Murray Gell-Mann Quotes & Sayings

“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 about it.”

“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.”

“We are driven by the usual insatiable curiosity of the scientist, and our work is a delightful game.”

“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 adaptive system like jaguars.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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