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Word Gems
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Quantum Mechanics
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What did physicist David Mermin mean
by his advice, "Shut up and calculate"?
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several answers from https://www.quora.com/What-did-physicist-David-Mermin-mean-by-his-advice-Shut-up-and-calculate?share=1
“Shut up and calculate” wasn’t David Mermin’s advice. Absolutely the opposite.
Here’s what he writes.
If I were forced to sum up in one sentence what the Copenhagen interpretation says to me, it would be “Shut up and calculate!” But I won’t shut up. I would rather celebrate the strangeness of quantum theory than deny it, because I believe it still has interesting things to teach us about how certain powerful but flawed verbal and mental tools we once took for granted continue to infect our thinking in subtly hidden ways. I don’t think anybody, even Bohr, has done an adequate job of extracting these lessons. (Mermin, What’s Wrong with this Pillow, Physics Today, 1989)
Those who parrot the phrase tend to overlook a couple of things, such as: (1) Mermin put forward his slogan specifically to point out why he refused to be guided by it, and... (2) Instead, they cast about for the nearest authority and seem to consistently end up with Richard Feynman [to whom the phrase is usually attributed]. Goodness knows why, except that it always helps to have the authority of Feynman behind you, so why not just invent it?
By the way, if you were in any doubt of David Mermin’s own attitude, you need look no further than the title he chose for his article. “What’s wrong with this Pillow?” refers to a remark of Albert Einstein’s, which comes in a famous letter to Erwin Schrodinger:
The Heisenberg-Bohr tranquilizing philosophy – or religion? – is so delicately contrived that, for the time being, it provides a gentle pillow for the true believer from which he cannot very easily be aroused. So let him lie there.
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It was Wigner's advice. Just sit down and calculate the eigenvalues, or other parameters of the problems asked. Don't go into the Interpretational aspect of quantum mechanics of why it works.
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It means that it’s a waste of time to argue about the deeper meaning and interpretations of quantum mechanics, which can’t be proven. Instead, just use the algorithms to calculate (predict) the properties of nature (e.g., energy levels), without regard to why they work.
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It means that in case of a theory which works even if we are not able to say why, the priority is to exploit this theory and perform important calculations without losing time for unproductive discussions and attempts to translate essence of this theory into an everyday language. Shut up and calculate.
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