Jerry Stratton

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect works as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect works 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 far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

When I come across an inaccuracy in a book written by someone else, I become discouraged, wondering whether I can really learn something from an author who has already been proved wrong on at least one point.

Somehow the human race has to find ways to respect and make use of the great variety of cultural traditions and still resist the threats of disunity, oppression, and obscurantism that some of those traditions present from time to time.

…the live cat has considerable interaction with the rest of the world, through breathing, for example, and even the dead cat interacts with the air to some extent. It doesn’t help to have the cat placed in a box, because the box will interact with the outside world as well as with the cat.
…
No real quasi classic object can exhibit such behavior [the cat being dead and alive at the same time] because interaction with the rest of the universe will lead to decoherence of the alternatives.

An observation in this context means a kind of pruning of the tree of branching histories. At a particular branching, only one of the branches is preserved (more precisely, on each branch, only that branch is preserved!). The branches that are pruned are thrown away, along with all the parts of the tree that grow out of the branches that are pruned.

Suppose a physicist engaged in such research looks at a particular track. While pursuing the work on dating, he or she can also be said to have made a measurement of the direction of decay of the radioactive nucleus. The track, however, has been there ever since it was formed; it does not come into existence when the physicist looks at it (as some clumsy descriptions of quantum mechanics might suggest). A measurement situation has existed since the nuclear decayed and the track was formed; that is when a strong correlation was established with the quasiclassical domain. The actual measurement could have been carried out by a cockroach or any other complex adaptive system. It consists of “noticing” that a particular alternative has occurred out of a set of decoherent alternatives with various probabilities.

On my early nature walks, I was impressed by the fact that the butterflies, birds, and mammals we saw really did fall neatly into species. If you go for a stroll, you may see song sparrows, swamp sparrows, field sparrows, and white-throated sparrows, but you are not likely to see any sparrows that fall in between those categories.

What is really meant by the opposing terms simplicity and complexity? In what sense is Einsteinium gravitation simple while a goldfish is complex? These are not easy questions—it is not simple to define “simple.” Probably no single concept of complexity can adequately capture our intuitive notions of what the word ought to mean.

A slightly different way of looking at superstition in a complex adaptive system suggests that perhaps superstition might be somewhat more prevalent than denial. The system can be regarded as having evolved in great part to discover patterns, so that a pattern becomes in a sense its own reward, even if it confers no particular advantage in the real world.

Alongside the devastating effects of systems of belief, their positive achievements stand out as well, especially the glorious music, architecture, literature, sculpture, painting, and dance that have been inspired by particular mythologies…

In the face of the overwhelming greatness of so much of the art related to mythology, we need to re-examine the significance of false regularities.

…who as a child had been considered a prodigy and never got over the need to show off in bizarre ways. As a graduate student at MIT, I would occasionally find him asleep on the stairs, creating a real obstacle to traffic with his portly figure.

… a unit of culturally transmitted information analogous to a gene in biological evolution.

It seems to be characteristic of the impact of scientific discovery on the literary world and on popular culture that certain items of vocabulary, interpreted vaguely or incorrectly, are often the principal survivors of the journey from the technical publication to the popular magazine or paperback.