Murray Gell-Mann won a Nobel prize for physics and still is working on quantum mechanics, but at 80 he has returned to his first passion – linguistics

Clearing up the confusion of particle physics ChinaFotoPress/Getty

BEFORE my interview with Murray Gell-Mann officially begins, we have lunch. We are at the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) in the foothills of New Mexico’s Sangre de Cristo mountains, and here, lunch is a communal affair.

We sit down at a table on the patio with a miscellaneous group of physicists, biologists and computer scientists. Between mouthfuls I field questions from the diners about the future of science journalism, prompting Gell-Mann – one of the titans of 20th-century physics, and the man who discovered quarks – to proclaim his distinctly low opinion …