Quotes by Murray Gell-Mann

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.

In 1963, when I assigned the name quark to the fundamental constituents of the nucleon, I had the sound first, without the spelling, which could have been kwork. Then, in one of my occasional perusals of Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce, I came across the word quark in the phrase Three quarks for Muster Mark. Since quark (meaning, for one thing, the cry of a gull) was clearly intended to rhyme with Mark, as well as bark and other such words, I had to find an excuse to pronounce it as kwork. But the book represents the dreams of a publican named Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker. Words in the text are typically drawn from several sources at once, like the portmanteau words in Through the Looking Glass. From time to time, phrases occur in the book that are partially determined by calls for drinks at the bar. I argued, therefore, that perhaps one of the multiple sources of the cry Three quarks for Muster Mark might be Three quarts for Mister Mark, in which case the pronunciation kwork would not be totally unjustified. In any case, the number three fitted perfectly the way quarks occur in nature.

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.

“In 1963, when I assigned the name quark to the fundamental constituents of the nucleon, I had the sound first, without the spelling, which could have been kwork. Then, in one of my occasional perusals of Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce, I came across the word quark in the phrase Three quarks for Muster Mark. Since quark (meaning, for one thing, the cry of a gull) was clearly intended to rhyme with Mark, as well as bark and other such words, I had to find an excuse to pronounce it as kwork. But the book represents the dreams of a publican named Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker. Words in the text are typically drawn from several sources at once, like the portmanteau words in Through the Looking Glass. From time to time, phrases occur in the book that are partially determined by calls for drinks at the bar. I argued, therefore, that perhaps one of the multiple sources of the cry Three quarks for Muster Mark might be Three quarts for Mister Mark, in which case the pronunciation kwork would not be totally unjustified. In any case, the number three fitted perfectly the way quarks occur in nature.”

“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. ”

“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.”