Murray Gell-Mann Has Died

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/24/obituaries/murray-gell-mann-died-.html

by sajid • 7 years ago

325 42 7 years ago

nytimes.com

I_complete_me• 7 years ago

A great man has left us. RIP.

return1• 7 years ago

I wonder how many such monumental "brand name" physicists are still alive.

gjm11• 7 years ago

We still have Witten, Weinberg, 't Hooft, Yang&Lee. Also Nobelists but (in my utterly prejudiced view) less monumental: Rubbia, Glashow, Wilczek, Thorne. Not Nobelists but arguably in the monumental category: Dyson, maybe Penrose.

ajna91• 7 years ago

Sorry to hear, my acquintance with him is via the Gell-Mann amnesia effect.

"Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know."

— Michael Crichton

jessaustin• 7 years ago

Even if we ignore his contributions to physics, that observation seems so central to HN discourse (even if usually in ironic fashion) that a black bar may be warranted?

icebraining• 7 years ago

That observation was not made by Gell-Mann himself, it merely bears his name.

stared• 7 years ago

It's why I probe newspapers on articles on subjects I know more about (in my case, well, physics and machine learning). I see what are the errors, what is the level (and quality) of simplifications, etc.

If it is poor, I don't expect other articles to be of higher quality.

starpilot• 7 years ago

Is it reasonable to assume that a newspaper's contents will have uniform quality? I always figured articles of general interest (politics, big world events that make the front page) were more vetted than articles of niche interest (most science articles). Also, journalists largely have humanities backgrounds, and so news articles related to those topics will derive from that expertise.

sdegutis• 7 years ago

This is a great summary of why we shouldn't be reading news. If it's not credible, it's just entertainment. But if we forget that it's entertainment, and we usually do, then we are by definition taking it seriously again.

cambalache• 7 years ago

Sadly this is not just limited to news.You dont need to go very far , here in HN I have experienced plenty of times. There are still very valid comments, and thanks God for that, but I think they are a much smaller proportion of what most of us suppose.

dang• 7 years ago

I like that quote of Crichton's too, but since it has nothing to do with the actual Murray Gell-Mann or his life—only his name, which Crichton made use of in a particularly arbitrary way—I think we should treat it as off topic in this thread.

0xcde4c3db• 7 years ago

Lest anyone think that dang is being uncharitable here, Crichton himself admitted as much immediately before giving his oft-quoted definition [1]:

"Media carries with it a credibility that is totally undeserved. You have all experienced this, in what I call the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. (I call it by this name because I once discussed it with Murray Gell-Mann, and by dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would otherwise have.)"

orbifold• 7 years ago

That’s is a really nice quote and basically the reason why I don’t feel too bad about Trumps fake news claims. Anyone competent in any subject area reads wildly inaccurate articles all the time.

hannasanarion• 7 years ago

Michael Crichton should not be treated as an authority on the reliability of sources. He believed until his death that global warming is a communist hoax.

hhs• 7 years ago

"The first thing that makes me respect Murray is that unlike all his contemporaries, including Feynman, Weinberg, Hawking, and all the other particle physicists, he saw that complexity is the next big problem. The kind of breakthroughs he made in the early 1960s in terms of impact on the world of science are not going to get made in that domain, they are going to get made in this domain. Murray recognized that, and has become more than just conversant with what's going on and with what the problems are." - J. Doyne Farmer [0].

Last month, there was a neat discussion of Murray Gell-Man's idea on plectics: the study of simplicity and complexity [1]. He definitely influenced my views on systems theory. Thank you and rest in peace.

[0] https://www.edge.org/conversation/murray_gell_mann-chapter-1....

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19760682.

auntienomen• 7 years ago

I'm willing to bet that the Gelllman Low equation outshines his other work in the long term.

wa1987• 7 years ago

Never seen the term 'plectics' before. Definitely seems like a source of inspiration for Rich Hickey's famous talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rI8tNMsozo0

dannylandau• 7 years ago

These video series with Gell-Mann are super interesting in my opinion -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LU6kbao3vo

vbuwivbiu2• 7 years ago

his book "The Quark and the Jaguar" included a bit about the game Oware which is highly recommended

agumonkey• 7 years ago

https://archive.org/details/MurrayGellMannTheQuarkAndTheJagu...

ignoranceprior• 7 years ago

How is this allowed on the Internet Archive? It was only published in the 90s, it is still under copyright. I thought the Internet Archive's publicly accessible book collection was supposed to only include content in the public domain (or otherwise freely licensed).

theoh• 7 years ago

I can't find the Oware reference, and the game is not in the index.

grayed-down• 7 years ago

A quarky guy with a love of simplicity. Thanks for the inspiration a long time ago. RIP

primodemus• 7 years ago

NYT obituary: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/24/obituaries/murray-gell-ma...

photojosh• 7 years ago

I think about him often, because of the infamous https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect

gilbetron• 7 years ago

This makes me incredibly sad, as he is one of those people that has taught me over the years in all kinds of ways. One of the most recent, and really rather unrelated to his fields, is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect

Which is amusing, but also profound. Fitting it is one of the last things he taught me (not directly, of course!).

rdiddly• 7 years ago

Embarrassing confession: For 20 years thanks to my shallow physics education (i.e. for engineering) I always thought Gell and Mann were two people, like Meyers and Briggs, and (appropriately) Dunning and Kruger.

org3432• 7 years ago

He gave an amusing talk at Google in 2007 about creativity[0], where I thought he talked about one of the important things in science is actually believing the data since it seems so outlandish. I thought it was in this talk, but skimming the video I can't seem to find it. The talk is quite amusing regardless.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7M2l-jzRG8

andybak• 7 years ago

Am I right in thinking he named the Quark - he was reading Finnigan's Wake at the time.

I wonder if he finished it...

acjohnson55• 7 years ago

A true giant. The concept of quarks really captured my mind as a kid. It was one of the first things that I recall that made me realize there was a whole world of knowledge beyond my basic textbooks.

earnubs• 7 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect

Murray Gell-Mann Has Died

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