Quotes by Murray Gell-Mann

About Murray Gell-Mann:

Murray Gell-Mann is an American physicist who received the 1969 Nobel Prize in physics for his work on the theory of elementary particles. He is the Robert Andrews Millikan Professor of Theoretical Physics Emeritus at the California Institute of Technology, a Distinguished Fellow and co-founder of the Santa Fe Institute, Professor in the Physics and Astronomy Department of the University of New Mexico, and the Presidential Professor of Physics and Medicine at the University of Southern California. Gell-Mann has spent several periods at CERN, among others as a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow in 1972.
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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

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

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

Murray Gell-Mann

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

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

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

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

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 c...

Murray Gell-Mann

Our planet doesn't seem to be the result of anything very special.

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

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

Well, I don't like to get involved in these philosophical issues very much.

Murray Gell-Mann

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 adapti...

Murray Gell-Mann

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

Today the network of relationships linking the human race to itself and to the rest of the biosphere is so complex that all aspects affect all others to an extraordinary degree. Someone should be studying the whole system, however crudely that has to...

Murray Gell-Mann

Author Bio

  • NameMurray Gell-Mann
  • DescriptionAmerican physicist
  • BornSeptember 15, 1929
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionPhysicist; Author
  • AwardsGuggenheim Fellowship; Nobel Prize In Physics; Humanist Of The Year; William Procter Prize For Scientific Achievement