David Mermin Quotes (8 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

David Mermin: 8 quotes 0 likes

Famous David Mermin Quotes

“An extrapolation of its present rate of growth reveals that in the not too distant future Physical Review will fill bookshelves at a speed exceeding that of light. This is not forbidden by general relativity since no information is being conveyed.”

David Mermin

quoting a joke he heard from Rudolf Peierls. [N. David Mermin, Boojums all the way through: communicating science in a prosaic age, Cambridge University Press, 1990, 0-521-38880-5, 57]

“Over the past fifty years or so, scientists have allowed the conventions of expression available to them to become entirely too confining.”

David Mermin

[N. David Mermin, Boojums all the way through: communicating science in a prosaic age, Cambridge University Press, 1990, 0-521-38880-5, xi]

“If I were forced to sum up in one sentence what the Copenhagen interpretation says to me, it would be 'Shut up and calculate!”

David Mermin

What's Wrong with this Pillow? http://scitation.aip.org/getabs/servlet/GetabsServlet?prog=normal&id=PHTOAD000042000004000009000001&idtype=cvips&gifs=Yes by N. David Mermin, Cornell University, Physics Today, April 1989, page 9, doi:10.1063/1.2810963

Misattributed to Richard Feynman, by Matthew effect.

Attribution discussed in: Could Feynman Have Said This? http://scitation.aip.org/journals/doc/PHTOAD-ft/vol_57/iss_5/10_1.shtml by N. David Mermin, Physics Today, May 2004, page 10 ( DOC http://web.archive.org/web/20040929192449/http://www.fisica.unlp.edu.ar/materias/FisGral2/PhysicsToday/PhysicsTodayMay2004ReferenceFrame.doc)

“… coincident with the explosive growth of research, the art of writing science suffered a grave setback, and the stultifying convention descended that the best scientific prose should sound like a non-human author addressing a mechanical reader. … We injure ourselves when we fail to make our discipline as clear and vibrant as we can to students - prospective scientists - and to the public who pay the taxes.”

David Mermin

“I am awaiting the day when people remember the fact that discovery does not work by deciding what you want and then discovering it.”

David Mermin

How not to create tigers http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.882769, Physics Today, Volume 52, Issue 8, August 1999, p. 11

“Quantum mechanics is the most useful and powerful theory physicists have ever devised. Yet today, nearly 90 years after its formulation, disagreement about the meaning of the theory is stronger than ever. New interpretations appear every year. None ever disappear. … The message from QBism is this: You needn't feel guilty about never getting nervous about this stuff. You were right not to be bothered. But for the sake of intellectual coherence, you had better reexamine what you wrongly may have thought you understood perfectly well about the nature of probability.”

David Mermin

Fixing the shifty split http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/PT.3.1618, Physics Today, Volume 65, Issue 7, July 2012, p. 8

“One of the most beautiful papers in physics that I know of is yours in the American Journal of Physics.”

David Mermin

Richard P. Feynman in a letter to N. David Mermin, related to his AJP paper Bringing home the atomic world: Quantum mysteries for anybody, American Journal of Physics, Volume 49, Issue 10, pp. 940-943 (1981), as quoted in [Michelle Feynman, Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track, Basic Books, 2005, 0-7382-0636-9, 367]