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Murray Gell-Mann
12 quotes
“Possibly we will find an elegant model, in agreement with observation, that yields the pattern of lepton masses as well as the pattern of quark bare masses and even relates hadrons and leptons. This is our dream; touch us!”
Murray Gell-Mann (1929–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The most important prediction of a typical unified is that of proton decay.”
Murray Gell-Mann (1929–2019) first seen 1987 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: (talk given at the Michelson-Morley Centennial Symposium, October 1987; offprint pages 1–20; quote from p. 11)
“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 (1929–2019) first seen 1997 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Murray Gell-Mann in ISSS The Primer Project International Society for the Systems Sciences (ISSS) seminar (12 October - 10 November 1997).
“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 (1929–2019) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Making of a Physicist : A Talk with Murray Gell-Mann" at Edge.org (2003).
“Just because things get a little dingy at the subatomic level doesn't mean all bets are off.”
Murray Gell-Mann (1929–2019) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Attributed to Murray Gell-Mann by Penn Jillette, Penn Radio (14 February 2007).
“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 (1929–2019) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: TED talk on beauty and truth in physics —video timecode 14m28s (March 2007).
“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 (1929–2019) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: TED talk on beauty and truth in physics — video TC 14m48s (March 2007).
“If I have seen further than others, it is because I am surrounded by dwarfs.”
Murray Gell-Mann (1929–2019) first seen 2009 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in "Wilson vs Watson: The blessing of great enemies" by Amanda Gefter in New Scientist (10 September 2009); this is a play upon the famous statement by Isaac Newton: "If I have seen further it is only by stand…
“Niels Bohr brain-washed a whole generation of physicists into believing that the problem had been solved fifty years ago [Gell-Mann's comment on the Copenhagen interpretation]”
Murray Gell-Mann (1929–2019) first seen 1976 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In The Nature of the Physical Universe, the 1976 Nobel Conference, (1979, p. 29)
“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 (1929–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1929–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The principal distortion disseminated ... is the implication, or even the explicit claim, that measuring the polarization, circular or plane, of one of the [EPRB] photons somehow affects the other photon. In fact, the measurement does not cause any physical effect to propagate from one photon to the other. ...If on one branch of history, the plane polarization of one photon is measured and thereby specified with certainty, then on the same branch of history the circular polarization of the other photon is also specified with certainty. On a different branch of history the circular polarization of one of the photons may be measured, in which case the circular polarization of both photons is specified with certainty. On each branch, the situation is like that of Bertlmann's socks, described by John Bell... Bertlmann... always wears one pink and one green sock. If you see just one... you know immediately the other... Yet no signal is propogated... Likewise no signal passes from one photon to the other in the experiment that confirms quantum mechanics. No action at a distance takes place.”
Murray Gell-Mann (1929–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source