Who said shut up and calculate

Peter, 23 Oct I agree. And again. Fifty years of ignoring the basic misconceptions and calculating forever in the wrong model is a complete waste of time.

New physical ideas are two-a-penny, but mostly they are counterfeit, and the genuine ones are very rare and precious. Distinguishing the two is the hard part, and most are thrown away before being properly examined, so it is likely that there are some genuine ones out there that are not recognised as such. Mathematics is also cheap, but again, choosing the right mathematics is very, very difficult and expensive. It seems to me that the current strategy amounts to going to a car boot sale and picking up a bit of mathematics or any old junk in the hope that it will solve the problem.

The chances are zilch. I have no solution to the problems, but I know where you have to start: get real mathematicians involved in the search. It is essential to have a genuine two-way dialogue between the physical ideas and the mathematics that expresses those ideas. But choosing the right mathematicians is also very very hard. This is venture capitalism on the most extreme scale of risk, and it is necessary to approach it in that spirit.

Build a team of 3 or 4, or 6 or 8, extremely clever and open-minded people, spanning particle physics, relativity, cosmology, mathematics, and leave them alone and give them everything they need for their entire careers, to argue among themselves until they resolve their differences. Treat them like a jury, and refuse to let them out until they come to a unanimous decision.

Above all, do not interfere in any way in their deliberations, and do not give them a time limit. And maybe repeat the exercise a few times in parallel, up to the limit of the desired investment. As someone who has done or tried to do research in particle theory for a long time, I am convinced that there are no fixes of the sort that you recommend.

If it were simply a matter of building the right sort of team or looking for specifically qualified people, it would have already worked. There is no simple path to creative achievement. Skip to main content Skip to sections. This service is more advanced with JavaScript available. Advertisement Hide. Authors Authors and affiliations Karl Svozil. Open Access.

First Online: 14 February This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves. Download chapter PDF. It could handle any calculation which returned an answer of anything up to 4. Having a computer to calculate the origin of mass for us may be convincing, but is not satisfying. Fortunately we can understand it too. The Lord's calculation boils down to love. The general who loses makes but few calculations beforehand.

Costs exist to be reduced. Viewed 5k times. Improve this question. The instrumentalist view is carried by the famous quote of David Mermin , "Shut up and calculate", often misattributed to Richard Feynman Add a comment.

Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer. Mikhail Katz Mikhail Katz 3, 12 12 silver badges 31 31 bronze badges. Maharrnab Maharrnab 2 2 bronze badges. According to the Nature article History: Shut up and calculate , referring to the role of leading physicist in the war effort WWII and how their attitude to their art became largely pragmatic as a result: This war-forged pragmatism produced enormously impressive research and influenced a generation of leading scientists.

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