As a boy, Murray Gell-Mann excelled in every possible field of academic study, except one -- physics -- but after he decided to pursue it as a career, he emerged as the era's most brilliant and original mind in the field. In his 20s, he revolutionized the study of particle physics, and for the next two decades, he dominated the field. He was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physics, for bringing order out of the chaos of particle theory. Even a short list of his discoveries reads like a history of mankind's evolving understanding of the building blocks of matter. The...