Remembering Murray Gell-Mann | Hacker News Reader

Remembering Murray Gell-Mann

blog.stephenwolfram.com

117 pointsseagullz39 comments

Absolutely fascinating to realize that when Richard Feynman talks about how the name of the thing doesn't tell you anything about the thing[1][2], he may be ranting about Murray Gell-Mann.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p018dvyg

[2] I quoted the key sentence at the top of http://akkartik.name/post/teaching-taste

It reminds me of the scene in "Return of the King" where Gandalf and Aragorn are looking for athelas:

> And he will tell you that he did not know that the herb you desire had any virtues, but that it is called _westmansweed_ by the vulgar, and _galenas_ by the noble, and other names in other tongues more learned, and after adding a few half-forgotten rhymes that he does not understand, he will regretfully inform you that there is none in the House, and he will leave you to reflect on the history of tongues.

or, as Gandalf cried:

> 'Then in the name of the king, go and find some old man of less lore and more wisdom who keeps some in his house!'

Holy cow, I was just describing this passage to my wife yesterday; Tolkien the philologist, writing something of himself into the story.

A scholar and apparently a very careful, deliberate thinker, Tolkien was no ass. But wow I bet he was locked in a room full of them from time to time.

I think it was also in general, he didn’t like how people used big words to fake knowledge, and use them as a replacement for knowledge.

> Or his questioning of space shuttle engineers: ''They kept referring to the problem by some complicated name - a 'pressure-induced vorticity oscillatory wa-wa,' or something. I said, 'Oh, you mean a whistle!' 'Yes,' they said; 'it exhibits the characteristics of a whistle.' '' http://movies2.nytimes.com/books/97/09/21/reviews/feynman-do...

> When Feynman died, Murray wrote a rather snarky obituary, saying of Feynman: “He surrounded himself with a cloud of myth, and he spent a great deal of time and energy generating anecdotes about himself”. I never quite understood why Murray—who could have gone to any university in the world—chose to work at Caltech for 33 years in an office two doors down from Feynman.

This is great. Although being interesting and challenging > being likeable, especially for a person like Murray seems to be. Especially professional environments.

I'm curious why Feynman decided to work at Caltech for such a long time as well, given he also could have been anywhere.

Some of these anecdotes about Murray are as good as Feynman's.

Caltech is often ranked as one of the world’s top-ten universities, according to Wikipedia. It’s really strong in research and the pure sciences, which might have been what drew Feynman and Gell-Mann. (Note also that Caltech has the highest per-capita number of associated Nobel laureates in the world.)

(Disclaimer: I’m a current Caltech undergrad and am thus biased :-)).

Feynman said it was the weather.

They probably had to stay together for the same reason gas stations cluster around one intersection.

What reason is that?

Hotelling's Law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotelling%27s_law

Though IMO misapplied here.

About gas stations, we only have the fact, and must speculate. Hotelling's law may be a good guess, but there need not be only one such influence. Once a corner has a gas station and occupies the space of "the place to get gas" in the minds of resident drivers, it becomes the obvious place to build the next, preferable to trying (and maybe failing) to persuade them to go somewhere else instead.

In the case of Caltech, having two adjacent Nobelers makes it easier for each to attract the best grad students than if he were alone, even after he loses half to his rival. We might make an analogy to chemical electropositivity instead of commerce.

The causality goes the other way at that level, though. Caltech's physics program was widely ranked as world class largely because of Feynman and Gell-Mann. They could have done world class work anywhere, and brought along a train of talent with them. But they both liked Pasadena, apparently.

> But they both liked Pasadena, apparently.

There is a multi-part interview of Gell-Mann on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVV0r6CmEsFxKFx-0lsQD...).

Somewhere in there he says that he eventually had offers from CalTech & Columbia and he chose CalTech for several reasons, one of which was that he perceived it to be "cleaner." My impression was that he viewed NYC as physically dirty. He also says this about MIT (where he went to grad school). He wanted to go to Princeton, but was rejected. He ended up having to 'settle' for MIT, but again he says his preconceived notion of MIT was that it was a 'grubby' school.

Gell-Mann sounds like a very smart but also eccentric friend of mine, who I'm almost certain is on the spectrum. He has a similar view towards cleanliness and exhibits many of the same traits, such as Murray's interaction with the limo driver. Gell-Man seems to fit this profile.

Although I hate when people try to armchair psychoanalyze public figures they've never met so I'll stop there.

My favorite quote from him came from his tech talk at Google where, in response to a question about String Theory from the audience he replied, "String Theory was invented in my lab, I thought it was a stupid idea then, and I still do."

His writing is surprisingly good. I enjoyed it from an outsiders view with little knowledge of particle physics history.

Typically anything that has the Wolfram name attached to it has the most gifted that money can hire doing the actual production.

https://www.lurklurk.org/wolfram/review.html

"Wolfram is careful never to actually claim credit for something he hasn't produced; however, he's good at wording the main text so that it implies he has discovered things. "

I would not be surprised if this writing was much of the same.

I don't find that the article you linked supports the 'most gifted doing the actual production.' I found the main thrust of the article rather the opposite.

