Murray Gell-Mann's Quest
How do people come to know things about human kinds -- about things like race and national character and culture? It's a specialized question, but it leads straight to a general one: How do people come to know about anything? What is knowledge of reality? This is a particularly important question for me, who's proposing that scientific knowledge has something new to say about problems like prejudice and intolerance. What's the nature of science?
When I can, then, I write about these fundamental epistemological questions. It is something of an understatement to say these topics are not popular with magazine editors. But now and again, an article gets commissioned. This was one of them. It's about Murray Gell-Mann, the co-discoverer (or co-inventor, if you prefer) of the quark. PDF only, at the moment.