"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."

Murray Gell-Mann Science See all quotes by Murray Gell-Mann →

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“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 behaviour of the whole.”

“Gell-Mann's Home Page at SFI”

“The false report that measuring one of the photons immediately affects the other leads to all sorts of unfortunate conclusions. ...the alleged effect ...would violate the requirement of relativity theory that no signal... can travel faster than the speed of light. If it were to do so, it would appear to observers in some states of motion that the signal were traveling backward in time.”

“Niels Bohr brain-washed a whole generation of physicists into believing that the problem had been solved fifty years ago”

“TED Talks: Murray Gell-Mann on beauty and truth in physics at TED”

“TED Talks: Murray Gell-Mann on the ancestor of language at TED”

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