I do agree he has a reputation and that the points in the lurklurk article are valid. Clearly anyone well-read enough can pick out the inaccuracies and the presentation is sometimes way out of scope for normal scientific publishing standards.

In my opinion, to sell copies some some publishers like to fly a bit too close to the sun but that's industry standard now.

Strange, Wolfram is very fond of claiming credit for inventions that originated before he was born.

But I don't doubt he has staff writing for him. His is a brand name.

I can assure you staff do not write for him. In fact, he's known to get frustrated when people make suggestions on his writing because he's very particular (perhaps even stubborn) about it.

OK, now I do doubt it.

I don't think you're being fair here. He's just sharing lore he had to become familiar with during his graduate school years. Such stories are part of the experience.

BTW he's written a fine summary of the history of particle physics during those years, which is rare indeed, because you have to be an insider to care about such things and then have the opportunities to get them straight. He's a theoretical particle physicist talking about his profession after all, even though he's been busy with other stuff for many years. Of course he can write this.

Folks here should really read the article. I just can't tell anything about the personal anecdotes, but everything else is spot on.

Yes he's a good writer. But I did notice that a disproportionately large fraction of his sentences start with the word "but".

"As it turned out, I never talked to Murray about science again. The last time I saw Murray was in 2012 at a peculiar event in New York City for promising high-school students. I said hello. Murray looked blank. I said my name, and held up my name tag. “Do I know you?”, he said. I repeated my name. Still blank. I couldn’t tell if it was a problem of age—or a repeat of the story of the beta function. But, with regret, I walked away."

That is incredibly sad.

Amos Tversky to Murray Gell-Mann: "There's no one in the world as smart as you think you are" (from The Undoing Project, by Michael Lewis)

Its fashionable on HN to disparage Wolfram but I have grown to ignore his ego and develop appreciation of his personality, experience and work. His anecdotes about Feynman as well as Gell-Mann is worth treasuring. Someone who got to personally know these titans is a very enviable position itself and he is probably one of the last links to that great generation. This blog post is highly recommended for all Physics enthusiast and is full of many great links and diversions.

I agree. I am growing out of the dislike I cultivated for Wolfram's ego that I cultivated during my grossly extended adolescence. He is an interesting and complex man who has achieved great things and collaborated with some of the greatest scientists of the last 100 years, on more or less equal terms.

Side note, there's also the Gell-Mann amnesia effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect

Though it should be noted that the effect originates with author Michael Crichton and has little to do with Gell-Mann himself:

>I refer to 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.

Shouldn't that be "Discoverer of Quarks"? There were there before Murry Gell-Man.

The standard model is not the be all and end all of physics , so the quarks may not be fundamental. It's therefore not meaningless to say e.g. invented (The quark model is a model that works but it is a model)

Well perhaps but regardless he didn't create quarks. He discovered their existence. No different than discovering the atom - it was there before people discovered it and so were quarks whether or not they're fundamental particles.

Technically he could have invented the theory of quarks I guess.

That's what I mean. The Quarks were partly a mathematical guess to encapsulate the known patterns in hundreds of composite particles

Oh Wolfram, never change. Even in a very charming and personal obituary about someone he obviously admires, Wolfram's ego shines through. As does his bizarre claim to ownership of all of complexity theory. No one cares that Gell-Mann left you out of the index of his book, Stephen.

100x this. I've met Stephen and was like this in person.

Even the essay (ostensibly an obituary for a physics luminary!) is full of humblebrags as he notes his personal contributions and wunderkind status growing up. Strange, because if anyone should be confident in their own skin, a famous billionaire physicist should fit the bill...

It's amusing how Wolfram don't get why his friends politely shy off from discussing his theories with him and don't seem to understand. Gell-Mann's reaction to A New Kind of Science is telling.

Wolfram can squeeze just few interesting and original things in his book but he handwaves it as something magnificent and revolutionary. The most striking feature of the book is the extremely high quality of printing, layout and illustrations. He created monument for himself.

Indeed! And you Stephen, are also very bad at reading people :)

Please don't take yet another HN thread into yet another repetition of this. It's not that it's wrong. It's that that lemon was squeezed dry years ago, the rind is hard as rock, and the spectacle of HN users gnawing on it is unseemly. It's also off topic. As is usually the case with his writing, there are genuinely interesting things to react to here.

If Wolfram's tic is a thing, the strange way the internet crystallizes on it is also a thing. In fact, it's a mirror image of the thing. Let's resist recreating that here.

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

> It's that that lemon was squeezed dry years ago, and now the rind is hard as rock, and the spectacle of HN users competing to gnaw on it is unseemly.

Why can’t the other online communities I’m a part of be run by moderators who have a way with words like you do?

> Wolfram's self tic is a thing, but the strange way that internet reactions crystallize on it is also a thing. In fact, it's a mirror image of the same thing.

This is the Wolfram effect: when one person's unusually conspicuous status-seeking behaviour in turn triggers the status preoccupations of a large number of people who usually aren't so bad about it themselves.

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