He is an American physicist and linguist who received the 1969 Nobel Prize in physics for his work on the theory of elementary particles. He is the Robert Andrews Millikan Professor of Theoretical Physics Emeritus at Caltech, a Distinguished Fellow, and co-founder of the Santa Fe Institute, Professor in the Physics and Astronomy Department of the University of New Mexico, and the Presidential Professor of Physics and Medicine at the University of Southern California.
He formulated the quark model of hadronic resonances, and identified the SU flavor symmetry of the light quarks, extending isospin to include strangeness, which he also discovered. He developed the V-A theory of the weak interaction and created current algebra in the 1960s as a way of extracting predictions from quark models.
(1929 – 2019)
– Murray Gell-Mann Quotes –
I have been interested in phenomena involving complexity, diversity and evolution since I was a young boy.
~ Murray Gell-Mann
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.
~ Murray Gell-Mann
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.
~ Murray Gell-Mann
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.
~ Murray Gell-Mann
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.
~ Murray Gell-Mann
I do not keep up with the details of particle physics.
~ Murray Gell-Mann
We are driven by the usual insatiable curiosity of the scientist, and our work is a delightful game.
~ Murray Gell-Mann
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.
~ Murray Gell-Mann
Enthusiasm is followed by disappointment and even depression, and then by renewed enthusiasm.
~ Murray Gell-Mann
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.
~ Murray Gell-Mann
For me, the study of these laws is inseparable from a love of Nature in all its manifestations.
~ Murray Gell-Mann
Now, what that means is that there is fundamental indeterminacy from quantum mechanics, but besides that there are other sources of effective indeterminacy.
~ Murray Gell-Mann
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
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.
~ Murray Gell-Mann
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.
~ Murray Gell-Mann
Well, I don’t like to get involved in these philosophical issues very much.
~ Murray Gell-Mann
Sometimes the probabilities are very close to certainties, but they’re never really certainties.
~ Murray Gell-Mann
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
I am frequently astonished that it so often results in correct predictions of experimental results.
~ Murray Gell-Mann
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.
~ Murray Gell-Mann
Our planet doesn’t seem to be the result of anything very special.
~ Murray Gell-Mann
Life can emerge from physics and chemistry plus a lot of accidents.
~ Murray Gell-Mann
The human mind can arise from neurobiology and a lot of accidents, the way the chemical bond arises from physics and certain accidents.
~ 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.
~ Murray Gell-Mann
You don’t need something more to get something more. That’s what emergence means.
~ Murray Gell-Mann
