73 Quotes by Murray Gell-Mann

The mathematics clearly called for a set of underlying elementary objects-at that time we needed three types of them-elementary objects that could be combined three at a time in different ways to make all the heavy particles we knew. ... I needed a name for them and called them quarks, after the taunting cry of the gulls, "Three quarks for Muster mark," from Finnegan's Wake by the Irish writer James Joyce.

Three principles - the conformability of nature to herself, the applicability of the criterion of simplicity, and the "unreasonable effectiveness" of certain parts of mathematics in describing physical reality - are thus consequences of the underlying law of the elementary particles and their interactions. Those three principles need not be assumed as separate metaphysical postulates. Instead, they are emergent properties of the fundamental laws of physics.

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...

I would recommend that skeptics devote even more effort than they do now to understanding the reasons why so many people want or need to believe.

Sustainability is living on nature's income rather than living on its capital.

Everything that is not forbidden is compulsory.

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

Think how hard physics would be if particles could think.

Sustainability is living on nature’s income rather than living on its capital.