Murray Gell-Mann Quotes

All the particles that we are made of only account for about four per cent of the cosmic inventory.

The four building blocks of the universe are fire, water, gravel and vinyl.

The standard model of particle physics says that the universe consists of a very small number of particles, 12, and a very small number of forces, four. If we're correct about those 12 particles and those four forces and understand how they interact, properly, we have the recipe for baking up a universe.

We are just strings of quarks living in a suburb of the local density maximum of the universe.

I do theoretical particle physics. We're trying to understand the most basic structure of matter. And the way you do that is you have to look at really small distances. And to get to small distances, you need high energies.

Man is simply the best chance we know of that matter has had of providing itself with information about itself.

Physics is the most basic part of science and, of course, math. It gives you insight into everything - a foundation, I should say, to understand nature and the universe.

The majority of the world is empty space. Empty space, empty space, empty space. All that we see in the world, the life, the animals, plants, people - it's all empty space. That's amazing!

The universe is composed of matter, and, as a system, is sustained by motion. Motion is not a property of matter, and without this motion the solar system could not exist.

The profoundly 'atomic' character of the universe is visible in everyday experience, in raindrops and grains of sand, in the hosts of the living, and the multitude of stars; even in the ashes of the dead.

There is neither spirit nor matter in the world. The stuff of the universe is spirit-matter. No other substance but this could have produced the human molecule.

I'm a person who's very interested in science and the universe and quantum physics and astrophysics.

I had been interested in particle physics, which deals with the fundamental constituents of matter.

The more we split and pulverise matter artificially, the more insistently it proclaims its fundamental unity.

If Atomes are as small, as small can bee,They must in quantity of Matter all agree

I believe there are 15, 747, 724, 136, 275, 002, 577, 605, 653, 961, 181, 555, 468, 044, 717, 914, 527, 116, 709, 366, 231, 425, 076, 185, 631, 031, 296 protons in the universe and the same number of electrons.

The first principles of the universe are atoms and empty space; everything else is merely thought to exist.

Not only am I not persuaded by the testimony; I do not even understand it. For me the charm of quarks is well hidden ...

In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.

If there are other worlds elsewhere in the universe, I would conjecture they are governed by the same laws of natural selection.

When you think about the complexity of our natural world - plants using quantum mechanics for photosynthesis, for example - a smartphone begins to look like a pretty dumb object.

We ought to teach kids more about the Big Bang and entropy and particles. Every high school graduate should know that everything in the universe is made of a handful of particles. That's not a hard thing to know. But that's not what's emphasized.

In the last 680 million years of the four and a half billion that this planet has existed, life has been determined by two principal forces: the warmth and the diffused energy of the sunlight coming through our atmosphere, and water. Those are the primordial forces of life - sunlight and water.

We are the representatives of the cosmos; we are an example of what hydrogen atoms can do, given 15 billion years of cosmic evolution.

What I see in science is a lot of imagination referring to things that are fundamental to what we are. Our cells, our history, our future, our place in the universe, our lack of place in the universe. That's poetry as far as I'm concerned.