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• While many questions about quantum mechanics are still not fully resolved, there is no point in introducing needless mystification where in fact no problem exists. Yet a great deal of recent writing about quantum mechanics has done just that.

• 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...
  • The Making of a Physicist: A Talk with Murray Gell-Mann

• Just because things get a little dingy at the subatomic level doesn't mean all bets are off.
  • Attributed to Murray Gell-Mann by Penn Jillette, Penn Radio Feb. 14, 2007

• 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.
  • TED talk on beauty and truth in physics (video timecode 14m28s), March 2007

• You don't need something more to get something more. That's what emergence means. Life can emerge from physics and chemistry plus a lot of accidents. The human mind can arise from neurobiology and a lot of accidents, the way the chemical bond arises from physics and certain accidents. Doesn't diminish the importance of these subjects to know they follow from more fundamental things plus accidents.
  • TED talk on beauty and truth in physics (video TC 14m48s), March 2007

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• That which is not forbidden is mandatory.

• On the Feynman Problem-Solving Algorithm:
    (1) write down the problem;
    (2) think very hard;
    (3) write down the answer.

• If I have seen farther than others, it is because I am surrounded by dwarves