The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex

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Macmillan, Sep 15, 1995 - Biography & Autobiography - 392 pages

From one of the architects of the new science of simplicity and complexity comes an explanation of the connections between nature at its most basic level and natural selection, archaeology, linguistics, child development, computers, and other complex adaptive systems. Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann offers a uniquely personal and unifying vision of the relationship between the fundamental laws of physics and the complexity and diversity of the natural world.

 

Selected pages

Contents

Prologue An Encounter in the Jungle
3
Early Light
11
Information and Crude Complexity
23
RANDomness
43
A Child Learning a Language
51
Bacteria Developing Drug Resistance
63
The Scientific Enterprise
75
The Power of Theory
89
Superstring Theory Unification at Last?
199
Times Arrows Forward and Backward Time
215
SELECTION AND FITNESS
233
Selection at Work in Biological Evolution and Elsewhere
235
From Learning to Creative Thinking
261
Superstition and Skepticism
275
Adaptive and Maladaptive Schemata
291
Machines That Learn or Simulate Learning
307

What Is Fundamental?
107
THE QUANTUM UNIVERSE
121
Simplicity and Randomness in the Quantum Universe
123
A Contemporary View of Quantum Mechanics Quantum Mechanics and the Classical Approximation
135
Quantum Mechanics and Flapdoodle
167
Quarks and All That The Standard Model
177
DIVERSITY AND SUSTAINABILITY
327
Diversities Under Threat
329
Transitions to a More Sustainable World
345
Afterword
367
Index
377
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About the author (1995)

Murray Gell-Mann was born on September 15, 1929 in Manhattan, New York. He received a bachelor's degree in physics from Yale University in 1948 and a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1951. His discovery of quarks, a concept in particle physics, earned him a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1969. He wrote several books including The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex. He has received several awards including the Dannie Heineman Prize, the Ernest O. Lawrence Memorial Award, the Franklin Medal, the Research Corporation Award, the John J. Carty Medal, and the Helmholtz Medal. He died on May 24, 2019 at the age of 89.

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