Murray Gell-Mann Quotes

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Murray Gell-Mann

Profession : Physicist

Birth : September 15, 1929

Think how hard physics would be if particles could think.

Murray Gell-Mann

Enthusiasm is followed by disappointment and even depression, and then by renewed enthusiasm.

Murray Gell-Mann

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

Sometimes the probabilities are very close to certainties, but they're never really certainties.

Murray Gell-Mann

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

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

I am frequently astonished that it so often results in correct predictions of experimental results.

Murray Gell-Mann

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

As a theoretical physicist, I feel at once proud and humble at the thought of the illustrious figures that have preceded me here to receive the greatest of all honors in science, the Nobel prize.

Murray Gell-Mann

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

For me, the study of these laws is inseparable from a love of Nature in all its manifestations.

Murray Gell-Mann

Hugh Everett's work has been described by many people in terms of many worlds, the idea being that every one of the various alternative histories, branching histories, is assigned some sort of reality.

Murray Gell-Mann

I do not keep up with the details of particle physics.

Murray Gell-Mann

I have been interested in phenomena involving complexity, diversity and evolution since I was a young boy.

Murray Gell-Mann

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

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

Now, what that means is that there is fundamental indeterminacy from quantum mechanics, but besides that there are other sources of effective indeterminacy.

Murray Gell-Mann

Of course the word chaos is used in rather a vague sense by a lot of writers, but in physics it means a particular phenomenon, namely that in a nonlinear system the outcome is often indefinitely, arbitrarily sensitive to tiny changes in the initial condition.

Murray Gell-Mann

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

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