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Sustainability is living on nature's income rather than living on its capital.

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
Capital
Income
Rather
Living
Nature
Sustainability

More quotes by 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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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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I do not keep up with the details of particle physics.
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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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 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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Sometimes the probabilities are very close to certainties, but they're never really certainties
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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Everything that is not forbidden is compulsory.
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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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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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
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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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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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The world of the quark has everything to do with a jaguar circling in the night.
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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Both biological and cultural diversity are now severely threatened and working for their preservation is a critical task.
Murray Gell-Mann