I am writing, gathering and organizing this collection of essays based on my writings over many years. This undertaking was started shortly before my ninetieth birth-year and I expect to continue it until the end.
I was inspired to embark in this endeavor by an example that I will not try to emulate: the two outstanding collections of essays penned by none other than the arguably foremost theoretical physicist of the last 50 years, Steven Weinberg, entitled Facing Up and Lake Views.
My collection of essays will be, in part, more personal and be a sequel to the autobiography, Pétain’s Praise and Other Incongruities, written jointly by my father Erich Lilienfeld and me.
I will be drawing from some of my professional writings in so far as they included themes of general interest. Other entries will be more lighthearted and even mocking, sentimental and sad, as well as ranging over a wide swath of subjects, from linguistics to music and poetry, to musings about the universe and extraterrestrial life.
Several of these sections are mini-essays on themes such as religion, a favorite target of mine, German antisemitism and the causes of the Holocaust, etc. Some essays are quite lengthy, others are brief. A large section consists of the science tidbits I sent to the erstwhile cohort of relatives and friends of Tom Urban, the father of my daughter in law, Nina Urban.
In most of these essays I will not attempt to adhere to Sadi Carnot’s[1] parsimonious dictum: “Speak little about what you know, speak not at all about what you don’t” which I learned from a framed advice on a wall in a corridor of the department of mechanical engineering at the University of Minnesota where I lectured for 31 years.
[1] Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot (1796 – 1832), French military scientist and physicist, often described as the “father of thermodynamics”.
Pedro Lilienfeld 
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