Individuality and freedom: its importance and its absence

Video URL

You must be registered to use this feature. Sign in or register.

Rewind 10 Seconds

Next Up

Live

00:00

Closed Captions

Settings

Fullscreen

This video file cannot be played.(Error Code: 224003)

My mother liked me and believed in me

RELATED STORIES

Individuality and freedom: its importance and its absence

Murray Gell-Mann Scientist

		Views	Duration
1. How my father came to America	10	6974	03:08
2. My mother's nationality	2	2786	00:40
3. A supplementary education	1	2276	01:22
4. Birdwatching with my brother	1	2055	01:22
5. A cornucopia of early interests		1914	02:50
6. Individuality and freedom: its importance and its absence	1	1929	01:49
7. My mother liked me and believed in me		1849	03:05
8. Doc Beene		1795	02:11
9. Studying elementary physics - reluctantly		3385	00:57
10. How I ended up studying physics at Yale		2984	03:05

Comments (0) Please sign in or register to add comments

Related Transcript Biography Info

I was very interested in etymology, and I still am. I'm very interested in history of languages and the relationships of languages... extremely interested. And... all of these subjects resemble one another a little bit in that they deal with... areas in which individuality is very important, diversity is very important, evolutionary processes are very important, evolutionary trees of one sort or another are very important.

[Q] Now I can now see your passion for Santa Fe Institute, which we'll talk about later, but I can see that the groundwork was laid very early. Could you say anything about... religion and politics? Was that a theme in your household or growing up?

Religion certainly was not much of a theme...politics, yes... liberal, even left wing politics, but my father was very sceptical about Stalin and... the Stalinist branch of... socialism. He realised that the... Soviet communists had... done a lot to industrialize the country rapidly – of course there’s no assurance that it couldn’t have been industrialized better and faster under capitalism, which was just taking hold... when the First World War broke out. But... he recognized that, but he... he was very... sceptical about the... the lack of freedom in the... in the... the Soviet Union.

New York-born physicist Murray Gell-Mann (1929-2019) was known for his creation of the eightfold way, an ordering system for subatomic particles, comparable to the periodic table. His discovery of the omega-minus particle filled a gap in the system, brought the theory wide acceptance and led to Gell-Mann's winning the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1969.

Title: Individuality and freedom: its importance and its absence

Listeners: Geoffrey West

Geoffrey West is a Staff Member, Fellow, and Program Manager for High Energy Physics at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He is also a member of The Santa Fe Institute. He is a native of England and was educated at Cambridge University (B.A. 1961). He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1966 followed by post-doctoral appointments at Cornell and Harvard Universities. He returned to Stanford as a faculty member in 1970. He left to build and lead the Theoretical High Energy Physics Group at Los Alamos. He has numerous scientific publications including the editing of three books. His primary interest has been in fundamental questions in Physics, especially those concerning the elementary particles and their interactions. His long-term fascination in general scaling phenomena grew out of his work on scaling in quantum chromodynamics and the unification of all forces of nature. In 1996 this evolved into the highly productive collaboration with James Brown and Brian Enquist on the origin of allometric scaling laws in biology and the development of realistic quantitative models that analyse the influence of size on the structural and functional design of organisms.

Tags: Santa Fe Institute, World War I, Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin

Duration: 1 minute, 49 seconds

Date story recorded: October 1997

Date story went live: 24 January 2008