When Murray Gell-Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1969, his colleague at the California Institute of Technology, Richard Feynman, said: “This event marks the public recognition of what we have known for a long time, that Murray Gell-Mann is the leading theoretical physicist of today. The development during the last 20 years of our knowledge of fundamental physics contains not one fruitful idea that does not carry his name.”

Gell-Mann is a well known figure in the physics community, having dominated particle physics from the 1950s to the 1970s. When he gave the opening address at the 1966 Rochester conference in Berkeley – in which he gave a sweeping overview of the field since the early 1950s – rumour has it that the organizers had originally thought of asking five or six scientists to share the task. But when Gell-Mann was identified as the best person within each field, the organizers entrusted him with the entire presentation.

Stories about Gell-Mann abound, and physicists who want to learn more about him will find that this book does a superb job in tracing his life so far. However, it does more than just that. Gell-Mann’s life is closely intertwined with the development of particle physics, and this book also provides a marvellous description of the recent history of this scientific endeavour – written for physicists and non-physicists alike. Indeed, George Johnson, who is a respected science writer, has turned what might have been just a biography into a great scientific saga. Once you grab the book it is difficult to put down.

But the author must have faced a terrific challenge. Gell-Mann is no fan of journalists, and is alleged to have once described someone – with his typically abrasive remarks about people he did not like – as “a man of impenetrable stupidity, unmatched even by science writers today”. Yet the author meets that challenge very well and the book is great to read.

This is the story of a man of many talents, who grew up in a family with strong intellectual values but much hurt and impoverished by the great Depression of the 1930s. He was admitted to Yale University at 14, went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) at 18 and joined the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton after his PhD. Then, after a brief stay in Chicago, he was awarded full tenure at Caltech at the age of just 25. The Nobel prize followed when he was 40.

This is an impressive academic trajectory, which saw Gell-Mann’s many contributions to particle physics, including strangeness, the renormalization group, the vector axial (V-A), the eightfold way and quarks. The book tells all that well, but it provides more. It takes the reader to the Russian border of the Hapsburg Empire, as we trace Gell-Mann’s ancestry. It takes us to Vienna, to Jewish families in New York in the 1920s and 1930s, to wartime Yale and to MIT under the leadership of Victor Weisskopf. It takes us to Princeton with Robert Oppenheimer and his young geniuses, to Chicago with Fermi’s impressive group and then to Caltech with Gell-Mann “twisting the tail of the cosmos” with Feynman as they worked together. Later come the glittering lights of Stockholm. I leave you to read in the book how the hyphen in his name came about.

Gell-Mann was a boy-genius – and he soon realized it. The first proper words that he is alleged to have uttered were “The lights of Babylon”: he was just two at the time and was looking at the New York streetlights coming on. He had fun impressing adults with his wide knowledge, and took no offence in correcting other people’s mistakes. However, he did suffer from his constant association with bigger and stronger children, who often resented his brilliance. Since those early days, Gell-Mann has maintained an enormous span of interests, and listening to him answer any question in almost any field is like reading the pages of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. However, Gell-Mann is not expert in every field: his son once pointed out that he does not know much about baseball or football.

Gell-Mann originally wanted to go to Yale to study linguistics or archaeology and, as physicists, we should be thankful that his father directed him toward physics instead, which he only began to love when he reached MIT. However, he long felt the shadow of his overmeticulous father reading over his shoulder, and this may have induced his infamous writer’s block that once prevented him from finishing writing his Nobel lecture in time. (I am reminded of that other great physicist, Paul Dirac, who spoke very little as an adult, and as a boy had been afraid of speaking French in front of his Swiss father – even though the young Dirac could do so perfectly.)

But Gell-Mann is a marvellous lecturer, and I remember how much I learnt from his course when I spent a year at Caltech in 1959. He explained the new physics (V-A at that time) with great clarity but also in great detail, and would use many mathematical tricks that I found very helpful on other occasions.

There is indeed something special about Gell-Mann. As the book says: “He has not just discovered a series of abstract concepts that helped make sense of the subatomic realm, he has bestowed the names that anchored them in people’s minds.” These names include strangeness, the eightfold way, quarks and – most recently – quantum chromodynamics.

However, I think that Gell-Mann’s procrastination in making definitive statements about unitary symmetry and quarks is somewhat overstressed in the book. Gell-Mann is both a great formal theorist and a superb phenomenologist. In the 1960s he knew that many possibilities other than the eightfold way existed and that the experimental data were still not good enough to tell which theory was right.

The book tells us about his passion for nature’s diversity, about his wonderful first wife Margaret, who died of cancer almost 20 years ago, about his children, and about his new marriage less than a decade ago. It tells us about his many bird-watching trips and the many committees he has served on. It also tells us about the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, where Gell-Mann can now fulfil his dream of interdisciplinary research, and where he tries to understand – together with colleagues from many other fields – how complexity may arise from simplicity. The book also includes a good set of notes and a detailed index.

I conclude with one of the many Gell-Mann stories. This one, which does not appear in the book, illustrates how sad he always feels when people do not fully meet his cultural standards, be they linguistic, taxonomical or gastronomical. One day, so the story goes, Murray was returning with friends from a trip in the Sierra Nevada, when they decided to stop for dinner at a roadside cafe.

“What is there to eat?” Gell-Mann asked the owner.

“Not much,” replied the chef, “but I do have spaghetti.”

“Good, but are they al dente?” said Gell-Mann, putting the proper stress on both syllables of the final word.

“I don’t know what you mean,” the owner retorted, “but they’ve been cooking all day.”