Great Read

While looking for something else after watching this week's Science Saturday on BH.tv, I came across the prepared text of a talk by David Mermin called "Writing Physics."

Mermin is a physicist and the talk focuses on two problems he has spent his life struggling with -- using our poorly-suited language to explain physics to the lay audience while not getting the physics wrong, and battling with the editors of physics journals who seem bent on removing all traces of humanity from physics papers.

Don't let the title of the talk or my description dissuade you. It's not nearly as dry as I'm probably making it sound. It's an utter delight to read, especially if you like physics or words or both. Give it a shot. I bet you'll read the whole thing.

[Added] Mermin's home page has a lot of other interesting-looking links. I mean, how can you not want to look around when you come across an entry, in a list of "current interests," like this:

4. I have participated in the controversy between scientists and sociologists who study the growth of scientific knowledge, trying, with limited success, to explain to each side why the other thinks they are idiots.

[Added] And on a related note, see "Advice to Beginning Physics Speakers (and Intermediate or Advanced Ones)." Excerpts:

If you have taught physics you know it is virtually impossible to write too easy an exam. Yet nobody acknowledges that the same is even more true of the physics talk. It is absolutely impossible to give too elementary a physics talk. Every talk I have ever attended in four decades of lecture-going has been too hard. There is therefore no point in advising you to make your talk clear and comprehensible. You should merely strive to place as far as possible from the beginning the grim moment when more than 90% of your audience is able to make sense of less than 10% of anything you say.

[...]

Never, ever, have I heard anybody complain about a talk on the grounds that "I understood everything in it."

[Added] Also, new (to me) term: the Matthew effect.