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A collection of offbeat, entertaining and primarily nontechnical essays on physics and those who practice it, from eminent theoretical physicist N. David Mermin. Bringing together for the first time all thirty of his columns published in Physics Today's Reference Frame series from 1988 to 2009, with updating commentary, this humorous and unusual volume includes thirteen other essays, many of them previously unpublished. Mermin's lively and penetrating writing illuminates a broad range of topics, from the implications of bad spelling in a major science journal, to the crises of science libraries and scientific periodicals, the folly of scientific prizes and honors, the agony of getting funding, and how to pronounce 'quark'. His witty observations and insightful anecdotes gleaned from a lifetime in science will entertain physicists at all levels, as well as anyone else interested in science or scientists at the turn of the twenty-first century.
Info autore
N. David Mermin is Horace White Professor of Physics Emeritus at Cornell University. He is known throughout the scientific world as co-author of Solid State Physics, and for his columns in Physics Today. He was awarded the Julius Edgar Lilienfeld Prize of the American Physical Society for 'outstanding contributions to physics' in 1989, and is a member of the American Philosophical Society, the US National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
