Why Quark Rhymes with Pork: And Other Scientific Diversions, N. David Mermin, Cambridge U. Press, 2016. $29.99 (391 pp.). ISBN 978-1-1070-2430-4 Buy at Amazon
The contents of many nonfiction books can be summarized as “the blurb spread thinly,” but that’s an accusation that cannot be levied at David Mermin’s new essay collection, Why Quark Rhymes with Pork: And Other Scientific Diversions. The best summary I could come up with is “things David Mermin is interested in,” or at least was interested in at some point during the past 30 years.
That isn’t as undescriptive as it seems. Mermin is a Horace White Professor of Physics Emeritus at Cornell University and a well-known condensed-matter physicist. He is active in science communication and famous for both his dissatisfaction with the Copenhagen interpretation and his obsession with properly punctuating equations. That’s also what his essays are about: quantum mechanics, academia, condensed-matter physics, writing in general, and obsessive punctuation in particular. Why Quark Rhymes with Pork collects all of Mermin’s Reference Frame columns published in Physics Today from 1988 to 2009, updated with postscripts, plus 13 previously unpublished essays.
The earliest of Mermin’s Reference Frame columns stem from the age of handwritten transparencies and predate the arXiv, the Superconducting Super Disaster, and the “science wars” of the 1990s. I read those first essays with the same delighted horror evoked by my grandma’s tales of slide rules and logarithmic tables, until I realized that we’re still discussing the same questions that Mermin did 20 years ago: Why do we submit papers to journals for peer review instead of reviewing them independently of journal submission? Have we learned anything profound in the past half century? What do you do when you give a talk and have mustard on your ear? Why is the sociology of science so utterly disconnected from the practice of science? Does anybody actually read Physical Review Letters? And, of course, the mother of all questions: How do we properly pronounce “quark”?
The most recent essays in the book mostly focus on the quantum world and just what is and isn’t wrong with it. They include the most insightful—and yet brief—exposition of quantum computing that I have come across. Several of the previously unpublished pieces are birthday speeches, summaries of lectures, or obituaries. The reader also hears again from Professor Mozart, a semifictional character that Mermin introduced in his Reference Frame columns.
Even though some of Mermin’s essays are accessible for the uninitiated, most of them would likely be incomprehensible to those without some background in physics, either because he presumes technical knowledge or because the relevance of his subject will not be clear to the reader. The first essay is a good example. It channels Mermin’s outrage over “Lagrangeans,” and even though written with both humor and purpose, it criticizes a spelling that I doubt nonphysicists would perceive as properly offensive. Likewise, a 12-verse poem on the standard model and elaborations on how to embed equations into text will find their audience mostly among physicists.
My only prior contact with Mermin’s writing was with a Reference Frame column from May 2009, in which Mermin lays out his favorite interpretation of quantum mechanics, QBism. Proposed by Carlton Caves, Christopher Fuchs, and Rüdiger Schack, QBism views quantum mechanics as the observer’s rule book for updating information about the world. In his column, Mermin argues that it is a “bad habit” to believe in the reality of the quantum state. “I hope you will agree,” he writes, “that you are not a continuous field of operators on an infinite-dimensional Hilbert space.”
I wrote a response to that column lamenting that Mermin’s argument was “polemic” and “not very insightful,” offhand complaints that Physics Today published in September 2009. Mermin replied that his column was “an amateurish attempt” to contribute to the philosophy of science and quantum foundations. But while reading Why Quark Rhymes with Pork, I found his amateurism to be a benefit: In contrast to professional attempts to contribute to the philosophy of science (or linguistics, or sociology, or scholarly publishing), Mermin’s writing is mostly comprehensible. I’m thus happy to leave further complaints to philosophers.
Why Quark Rhymes with Pork is a book I’d never have bought. But having read it, I think you should read it too, because I’d rather not discuss the same questions 20 years from now.
And the only correct way to pronounce quark is, of course, the German way, as “qvark.”
Sabine Hossenfelder is a research fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, Germany. She works on physics beyond the standard model and on quantum-gravity phenomenology. Sabine blogs at http://backreaction.blogspot.com.
