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I do not keep up with the details of particle physics.

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
Particle
Particles
Physics
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More quotes by 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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I think also of my colleagues in elementary particle theory in many lands, and feel that in some measure I am here as a representative of our small, informal, international fraternity.
Murray Gell-Mann
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But when researchers at Bell Labs discovered that static tends to come from particular places in the sky, the whole field of radio astronomy opened up.
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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Both biological and cultural diversity are now severely threatened and working for their preservation is a critical task.
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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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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Modern language must be older than the cave paintings and cave engravings and cave sculptures and dance steps in the soft clay in the caves in Western Europe, in the Aurignacian Period some 35,000 years ago, or earlier. I can't believe they did all those things and didn't also have a modern language.
Murray Gell-Mann
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Sustainability is living on nature's income rather than living on its capital.
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.
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
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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.
Murray Gell-Mann
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If I have seen further than others, it is because I am surrounded by dwarfs.
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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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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The world of the quark has everything to do with a jaguar circling in the night.
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 we look at the way the universe behaves, quantum mechanics gives us fundamental, unavoidable indeterminacy, so that alternative histories of the universe can be assigned probability.
Murray Gell-Mann
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Perhaps we see equations as simple because they are easily expressed in terms of mathematical notation already invented at an earlier stage of development of the science, and thus what appears to us as elegance of description really reflects the interconnectedness of Nature's laws at different levels.
Murray Gell-Mann