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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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Murray Gell-Mann
Age: 89 †
Born: 1929
Born: September 15
Died: 2019
Died: May 24
Non-Fiction Writer
Physicist
Theoretical Physicist
Downtown Manhattan
Seen
Existing
Away
Equipment
Effect
Planets
Except
Effects
Circumstances
Gravitational
Special
Detected

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Enthusiasm is followed by disappointment and even depression, and then by renewed enthusiasm.
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Both biological and cultural diversity are now severely threatened and working for their preservation is a critical task.
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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.
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I do not keep up with the details of particle physics.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Sustainability is living on nature's income rather than living on its capital.
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If I have seen further than others, it is because I am surrounded by dwarfs.
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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.
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The world of the quark has everything to do with a jaguar circling in the night.
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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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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.
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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 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.
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All of modern physics is governed by that magnificent and thoroughly confusing discipline called quantum mechanics ... It has survived all tests and there is no reason to believe that there is any flaw in it. We all know how to use it and how to apply it to problems and so we have learned to live with the fact that nobody can understand it.
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Everything that is not forbidden is compulsory.
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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
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Modern education is like being taken to the world's greatest restaurant & being forced to eat the menu.
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Sometimes the probabilities are very close to certainties, but they're never really certainties
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