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Everything that is not forbidden is compulsory.

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
Compulsory
Forbidden
Everything

More quotes by 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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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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If you know the wavefunction of the universe, why aren't you rich?
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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The world of the quark has everything to do with a jaguar circling in the night.
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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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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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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Sometimes the probabilities are very close to certainties, but they're never really certainties
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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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 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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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.
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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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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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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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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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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Both biological and cultural diversity are now severely threatened and working for their preservation is a critical task.
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