Martin Lewis Perl Quotations

These schools and the attitude of my parents towards these schools were important in preparing me for the work of an experimental scientist.

For example, I am not a good craftsman.

I loved to build with the Erector set, I loved to build toys and models out of wood, I loved to draw mechanical devices, even those I could not build.

In my high school, two foreign languages had to be studied, four years of English was required, and that meant mostly grammar and composition.

However, Allied Printing brought the four of us into the middle class and kept us in the middle class thru the Depression of the 1930's.

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.

There were two free public libraries within walking distance of my home; I remember taking six books home from every visit, the limit set by the library.

They wanted me to play more sports because they were acutely sensitive to their children being one hundred percent American, and they believed that all Americans played sports and loved sports.

Whatever the course, whether the course was boring or interesting to me, whether I was talented in mathematics or not talented in languages, my parents expected A's.

Their educations ended with high school - my father going to work as a clerk and then salesman in a company dealing in printing and stationary, and my mother working as a secretary and then bookkeeper in a firm of wool merchants.

The experimenter dealing with nature faces an outside and often hard world. Natures' curriculum cannot be changed.

I read everything: fiction, history, science, mathematics, biography, travel.

Nature's curriculum cannot be changed.

A parent being called to the school because their child had misbehaved was as serious as a parent being called to the police station because their child had robbed a bank.

Along with my parents insistence, soon internalized, that I do very well in school, went my love of reading and my love of mechanics.