by Murray Gell-Mann

"The world of the quark has everything to do with a jaguar circling in the night."
--"The Leaves of a Dream Are the Leaves of an Onion,"
by Arthur Sze, from River, River

As a theoretical physicist, Murray Gell-Mann has explored nature at its most fundamental level. His achievements include the 1969 Nobel Prize for work leading up to his discovery of the quark--the basic building block of all atomic nuclei throughout the universe. But Gell-Mann is a man of many intellectual passions, with lifelong interests in fields that seek to understand existence at its most complex: natural history, biological evolution, the history of language, and the study of creative thinking.

These seemingly disparate pursuits come together in Gell-Mann's current work at the Santa Fe Institute, where scientists are investigating the similarities and differences among complex adaptive systems--systems that learn or evolve by utilizing acquired information. They include a child learning his or her native language, a strain of bacteria becoming resistant to an antibiotic, the scientific community testing new theories, or an artist implementing a creative idea.

The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex is Gell-Mann's own story of finding the connections between the basic laws of physics and the complexity and diversity of the natural world.

The simple: a quark inside an atom. The complex: a jaguar prowling its jungle territory in the night. Exploring the relationship between them becomes a series of exciting intellectual adventures.

Published by W. H. Freeman and Company, New York, 1994.
ISBN 0-7167-2581-9