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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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Murray Gell-Mann
Age: 89 †
Born: 1929
Born: September 15
Died: 2019
Died: May 24
Non-Fiction Writer
Physicist
Theoretical Physicist
Downtown Manhattan
Happens
Fluctuations
Around
Fluctuation
World
Quantum
Chaos
Effects
Produce
Happen
Often
Sizable

More quotes by 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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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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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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Sometimes the probabilities are very close to certainties, but they're never really certainties
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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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Both biological and cultural diversity are now severely threatened and working for their preservation is a critical task.
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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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If I have seen further than others, it is because I am surrounded by dwarfs.
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Sustainability is living on nature's income rather than living on its capital.
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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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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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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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The world of the quark has everything to do with a jaguar circling in the night.
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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If you know the wavefunction of the universe, why aren't you rich?
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
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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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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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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.
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