Science Quote by Murray Gell-Mann

Gell-Mann is doing something characteristically scientific and quietly political here: he’s distancing a serious technical proposal from the pop-philosophy costume it’s been forced to wear. “Described by many people” is a gentle jab, a reminder that the public story of Everett is often narrated by enthusiasts, not by the math. And that famous hook, “many worlds,” arrives not as a confident label but as hearsay - “the idea being” - which lets Gell-Mann keep the concept at arm’s length while still acknowledging its grip on the imagination.

The real work is in his careful hedging about “some sort of reality.” Everett’s move wasn’t to invent a sci-fi multiverse; it was to take the quantum formalism seriously without adding a collapse postulate. That stance creates an interpretive pressure: if the wavefunction doesn’t collapse, then what are we supposed to say is real? Gell-Mann’s phrasing suggests that “reality” here is not a single yes-or-no property but a bookkeeping problem: how you map mathematical structure onto ontology without smuggling in metaphysics disguised as common sense.

Context matters: by the late 20th century, “many worlds” had become both a marketing term and a battleground inside physics, with debates over decoherence, measurement, and what counts as an explanation. Gell-Mann, who helped develop decoherence-based accounts, is implicitly steering the reader away from naïve branching storylines and toward the harder question: which distinctions in quantum theory are physically meaningful, and which are just narrative convenience.