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Of Course The Word Chaos Is Used In Rather A Vague Sense By A Lot Of Writers, But In Physics It Means A Particular Phenomenon, Namely That In A Nonlinear System The Outcome Is Often Indefinitely, Arbitrarily Sensitive To Tiny Changes In The Initial Condition

-Murray Gell-Mann

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Of Course The Word

Murray Gell-Mann

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Of Course The Word Chaos Is Used In Rather A Vague Sense By A Lot Of Writers, But In Physics It Means A Particular Phenomenon, Namely That In A Nonlinear System The Outcome Is Often Indefinitely, Arbitrarily Sensitive To Tiny Changes In The Initial Condition

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All Of Modern Physics Is Governed By That Magnificent And Thoroughly Confusing Discipline Called Quantum Mechanics ... It Has Survived All Tests And There Is No Reason To Believe That There Is Any Flaw In It. We All Know How To Use It And How To Apply It To Problems; And So We Have Learned To Live With The Fact That Nobody Can Understand It.

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.

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.

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I Am Frequently Astonished That It So Often Results In Correct Predictions Of Experimental Results.

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