Murray Gell-Mann Quotes

Physics is really figuring out how to discover new things that are counterintuitive, like quantum mechanics. It's really counterintuitive.

It is not merely the truth of science that makes it beautiful, but its simplicity.

Actually, I was more or less determined to be a theoretical physicist at the age of thirteen.

We do not know what the rules of the game are; all we are allowed to do is to watch the playing. Of course, if we watch long enough, we may eventually catch on to a few of the rules. The rules of the game are what we mean by fundamental physics.

This book is about physics and its about physics and its relationship with mathematics and how they seem to be intimately related and to what extent can you explore this relationship and trust it.

It's not completely obvious what gravity is, fundamentally, or what dimensions are, fundamentally. One of these days we'll understand better what we mean, what is the fundamental thing that's given us space in the first place and dimensions of space in particular.

I've learnt more physics from Kabbalah than I ever did in school.

Philosophers have not kept up with modern developments in science. Particularly physics.

Of course, Einstein was a very great scientist indeed, and I have enormous respect for him, and great admiration for the discoveries he made. But he was very committed to a view of the objectivity of the physical world.

To me, what makes physics physics is that experiment is intimately connected to theory. It's one whole.

You know very well that unless you're a scientist, it's much more important for a theory to be shapely, than for it to be true.

Even before string theory, especially as physics developed in the 20th century, it turned out that the equations that really work in describing nature with the most generality and the greatest simplicity are very elegant and subtle.

The paradigm of physics - with its interplay of data, theory and prediction - is the most powerful in science.

It is not observation but theory that led me to this result that experience has confirmed afterwards.

If you aren't confused by quantum physics, then you haven't really understood it

I chose to pursue a career in physics because there the truth isn't so easily bent.

I studied physics at university, and I'm still a sucker for an experiment or scientific theory.

I was brought up as a physicist.

The best that most of us can hope to achieve in physics is simply to misunderstand at a deeper level.

Until now, physical theories have been regarded as merely models with approximately describe the reality of nature. As the models improve, so the fit between theory and reality gets closer. Some physicists are now claiming that supergravity is the reality, that the model and the real world are in mathematically perfect accord.

In Einstein's theory of relativity the observer is a man who sets out in quest of truth armed with a measuring-rod. In quantum theory he sets out with a sieve.

We can deduce, often, from one part of physics like the law of gravitation, a principle which turns out to be much more valid than the derivation.

Fourier's theorem is not only one of the most beautiful results of modern analysis, but it may be said to furnish an indispensable instrument in the treatment of nearly every recondite question in modern physics.

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.

All theoretical chemistry is really physics; and all theoretical chemists know it.