| Document Type
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BL
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| Record Number
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584457
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| Doc. No
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b413676
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| Main Entry
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Gell-Mann, Murray
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| Title & Author
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The quark and the jaguar : : adventures in the simple and the complex /\ Murray Gell-Mann
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| Page. NO
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xviii, 392 pages :: illustrations ;; 25 cm
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| ISBN
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0716725819
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: 9780716725817
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: 0716727250
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: 9780716727255
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| Notes
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Includes index
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| Contents
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Prologue: An Encounter in the Jungle -- Early Light -- Information and Crude Complexity -- RANDomness -- A Child Learning a Language -- Bacteria Developing Drug Resistence -- The Scientific Enterprise -- The Power of Theory -- What Is Fundamental? -- Simplicity and Randomness in the Quantum Mechanics Universe -- A Contemporary View of Quantum Mechanics -- Quantum Mechanics and Flapdoodle -- Quarks and All That: The Standard Model -- Superstring Theory: Unification at Last? -- Time's Arrow's: Forward and Backward Time -- Selection at Work in Biological Evolution and Elsewhere -- From Learning to Creative Thinking -- Superstition and Skepticism -- Adaptive and Maladaptive Schema -- Machines That Learn or Simulate Learning -- Diversities Under Threat -- Transitions to a More Sustainable World -- Afterword
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| Abstract
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From one of the architects of the new science of simplicity and complexity comes a highly personal, unifying vision of the natural world. As a theoretical physicist, Murray Gell-Mann has explored nature at its most fundamental level. His achievements include the 1969 Nobel Prize for work leading up to his discovery of the quark - the basic building block of all atomic nuclei throughout the universe. But Gell-Mann is a man of many intellectual passions, with lifelong interests in fields that seek to understand existence at its most complex: natural history, biological evolution, the history of language, and the study of creative thinking
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These seemingly disparate pursuits come together in Gell-Mann's current work at the Santa Fe Institute, where scientists are investigating the similarities and differences among complex adaptive systems - systems that learn or evolve by utilizing acquired information. They include a child learning his or her native language, a strain of bacteria becoming resistant to an antibiotic, the scientific community testing new theories, or an artist implementing a creative idea. The Quark and the Jaguar is Gell-Mann's own story of finding the connections between the basic laws of physics and the complexity and diversity of the natural world. The simple: a quark inside an atom. The complex: a jaguar prowling its jungle territory in the night. Exploring the relationship between them becomes a series of exciting intellectual adventures
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| Subject
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Gell-Mann, Murray-- Travel-- Ecuador
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| Subject
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Particles (Nuclear physics)
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Nuclear physicists-- United States, Biography
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Ecuador, Description and travel
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| Dewey Classification
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530
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| LC Classification
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QC774.G45A3 1994
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