"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."
Read quote
12 likes
Quote collection
Murray Gell-Mann quotes (page 2 of 3)
50 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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."
Read quote
9 likes
"Modern language must be older than the cave paintings and cave engravings and cave sculptures and dance steps in the soft clay in the caves in Western Europe, in the Aurignacian Period some 35,000 years ago, or earlier. I can't believe they did all those things and didn't also have a modern language."
Read quote
9 likes
"We are driven by the usual insatiable curiosity of the scientist, and our work is a delightful game."
Read quote
8 likes
"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."
Read quote
8 likes
"If I have seen further than others, it is because I am surrounded by dwarfs."
Read quote
8 likes
"I do not keep up with the details of particle physics."
Read quote
7 likes
"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."
Read quote
7 likes
"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."
Read quote
7 likes
"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"
Read quote
7 likes
"But when researchers at Bell Labs discovered that static tends to come from particular places in the sky, the whole field of radio astronomy opened up."
Read quote
7 likes
"I have been interested in phenomena involving complexity, diversity and evolution since I was a young boy."
Read quote
7 likes
"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."
Read quote
7 likes
"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"
Read quote
7 likes
"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"
Read quote
6 likes
"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?"
Read quote
6 likes
"One thing that makes the adventure of working in our field particularly rewarding, especially in attempting to improve the theory, is that... a chief criterion for the selection of a correct hypothesis... seems to be the criterion of beauty, simplicity, or elegance."
Read quote
6 likes
"I am frequently astonished that it so often results in correct predictions of experimental results."
Read quote
5 likes
"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."
Read quote
5 likes
"Superstitions typically involve seeing order where in fact there is none, and denial amounts to rejecting evidence of regularities, sometimes even ones that are staring us in the face."
Read quote
5 likes