David Mermin Quotes
March 30, 1935, in New Haven, Connecticut, USA
More David Mermin Quotes
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 (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.
David Mermin— 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.
David Mermin— 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.
David Mermin— How not to create tigers, Physics Today, Volume 52, Issue 8, August 1999, p. 11
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 (2005). Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track. Basic Books. p. 367. ISBN 0-7382-0636-9.
