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The world of the quark has everything to do with a jaguar circling in the night.

Murray Gell-Mann

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Murray Gell-Mann
Age: 89 †
Born: 1929
Born: September 15
Died: 2019
Died: May 24
Non-Fiction Writer
Physicist
Theoretical Physicist
Downtown Manhattan
Everything
World
Jaguar
Quarks
Jaguars
Circling
Night

More quotes by Murray Gell-Mann

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Sustainability is living on nature's income rather than living on its capital.
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But I don't actually adopt the point of view that our subjective impression of free will, which is a kind of indeterminacy behavior, comes from quantum mechanical indeterminacy.
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I would recommend that skeptics devote even more effort than they do now to understanding the reasons why so many people want or need to believe.
Murray Gell-Mann
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While many questions about quantum mechanics are still not fully resolved, there is no point in introducing needless mystification where in fact no problem exists. Yet a great deal of recent writing about quantum mechanics has done just that.
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The chaos can act as a magnifier of quantum fluctuations so that they can produce sizable effects in the world around us. But we know that that can happen often
Murray Gell-Mann
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The persistence of erroneous beliefs exacerbates the widespread anachronistic failure to recognize the urgent problems that face humanity on this planet.
Murray Gell-Mann
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Bush is a nice fellow who gives very good parties. I just wish someone would find him a better job than running the country.
Murray Gell-Mann
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In our work, we are always between Scylla and Charybdis we may fail to abstract enough, and miss important physics, or we may abstract too much and end up with fictitious objects in our models turning into real monsters that devour us.
Murray Gell-Mann
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One thing that makes the adventure of working in our field particularly rewarding, especially in attempting to improve the theory, is that... a chief criterion for the selection of a correct hypothesis... seems to be the criterion of beauty, simplicity, or elegance.
Murray Gell-Mann
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What I try to do in the book is to trace the chain of relationships running from elementary particles, fundamental building blocks of matter everywhere in the universe, such as quarks, all the way to complex entities, and in particular complex adaptive system like jaguars.
Murray Gell-Mann
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Superstitions typically involve seeing order where in fact there is none, and denial amounts to rejecting evidence of regularities, sometimes even ones that are staring us in the face.
Murray Gell-Mann
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Planets are too dim to be detected with existing equipment, far away, except in these very special circumstances where they're seen by their gravitational effect
Murray Gell-Mann
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Enthusiasm is followed by disappointment and even depression, and then by renewed enthusiasm.
Murray Gell-Mann
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If you know the wavefunction of the universe, why aren't you rich?
Murray Gell-Mann
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What is especially striking and remarkable is that in fundamental physics a beautiful or elegant theory is more likely to be right than a theory that is inelegant.
Murray Gell-Mann
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If someone says that he can think or talk about quantum physics without becoming dizzy, that shows only that he has not understood anything whatever about it.
Murray Gell-Mann
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In fact any experiment that measures a quantum effect is one in which the quantum effect is aligned with the behavior of some heavy, macroscopic object that's how we measure it
Murray Gell-Mann
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So the old Copenhagen interpretation needs to be generalized, needs to be replaced by something that can be used for the whole universe, and can be used also in cases where there is plenty of individuality and history
Murray Gell-Mann
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Sometimes the probabilities are very close to certainties, but they're never really certainties
Murray Gell-Mann
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Modern education is like being taken to the world's greatest restaurant & being forced to eat the menu.
Murray Gell-Mann