I thought I'd add to the blog a reference to the book I mentioned at the group's last discussion -- David Mermin's delightful and fascinating collection of essays "Boojums All the Way Through: Communicating Science in a Prosaic Age". Here Mermin explains his coinage of the term "boojum" for a particular configuration of a spherical drop of superfluid Helium-3, and his heroic campaign to get the term accepted by Physical Review Letters and another skirmish with the editors of Physical Review over the acceptability of referring to a paper as "charming". The volume also contains a relativistic tragicomedy that has been termed"the only [known] Elizabethan drama that is explicitly Lorentz invariant", some very nice pedagogical introductions to quantum entanglement and nonlocality, and much else for anyone involved or interested in science or scientific exposition to enjoy.

Adrian Kent