Murray Gell-Mann Has Died | Hacker News Reader

Murray Gell-Mann Has Died

nytimes.com

325 pointssajid42 comments

"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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I wonder if he finished it...

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.

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.

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

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

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).

IA began to put up out-of-print items some time ago (old LPs for example). I'd guess that many books still under technical copyright can only be reprinted in small quantities (probably at a loss) and be hard to find. Seems a reasonable 'gentleman's agreement' that's working out for IA.

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

it goes by other names as it's played widely across Africa. He may have used another name for it.

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

A great man has left us. RIP.

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

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.

For "brand recognition" surely Peter Higgs is at the top, along with maybe Dyson. I'm not qualified to opine on how his work compares to the others.

I don't think Higgs is really widely considered monumental in the same was as those other people. He had one good idea (at essentially the same time as Brout, Englert, Kibble, ...) which got his name attached. But I am a professional physicist and know none of his other work, in contrast to Dyson, Weinberg, Witten, t' Hooft, ...

Higgs is absolutely a more familiar name than the others, and stain too, whether you think his contributions were proportional to that recognition or not

That he has greater name recognition amongst lay people doesn't make him a monumental physicist.

PW Anderson (Nobel Laureate, 95 yrs old) Condensed Matter Physics legend

Schrodinger's cat, maybe.

Nope. I checked.

Maybe Susskind. I'm not sure what definition of "monumental" we're going with, but he's surely "brand name."

Maldacena seems like a good consideration. Maybe Alan Guth.

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

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

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Newspaper and HN are two very different things. Newspaper articles are supposed to be accurate and curated. Editors have control over them. That is not the case with HN.

Comparison between comments on HN and comments on (online) newspaper articles would be more apt. In this case, HN would lead by very large margin, as far as quality of comments are concerned.

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.

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.)"

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.

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.

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!).

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

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