David Mermin

N. David Mermin (born March 30, 1935, in New Haven, Connecticut, USA) is Horace White Professor of Physics Emeritus at Cornell University

Sourced

• If I were forced to sum up in one sentence what the Copenhagen interpretation says to me, it would be 'Shut up and calculate!'
  • What's Wrong with this Pillow? 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? by N. David Mermin, Physics Today, May 2004, page 10 (DOC)

• Over the past fifty years or so, scientists have allowed the conventions of expression available to them to become entirely too confining.
  • N. David Mermin (1990). Boojums all the way through: communicating science in a prosaic age. Cambridge University Press. p. xi. ISBN 0-521-38880-5. 

• ... 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.
  • N. David Mermin (1990). Boojums all the way through: communicating science in a prosaic age. Cambridge University Press. p. xii. ISBN 0-521-38880-5. 

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

• I am awaiting the day when people remember the fact that discovery does not work by deciding what you want and then discovering it.
  • How not to create tigers, Physics Today, Volume 52, Issue 8, August 1999, p. 11

About David Mermin

• One of the most beautiful papers in physics that I know of is yours in the American Journal of Physics.
  • 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 (2005). Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track. Basic Books. p. 367. ISBN 0-7382-0636-9.