Boojums All the Way through: Communicating Science in a Prosaic Age by N. David Mermin

by N. David Mermin

Addressed to a general audience, these essays present the dilemma of communicating modern physics to physicists and nonphysicists by analyzing the substance and style of written scientific communication.

Genres: Science, Physics

Paperback

First published March 15, 1990

About the author

Nathaniel David Mermin (born 1935) is a solid-state physicist at Cornell University best known for the eponymous Mermin–Wagner theorem, his application of the term "Boojum" to superfluidity, and for the quote "shut up and calculate!" (in the context of the interpretation of quantum mechanics).

In 1976, Neil Ashcroft and Mermin published a textbook on solid-state physics. As a proponent of Quantum Bayesianism, Mermin described the concept in Nature.

In 2003, the journal Foundations of Physics published a bibliography of Mermin’s writing that included three books, 125 technical articles, 18 pedagogical articles, 21 general articles, 34 book reviews, and 24 "Reference Frame" articles from Physics Today.

[from Wikipedia. check the original article also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_M...]

Reviews

[Phil Lawless · Rating 3 out of 5]

Clarifies some very difficult physics concepts, but it somewhat repetitious. These are all essays published in various venues, but now collected together.

[Ari · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a collection of Mermin's essays, columns, etc. I quite liked them; this was one of those rare books which, once started, I had a hard time putting down. The description of Bell's Inequality is remarkably lucid and better than anything else I know at explaining why quantum mechanics is truly *weird.*

Sadly, the book is less than the sum of its parts -- he has three or four separate (redundant) explanations for both Bell's inequality and also for special relativity. This is of no interest to anybody except perhaps a pedant interested in seeing varying presentations of the same ideas I skimmed over some of the redundancy.

[Lynn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book because it was by one of the co-authors of a standard textbook in my field of physics. It's a (more) lay book than his Solid State textbook, though a couple of the essays contain some sophisticated points. (It's been a while since I read the book, but I remember a couple of the papers/articles were not simple to understand.)