Murray Gell-Mann Quotes About Physics

Quotes about: Physics

• 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

  Real, Missing, Important

  Murray Gell-Mann, Harald Fritzsch (2010). “Murray Gell-Mann: Selected Papers”, p.239, World Scientific

• 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

  Murray Gell-Mann

  Mean, Outcomes, Tiny

• 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. A theory appears to be beautiful or elegant (or simple, if you prefer) when it can be expressed concisely in terms of mathematics we already have. Symmetry exhibits the simplicity. The Foundamental Law is such that the different skins of the onion resemble one another and therefore the math for one skin allows you to express beautifully and simply the phenomenon of the next skin.

  Murray Gell-Mann

  Beautiful, Math, Simple

• 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

  Thinking, Dizzy, Becoming

• Three principles - the conformability of nature to herself, the applicability of the criterion of simplicity, and the utility 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

  Reality, Law, Effectiveness

  "Murray Gell-Mann: Selected Papers". Book by Murray Gell-Mann and Harald Fritzsch, 2010.

• All of modern physics is governed by that magnificent and thoroughly confusing discipline called quantum mechanics ... It has survived all tests and there is no reason to believe that there is any flaw in it. We all know how to use it and how to apply it to problems; and so we have learned to live with the fact that nobody can understand it.

  Murray Gell-Mann

  Believe, Discipline, Confusing

• Think how hard physics would be if particles could think

  Murray Gell-Mann

  Thinking, Would Be, Physics

• 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

  Beautiful, Fundamentals, Physics

• I do not keep up with the details of particle physics.

  Murray Gell-Mann

  Details, Physics, Particle Physics

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