Murray Gell-Mann Quotes

51 quotes in 747 categories

• We are driven by the usual insatiable curiosity of the scientist, and our work is a delightful game
• 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…
• When you think you're listening to several conversations at once, they tell me, you may really simply be time sharing - that is, listening a…
• You know, there was a time, just before I started to study physical science, when astronomers thought that systems such as we have here in…
• Niels Bohr brainwashed a whole generation of theorists into thinking that the job (interpreting quantum theory) was done 50 years ago.
• Sustainability is living on nature's income rather than living on its capital.
• 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…
• 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…
• Enthusiasm is followed by disappointment and even depression, and then by renewed enthusiasm.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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,…
• 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…
• For me, the study of these laws is inseparable from a love of Nature in all its manifestations. The beauty of the basic laws of…
• 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…
• My colleagues in elementary particle theory in many lands [and I] are driven by the usual insatiable curiosity of the scientist, and our work is…
• For me, the study of these laws is inseparable from a love of Nature in all its manifestations.
• Now, what that means is that there is fundamental indeterminacy from quantum mechanics, but besides that there are other sources of effective indeterminacy.

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