Murray Gell-Mann
Murray Gell-Mann
Murray Gell-Mannis an American physicist 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 the California Institute of Technology, 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. Gell-Mann has spent several...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth15 September 1929
CityNew York City, NY
CountryUnited States of America
My colleagues in elementary particle theory in many lands [and I] are driven by the usual insatiable curiosity of the scientist, and our work is a delightful game. I am frequently astonished that it so often results in correct predictions of experimental results. How can it be that writing down a few simple and elegant formulae, like short poems governed by strict rules such as those of the sonnet or the waka, can predict universal regularities of Nature?
Perhaps we see equations as simple because they are easily expressed in terms of mathematical notation already invented at an earlier stage of development of the science, and thus what appears to us as elegance of description really reflects the interconnectedness of Nature's laws at different levels.
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.
Is it imaginable that in the 13 or 14 billion years before human life appeared there was no quantum mechanics? That is ludicrous.
I think one can try to reduce the amount of confusion, and also to reduce the amount of nonsense that's talked about quantum mechanics.
Now, what that means is that there is fundamental indeterminacy from quantum mechanics, but besides that there are other sources of effective indeterminacy.
Well, I don't like to get involved in these philosophical issues very much.
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
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
The world of the quark has everything to do with a jaguar circling in the night.
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.
I am frequently astonished that it so often results in correct predictions of experimental results.
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.
I do not keep up with the details of particle physics.