David Mermin: Physics

David Mermin is American physicist. Explore interesting quotes on physics.

David Mermin: 16 quotes 0 likes

“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]

Light , Distant , Future , Speed

“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]

Beauty

“My complete answer to the late 19th century question, "what is electrodynamics trying to tell us" would simply be this: Fields in empty space have physical reality; the medium that supports them does not.”

David Mermin

Support , Reality , Question