theory refers to all "strongly interacting" particles, not particles in general.
p. 16. Taiwan, rather than mainland China, was among the countries Gell-Mann had visited to see birds and other wildlife.
p. 20. To clarify, "Lower East Side" is used here and elsewhere to refer to what is sometimes called the historic Lower East Side -- the area east of Broadway extending as far north as 14th Street, including what is still called "Loisaida." However (p. 42), the Stuyvesant Square neighborhood is just north of this boundary putting it outside the area.
p. 49. Louis Kovarik should be Alois Kovarik.
p. 52. Gell-Mann's friend at Yale was Gerald Hegerty (not Haggerty). Although Gell-Mann helped organize the break-in at Skull and Bones, he himself didn't get inside.
p. 72. Lake Pitscuaro should be Lake Patzcuaro.
p. 78. Oswald Veblen was a mathematician not an economist. I confused him with his uncle, Thorstein Veblen.
p. 85. Gell-Mann's first car, purchased when he was at the Institute for Advanced Study was "brand new," he now assures me, not second-hand.
p. 90. The name of the play is "Maid in the Ozarks" (not "Made in the Ozarks").
p. 103. The name "never-never land" is, of course, from Peter Pan, not Alice in Wonderland.
p. 121. In explaining that neutrons and antineutrons are not necessarily identical in their behavior, I erred in saying that is because they have different spins. The distinction lies, rather, in the magnetic moments of the two particles, which each are formed from a different configuration of quarks.
p. 121. There should be a minus sign in front of the value of 2 for the strangeness of the "doubly strange" xi particle.
p. 123. "Moving charges give rise to magnetic fields" (rather than "magnetic currents").
p. 124. It was Fermi's secretary's office (not Fermi's own) where Gell-Mann saw the letter.
p. 133. Gell-Mann says that Italy was not among the list of countries he and his first wife, Margaret, drove through after their marriage in 1955.
On pp. 166 and 237 I mistakenly lumped mesons with the fermions instead of the bosons.
pp. 193-4. I misattributed the accomplishments of William B. Fowler on associated production to William A. Fowler, who was best known for his work on nucleosynthesis. I also misunderstood a story Zweig told me: it was not Fowler but another physicist, Alvin Tollestrup, who made a belittling remark.
p. 207. 1,685 electron volts should be 1,685 million electron-volts.
p. 223. Erica Jen is incorrectly identified in the first printing as George Zweig's wife in 1962. She is actually his second wife.
p. 257. American Kennel Club (not "Association").
p. 258. Paul Macready should be Paul MacCready.
p. 261. Gell-Mann tells me that in the picture Margaret was pouring tea (not hot water for tea) into his cup.
p. 262. The patch of land the Gell-Manns considered buying to protect was not in Aspen but near Aspen.
p. 273. Smog contains "nitrogen oxide" (rather than "nitrous oxide").
p. 293. "pion" should be "muon."
p. 297. SU(1) X SU(2) should be U(1) X SU(2).
p. 307. Correcting what he had told me in an interview (July 30, 1998) Gell-Mann says that his daughter's job on the docks was during, not after, her time at the Marine Biological Laboratory.
p. 309. The other scientists mentioned in the sentence about land in Tesuque bought their lots at the same time as Delbrück, who sold his to Gell-Mann.
p. 352. "suit and tie" should be, as is clear from the picture, "vest and tie."