“There has never been just one best way to teach quantum mechanics. My goal is neither to sow nostalgia for the philosophically engaged style of Oppenheimer and Nordheim, nor to condemn the pragmatic approach of Fermi, Bethe and Feynman. It is rather to highlight the choices that physicists must always make when stepping into the classroom. Choices of topics to discuss and problems to assign reflect deeper decisions about the ideal type of physicist one seeks to train. Should the new generation be philosophically attuned, concerned with minute details of conceptual interpretation? Or should physicists hone their ability to calculate, pushing Heisenberg’s and Schrödinger’s equations into the service of ever more elaborate problems to solve and phenomena to analyse? Competing ideals have flourished under different pedagogical conditions.”

— David Kaiser

Turning physicists into quantum mechanics (2007)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

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David Kaiser 2

American physicist 1971

Valentine Telegdi (1922–2006) American physicist

[Physics Today, A Lowbrow's View of Feynman, 42, 2, 1989, 10.1063/1.881197] (p. 85)

“What are the choices that we must make if we are now to succeed, and not to fail? […] Two types of choices seem to me to have been crucial to tipping their outcomes towards success or failure: long-term planning, and willingness to reconsider core values. On reflection, we can also recognize the crucial role of these same two choices for the outcomes of our individual lives. One of those choices has depended on the courage to practice long-term thinking, and to make bold, courageous, anticipatory decisions at a time when problems have become perceptible but before they have reached crisis proportions. […] The other crucial choice illuminated by the past involves the courage to make painful decisions about values. Which of the values that formerly served a society well can continue to be maintained under new changed circumstances? Which of these treasured values must instead be jettisoned and replaced with different approaches?”

Jared Diamond book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

Source: Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005), Chapter "The world as a polder: what does it all mean to us today?", section "Reasons for hope" (Penguin Books, 2011, pages 522-523, ISBN 978-0-241-95868-1.

“Of course, the apparent disarray could have stemmed entirely from my own ignorance. But when I revealed my impression of confusion and dissonance to one of the attendees, he reassured me that my perception was accurate. “It’s a mess,” he said of the conference (and, by implication, the whole business of interpreting quantum mechanics). The problem, he noted, arose because, for the most part, the different interpretations of quantum mechanics cannot be empirically distinguished from one another; philosophers and physicists favor one interpretation over another for aesthetic and philosophical—that is, subjective—reasons.”

John Horgan (journalist) (1953) American science journalist

Source: The End of Science (1996), p. 88

“Chemistry has been termed by the physicist as the messy part of physics, but that is no reason why the physicists should be permitted to make a mess of chemistry when they invade it.”

Frederick Soddy (1877–1956) chemist and physicist from England

As quoted in American Journal of Physics, Vol. 14 | (1946), p. 248

“"Sticazzi" has always been one of the best choices to safeguard one's health.”

Prevale (1983) Italian DJ and producer

Original: (it) "Sticazzi" è da sempre una delle scelte migliori per salvaguardare la propria salute.
Source: prevale.net

“My own conclusion is that today there is no interpretation of quantum mechanics that does not have serious flaws. This view is not universally shared. Indeed, many physicists are satisfied with their own interpretation of quantum mechanics. But different physicists are satisfied with different interpretations. In my view, we ought to take seriously the possibility of finding some more satisfactory other theory, to which quantum mechanics is only a good approximation.”

Steven Weinberg (1933) American theoretical physicist

Source: Lectures on Quantum Mechanics (2012, 2nd ed. 2015), Ch. 3: General Principles of Quantum Mechanics

“The traditional approach has tended to obscure the nature of the choice that has to be made. The question is commonly thought of as one in which A inflicts harm on B and what has to be decided is: how should we restrain A? But this is wrong. We are dealing with a problem of a reciprocal nature. To avoid the harm to B would inflict harm on A. The real question that has to be decided is: should A be allowed to harm B or should B be allowed to harm A?”

Ronald H. Coase (1910–2013) British economist and author

1960s-1980s, "The Problem of Social Cost" (1960)

“There are street artists. Street musicians. Street actors. But there are no street physicists. A little known secret is that a physicist is one of the most employable people in the marketplace - a physicist is a trained problem solver. How many times have you heard a person in a workplace say, "I wasn't trained for this!" That's an impossible reaction from a physicist, who would say, instead, "Cool. A problem I've never seen before. Let's see how I can figure out how to solve it!"”

Neil deGrasse Tyson (1958) American astrophysicist and science communicator

Oh, and, have fun along the way.
Comment on "I am Neil deGrasse Tyson -- AMA", November 13, 2011 https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/mateq/i_am_neil_degrasse_tyson_ama/c2zg4do,
2010s

“It is my goal to be more intentional about the choices I make about the themes in my films so this one spoke to me.”

Ego Boyo (1968) Nigerian actress and movie producer

Source: https://www.premiumtimesng.com/entertainment/381261-how-nigeria-police-can-improve-image-through-film-ego-boyo.html Boyo talks about police officers acts.

“The courts have properly determined that a man should neither be able to force a woman to have an abortion nor to prevent her from having one, should she so choose. Justice therefore dictates that if a woman makes a unilateral decision to bring pregnancy to term, and the biological father does not, and cannot, share in this decision, he should not be liable for 21 years of support. Or, put another way, autonomous women making independent decisions about their lives should not expect men to finance their choice.”

Karen DeCrow (1937–2014) American lawyer

New York Times Magazine, 9 May 1982, letter to the editor
Source: New York Times Magazine, letter to the editor http://www.nytimes.com/1982/05/09/magazine/l-no-headline-123813.html, 1982-05-09

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