Murray Gell-Mann Quotes
Enthusiasm is followed by disappointment and even depression, and then by renewed enthusiasm.
Modern education is like being taken to the world's greatest restaurant & being forced to eat the menu.
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.
Niels Bohr brainwashed a whole generation of theorists into thinking that the job (interpreting quantum theory) was done 50 years ago.
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 the solar system required a rare triple collision of stars
Both biological and cultural diversity are now severely threatened and working for their preservation is a critical task.
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.
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.
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
We are driven by the usual insatiable curiosity of the scientist, and our work is a delightful game.
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.
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
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.
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
I have been interested in phenomena involving complexity, diversity and evolution since I was a young boy.
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.
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 little bit to this one, a little bit to that one
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.
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.
I am frequently astonished that it so often results in correct predictions of experimental results.
The persistence of erroneous beliefs exacerbates the widespread anachronistic failure to recognize the urgent problems that face humanity on this planet.
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.
Sometimes the probabilities are very close to certainties, but they're never really certainties
Just because things get a little dingy at the subatomic level doesn't mean all bets are off.
Bush is a nice fellow who gives very good parties. I just wish someone would find him a better job than running the country.
