WASHINGTON: Murray Gell-Mann, a physicist who theorized the existence of the quark and won a Nobel Prize for his method of classifying particles, has died at age 89, the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) said.
Considered among the most important physicists of the 20th century, the American scientist theorized in the 1960s that subatomic particles — protons and neutrons — were composed of paired subunits he called quarks.
Experiments later confirmed the existence of the particles, which are a continuing subject of study by physicists including those at the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s most powerful proton smasher straddling the French-Swiss border.
Amid an explosion of research into what makes up matter in the 1950s and 1960s, Gell-Mann came up with a criteria for putting particles in groups of eight based on characteristics like electric charge and spin.
He called it the “eightfold way,” Caltech said, and was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physics for the innovation.
Born in New York City on September 15, 1929, Gell-Mann was encouraged to study physics by his father, and earned a doctorate in the subject from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1951.
He taught at Caltech in Pasadena, California from 1955 until his retirement in 1993.
“Dr. Gell-Mann had this clear vision and penetrating insight to look through the large amounts of data that were coming from experiments and make sense of it,” Hirosi Ooguri, a professor at Caltech and director of the school’s Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics, said in an obituary published by the university.
“He opened a new paradigm in particle physics.”
Nobel Prize-winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann dead at 89
Nobel Prize-winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann dead at 89
- Born in New York City on September 15, 1929, Gell-Mann was encouraged to study physics by his father, and earned a doctorate in the subject from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1951
Filipinos master disaster readiness, one roll of the dice at a time
- In a library in the Philippines, a dice rattles on the surface of a board before coming to a stop, putting one of its players straight into the path of a powerful typhoon
MANILA: In a library in the Philippines, a dice rattles on the surface of a board before coming to a stop, putting one of its players straight into the path of a powerful typhoon.
The teenagers huddled around the table leap into action, shouting instructions and acting out the correct strategies for just one of the potential catastrophes laid out in the board game called Master of Disaster.
With fewer than half of Filipinos estimated to have undertaken disaster drills or to own a first-aid kit, the game aims to boost lagging preparedness in a country ranked the most disaster-prone on earth for four years running.
“(It) features disasters we’ve been experiencing in real life for the past few months and years,” 17-year-old Ansherina Agasen told AFP, noting that flooding routinely upends life in her hometown of Valenzuela, north of Manila.
Sitting in the arc of intense seismic activity called the “Pacific Ring of Fire,” the Philippines endures daily earthquakes and is hit by an average of 20 typhoons each year.
In November, back-to-back typhoons drove flooding that killed nearly 300 people in the archipelago nation, while a 6.9-magnitude quake in late September toppled buildings and killed 79 people around the city of Cebu.
“We realized that a lot of loss of lives and destruction of property could have been avoided if people knew about basic concepts related to disaster preparedness,” Francis Macatulad, one of the game’s developers, told AFP of its inception.
The Asia Society for Social Improvement and Sustainable Transformation (ASSIST), where Macatulad heads business development, first dreamt up the game in 2013, after Super Typhoon Haiyan ravaged the central Philippines and left thousands dead.
Launched six years later, Master of Disaster has been updated this year to address more events exacerbated by human-driven climate change, such as landslides, drought and heatwaves.
More than 10,000 editions of the game, aimed at players as young as nine years old, have been distributed across the archipelago nation.
“The youth are very essential in creating this disaster resiliency mindset,” Macatulad said.
‘Keeps on getting worse’
While the Philippines has introduced disaster readiness training into its K-12 curriculum, Master of Disaster is providing a jolt of innovation, Bianca Canlas of the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) told AFP.
“It’s important that it’s tactile, something that can be touched and can be seen by the eyes of the youth so they can have engagement with each other,” she said of the game.
Players roll a dice to move their pawns across the board, with each landing spot corresponding to cards containing questions or instructions to act out disaster-specific responses.
When a player is unable to fulfil a task, another can “save” them and receive a “hero token” — tallied at the end to determine a winner.
At least 27,500 deaths and economic losses of $35 billion have been attributed to extreme weather events in the past two decades, according to the 2026 Climate Risk Index.
“It just keeps on getting worse,” Canlas said, noting the lives lost in recent months.
The government is now determining if it will throw its weight behind the distribution of the game, with the sessions in Valenzuela City serving as a pilot to assess whether players find it engaging and informative.
While conceding the evidence was so far anecdotal, ASSIST’s Macatulad said he believed the game was bringing a “significant” improvement in its players’ disaster preparedness knowledge.
“Disaster is not picky. It affects from north to south. So we would like to expand this further,” Macatulad said, adding that poor communities “most vulnerable to the effects of climate change” were the priority.
“Disasters can happen to anyone,” Agasen, the teen, told AFP as the game broke up.
“As a young person, I can share the knowledge I’ve gained... with my classmates at school, with people at home, and those I’ll meet in the future.”
