By Steve Sailer
05/24/2019
I was going to write up something about the extraordinary accomplishments and personality of the great physicist Murray Gell-Mann, but then I realized that I would inevitably just illustrate the Gell-Mann Effect, as named by Michael Crichton:
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.
So I will leave it to more confident journalists:
NYT: Murray Gell-Mann, Who Peered at Particles and Saw the Universe, Dies at 89
Caltech’s press release:
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