8 ms·
Murray Gell-Mann Has Died
- I_complete_me 7y agoA great man has left us. RIP.
- return1 7y agoI wonder how many such monumental "brand name" physicists are still alive.
- gjm11 7y agoWe 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.
- dmurray 7y agoFor "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.
- evanb 7y agoI 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, ...
- levlandau 7y agoPW Anderson (Nobel Laureate, 95 yrs old) Condensed Matter Physics legend
- spodek 7y agoSchrodinger's cat, maybe.
- lovemenot 7y agoNope. I checked.
- dplavery92 7y agoMaybe 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.
- ajna91 7y agoSorry 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 7y agoEven 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 7y agoThat observation was not made by Gell-Mann himself, it merely bears his name.
- stared 7y agoIt'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 7y agoIs 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.
- hhs 7y 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-19-plectics https://www.edge.org/conversation/murray_gell_mann-chapter-1.... [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19760682 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19760682.
- auntienomen 7y agoI'm willing to bet that the Gelllman Low equation outshines his other work in the long term.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- wa1987 7y agoNever 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rI8tNMsozo0
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- dannylandau 7y agoThese video series with Gell-Mann are super interesting in my opinion -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LU6kbao3vo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LU6kbao3vo
- vbuwivbiu 7y agohis book "The Quark and the Jaguar" included a bit about the game Oware which is highly recommended
- agumonkey 7y agohttps://archive.org/details/MurrayGellMannTheQuarkAndTheJaguarAdventuresInTheSimpleAndTheComplex1995St.MartinsGriffin.compressed https://archive.org/details/MurrayGellMannTheQuarkAndTheJagu...
- ignoranceprior 7y agoHow 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).
- 8bitsrule 7y agoIA 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.
- theoh 7y agoI can't find the Oware reference, and the game is not in the index.
- vbuwivbiu 7y agoit goes by other names as it's played widely across Africa. He may have used another name for it.
- grayed-down 7y agoA quarky guy with a love of simplicity. Thanks for the inspiration a long time ago. RIP
- primodemus 7y agoNYT obituary: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/24/obituaries/murray-gell-mann-died-.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/24/obituaries/murray-gell-ma...
- photojosh 7y agoI think about him often, because of the infamous https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
- gilbetron 7y agoThis 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 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 7y agoEmbarrassing 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 7y agoHe 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7M2l-jzRG8
- andybak 7y agoAm I right in thinking he named the Quark - he was reading Finnigan's Wake at the time. I wonder if he finished it...
- acjohnson55 7y agoA 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 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect