32 Quotes by Martin Lewis Perl

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.