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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
Circumstances
Gravitational
Special
Detected
Seen
Existing
Away
Equipment
Effect
Planets
Except
Effects

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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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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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If I have seen further than others, it is because I am surrounded by dwarfs.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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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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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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Sometimes the probabilities are very close to certainties, but they're never really certainties
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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.
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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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I do not keep up with the details of particle physics.
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Sustainability is living on nature's income rather than living on its capital.
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I thought of killing myself but soon decided that I could always try MIT and then kill myself later if it was that bad but that I couldn't commit suicide and then try MIT afterwards. The two operations, suicide and going to MIT, don't commute.
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Enthusiasm is followed by disappointment and even depression, and then by renewed enthusiasm.
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Everything that is not forbidden is compulsory.
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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.
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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
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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.
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