Murray Gell-Mann

Our planet doesn't seem to be the result of anything very special.

Summary

Murray Gell-Mann (1929 - ) is an American physicist who received the 1969 Nobel Prize in physics for his work on the theory of Elementary Particles. He also proposed the Quark Model in it's modern form.

His interests extend to historical linguistics, archeology, natural history, the psychology of creative thinking, and other subjects connected with biological and cultural evolution and with learning. Much of his recent research has focused on the theory of Complex Adaptive Systems, which brings many of those topics together.

He along with others, proposed that living beings and the phenomena of life have an essential and functional relationship, that functions through still unknown mechanisms that create regularities and through the processes of self-organisation (see Vital Unconscious and Biocentric Principle).

Ideas

• Plectics/ Complexity theory - a broad transdisciplinary subject covering aspects of simplicity and complexity as well as the properties of Complex Adaptive Systems,
• It is a way of describing why things are more than the sum of their parts,
• Basic components (atoms, molecules, cells) are each simple enough but as they interact with one another new properties emerge,
• The result is a Complex Adaptive Systems - a collection of simple parts that interact to form a complex whole capable of learning about and reacting to the outside world,
• Complexity theory is related to Chaos theory (which is the study of systems that can be altered in enormous and often unpredictable ways by even the slightest change in input).