Murray Gell-Mann > 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 behavior of the whole. ”
― Murray Gell-Mann

“Think how hard physics would be if particles could think”
― Murray Gell-Mann

“In 1963, when I assigned the name "quark" to the fundamental constituents of the nucleon, I had the sound first, without the spelling, which could have been "kwork." Then, in one of my occasional perusals of Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce, I came across the word "quark" in the phrase "Three quarks for Muster Mark." Since "quark" (meaning, for one thing, the cry of a gull) was clearly intended to rhyme with "Mark," as well as "bark" and other such words, I had to find an excuse to pronounce it as "kwork." But the book represents the dreams of a publican named Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker. Words in the text are typically drawn from several sources at once, like the "portmanteau words" in Through the Looking Glass. From time to time, phrases occur in the book that are partially determined by calls for drinks at the bar. I argued, therefore, that perhaps one of the multiple sources of the cry "Three quarks for Muster Mark" might be "Three quarts for Mister Mark," in which case the pronunciation "kwork" would not be totally unjustified. In any case, the number three fitted perfectly the way quarks occur in nature.”
― Murray Gell-Mann, The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex

“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

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

“The world of the quark has everything to do with a jaguar circling in the night.”
― Murray Gell-Mann, The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex

“Biological evolution is part of the winding-down process by which the informational gap between the potential and the actual tends to be reduced.”
― Murray Gell-Mann, The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex

“Even among schemata, competition leavened with cooperation is sometimes both possible and advantageous. In the realm of theories, for instance, competing notions are not always mutually exclusive; sometimes a synthesis of several ideas comes much closer to the thruth than any of them does individually.”
― Murray Gell-Mann, The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex

“[Evolution] is reminiscent of the way that the temperatures of a hot object and a cold object placed in contact with each another approach thermal equilibrium, in conformity with the second law of thermodynamics.”
― Murray Gell-Mann, The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex

“Entropy can be regarded as a measure of ignorance”
― Murray Gell-Mann, The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex

“During the period of recollapse, the universe will not be running through its expansion in reverse. The notion that expansion and contraction would be symmetrical with each other is what Stephen Hawking calss his "greatest mistake”
― Murray Gell-Mann, The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex

“Among baryons, antibaryons, and mesons, any process which is not forbidden by a conservation law actually does take place with appreciable probability. We have made liberal and tacit use of this assumption, which is related to the state of affairs that is said to prevail in a perfect totalitarian state. Anything that is not compulsory is forbidden. Use of this principle is somewhat dangerous, since it may be that while the laws proposed in this communication are correct, there are others, yet to be discussed, which forbid some of the processes that we suppose to be allowed.”
― Murray Gell-Mann