David Mermin Quotes

8 Sourced Quotes

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

David Mermin
Everything, no matter how evident or obvious, should be doubted, questioned, viewed with suspicion....There is much to be gained from the discovery that one has been deeply, persistently, and utterly wrong.

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

David Mermin