Murray Gell-Mann Quotes

11 Sourced Quotes

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 be done, because no gluing together of partial studies of a complex nonlinear system can give a good idea of the behaviour of the whole.

Murray Gell-Mann
While many questions about quantum mechanics are still not fully resolved, there is no point in introducing needless mystification where in fact no problem exists. Yet a great deal of recent writing about quantum mechanics has done just that.

Murray Gell-Mann
I thought of killing myself but soon decided that I could always try MIT and then kill myself later if it was that bad but that I couldn't commit suicide and then try MIT afterwards. The two operations, suicide and going to MIT, don't commute...

Murray Gell-Mann
The false report that measuring one of the photons immediately affects the other leads to all sorts of unfortunate conclusions.... the alleged effect... would violate the requirement of relativity theory that no signal... can travel faster than the speed of light. If it were to do so, it would appear to observers in some states of motion that the signal were traveling backward in time.

Murray Gell-Mann
Three principles — the conformability of nature to herself, the applicability of the criterion of simplicity, and the "unreasonable effectiveness" of certain parts of mathematics in describing physical reality — are thus consequences of the underlying law of the elementary particles and their interactions. Those three principles need not be assumed as separate metaphysical postulates. Instead, they are emergent properties of the fundamental laws of physics.

Murray Gell-Mann
Just because things get a little dingy at the subatomic level doesn't mean all bets are off.

Murray Gell-Mann
You don't need something more to get something more. That's what emergence means. Life can emerge from physics and chemistry plus a lot of accidents. The human mind can arise from neurobiology and a lot of accidents, the way the chemical bond arises from physics and certain accidents. Doesn't diminish the importance of these subjects to know they follow from more fundamental things plus accidents.

Murray Gell-Mann
If I have seen further than others, it is because I am surrounded by dwarfs.

Murray Gell-Mann
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 to devour us.

Murray Gell-Mann
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
Physical causality can be traced directly to the existence of a simple initial condition of the universe. But how does that initial condition enter into the theory?

Murray Gell-Mann