Quotes from Murray Gell-Mann

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.

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.

We are driven by the usual insatiable curiosity of the scientist, and our work is a delightful game.

For me, the study of these laws is inseparable from a love of Nature in all its manifestations.

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.

Modern education is like being taken to the world's greatest restaurant & being forced to eat the menu.

So the old Copenhagen interpretation needs to be generalized, needs to be replaced by something that can be used for the whole universe, and can be used also in cases where there is plenty of individuality and history.

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.

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.

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.

Think how hard physics would be if particles could think

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.

Just because things get a little dingy at the subatomic level doesn't mean all bets are off.

The world of the quark has everything to do with a jaguar circling in the night.

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.

Biological evolution is part of the winding-down process by which the informational gap between the potential and the actual tends to be reduced.

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.

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

Entropy can be regarded as a measure of ignorance