Quote

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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Murray Gell-Mann
Age: 89 †
Born: 1929
Born: September 15
Died: 2019
Died: May 24
Non-Fiction Writer
Physicist
Theoretical Physicist
Downtown Manhattan
Ends
Abstract
May
Physics
Enough
Miss
Scylla
Real
Fail
Charybdis
Important
Models
Fictitious
Work
Missing
Devour
Much
Failing
Monsters
Always
Objects
Turning

More quotes by 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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If I have seen further than others, it is because I am surrounded by dwarfs.
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.
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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.
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I do not keep up with the details of particle physics.
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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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Sometimes the probabilities are very close to certainties, but they're never really certainties
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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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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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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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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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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Sustainability is living on nature's income rather than living on its capital.
Murray Gell-Mann
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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.
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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So the old Copenhagen interpretation needs to be generalized, needs to be replaced by something that can be used for the whole universe, and can be used also in cases where there is plenty of individuality and history
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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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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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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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