Essential Errors

21 Confessions of an Old Fool

This is a short autobiographical pamphlet written by a senior physicist and sprinkled with quotes from wiser people’s writings.

From the Preface:
When I was young, my father – a talented engineer and a caring but austere parent – liked to remind me of the old proverb,

Wise people learn by others’ mistakes, fools by their own, and complete idiots do not learn even by their own blunders.

He accompanied each reminder with the same advice:

It doesn’t look like you have a chance to reach the first of these categories. So, try to cling to the second of them as much as you can, making every effort not to slip into the last one.

I tried to follow his advice all my life but with very questionable success. Now rather old, I have compiled a list of the major errors I had made through these years. I am publishing this list now to give the reader a chance to laugh at my mistakes and decide which category I fit in each of the described matters. (Just for fun, you may like to record your grades and then go to https://xyscientist.weebly.com/forum to compare them with those posted by other readers.)

But my main hope is that some young readers wiser than I was might use these notes to avoid at least some of the listed errors, thus making their claim for the top category.

About the author:
The author is a senior scientist/engineer, with nearly a dozen published monographs and textbooks on top of 350+ other research publications under his belt. Born in Moscow, Russia (then a part of the Soviet Union), he lived and worked there until the early 1990s when he moved to the United States to join the faculty of a major research university. He is a Fellow (honorary member) of the American Physical Society and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

New:
Since September 2024, this brochure's content is in public domain. Its plain-text version is available online at https://xyscientist.weebly.com.