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Talks about banning anti-ballistic missile systems

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A meeting in Moscow
Murray Gell-Mann Scientist
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Carl Kaysen and Paul Doty and George Kistiakowsky were in Moscow to meet with a whole bunch of science statesmen, I think one member of the Politburo, and discuss these matters. George was accompanied by his wife Elaine and of course George was Russian originally, so they treated him very, very, very well, because he was there with his wife and he had been born in Russia. He got a beautiful room in the hotel. Carl and Paul shared a much less beautiful room, and when they got into the room they said, ‘Oh shucks, I thought we'd have accommodations like George and Elaine's’. Anyway, they got down to the desk and the little man, who was this little KGB agent, who was the secretary of the All-Union Academy of Sciences, said, ‘I hear you don't like your room’. It's a marvelous story. I think his name was Pavlichenko.

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.

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: Moscow, Russia, Politburo, KGB agent, All-Union Academy of Sciences, Carl Kaysen, Paul Doty, George Kistiakowsky, VP Pavlichenko

Duration: 1 minute, 9 seconds

Date story recorded: October 1997

Date story went live: 24 January 2008