Martin Lewis Perl Quotations

Experimental science is a craft and an art, and part of the art is knowing when to end a fruitless experiment. There is a danger of becoming obsessed with a fruitless experiment even if it goes nowhere. It is always a good plan for a speculative experimenter to have two experiments going, or at least one going and one being built.

My final remark to young women and men going into experimental science is that they should pay little attention to the speculative physics ideas of my generation. After all, if my generation has any really good speculative ideas, we will be carrying these ideas out ourselves.

I was also interested in chemistry, but my parents were not willing to buy me a chemistry set.

The remoteness of my parents from the schools, so unfashionable today, was often painful for me, but I learned early to deal with an outside and sometimes hard world.

I learned quickly, as I tell my graduate students now, there are no answers in the back of the book when the equipment doesn't work or the measurements look strange.

About 1900 my parents came to the United States as children from what was then the Polish area of Russia.

Going to school and working for good marks, indeed working for very good marks, was a serious business.

My parents were determined to move into the middle class.

My parents regarded school teachers as higher beings, as did many immigrants.

It was good fortune to be a child during the Depression years and a youth during the war years.