11 ms·
Electron Band Structure in Germanium, My Ass (2001)
- sctb 9y agoDiscussion from 2010: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2513293 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2513293.
- gus_massa 9y agoWhy the experimental points don't have error bars? Is it not possible to use four terminal sensing? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-terminal_sensing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-terminal_sensing Perhaps the sample is too irregular, but for very low resistance samples using only two terminals never work. Can they use a lock-in amplifier? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lock-in_amplifier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lock-in_amplifier When it works, it's like magic. I'm not sure that it is useful here > I attached them as appropriate to the second-rate equipment I scavenged from the back of the lab, none of which worked properly. Yep, that's usual. In next life, remember to be a mathematician.
- davrosthedalek 9y agoLock-in amplifiers are indeed great. They essentially shift your signal up in frequency, where you have less background. Here, it might be hard to apply because you would need to modulate the heating. Not impossible, but the maximum frequency is certainly limited. Part of being a physicist is having a high pain tolerance to non-working hardware. This includes cables.
- sevensor 9y agoI think this is a good deal older than 2007, but my memory could be playing tricks on me. I could swear I had read this when I was studying semiconductors in school, in the early 2000s. Edit: could be I'm thinking of Britney Spears' Guide to Semiconductor Physics, and I read this article later.
- 2474 9y agoConsidering he graduated from Stanford in '99 I would say so.
- vymague 9y agoPossible, his homepage says it's published on July 2001 in Annals of Improbable Research.
- phyller 9y agoFrom the previous discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2514041 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2514041 looks like the Britney Spears tutorial in semiconductor physics is at http://britneyspears.ac/lasers.html http://britneyspears.ac/lasers.html
- mcguire 9y ago"...by waving your hands and chanting "to first order"." I've found that to be very successful in all walks of life.
- adyavanapalli 9y agoHaha, I found that particularly hilarious XD. We did this all throughout my physics degree.
- Analemma_ 9y agoAnother classic in the same vein as the linked article is http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~dinoj/scilies.html http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~dinoj/scilies.html, which contains this nugget: "Correct to within an order of magnitude." Wrong.
- aj7 9y agoUsed to be ok in some branches of astrophysics. Now they know the age of the universe more accurately than any test you’ll get in a hospital. Stay the f—— out of hospitals (and courtrooms).
- davrosthedalek 9y agoIt is a joke, but not completely without any connection to reality: Sometimes, in astrophysics, you are happy if you get the order of magnitude correct to an order of magnitude.
- aj7 9y agoVirtually everything, and I mean everything in your post was wrong, but I still enjoyed the hell out of it. Laser scientists know that if you use (a well anti-reflection coated) Ge window or lens to transmit a high power CO2 laser beam, slight absorption heats it a little. Heating it a little makes it more absorptive. So it heats a little more. And so forth, until the motherf——r cracks: “thermal runaway.” Guess why? You are going to be a good experimental physicist eventually. Eventually. I spent two years blowing up homemade nitrogen lasers at Berkeley. Keep posting!
- raldi 9y ago> You are going to be a good experimental physicist eventually. He switched to CS and now gets paid to work on A-list videogames all day: http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~kovar/cv.html http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~kovar/cv.html Edit: Oops, LinkedIn says he's now at Google.
- johndavidback 9y agoThe last line from his CV is a gem: "Two years experience in swing dancing (east coast swing and lindy hop)."
- mikepurvis 9y agoSwing dancing is wonderful, and is very compatible with the analytical nerd brain as far as building up something beautiful from components, expressing yourself within a structure, getting physical exercise, etc etc.
- gascan 9y agoConclusion: Going into physics was the biggest mistake of my life. I should've declared CS. I still wouldn't have any women, but at least I'd be rolling in cash.
- lostInSpaaaace 9y agoBrilliantly written. Blows all other academic papers out of the water. Brevity, eloquence, effective application of profanity. Love it.
- raldi 9y agoMods: The title is wrong; this was written in 2001. Citation: http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~kovar/cv.html http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~kovar/cv.html
- sctb 9y agoThanks, updated!
- IamNotAtWork 9y agoThere are actually more women in physics and other natural sciences than CS. So, don't despair, your chances are already better than most geeks!
- hprotagonist 9y agoI remember reading this when it was first published. I was a freshman student taking physics at the time, cranking out truly boring and awful "lab reports" once a week. I think this got printed up and hung in the dorm common room as some cathartic exercise. I dimly remember some other reports of a similar style on other subjects, but I don't recall what they were beyond that.
- acqq 9y agoMy favourite: https://isotropic.org/papers/chicken.pdf https://isotropic.org/papers/chicken.pdf https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yL_-1d9OSdk https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yL_-1d9OSdk
- cousin_it 9y agoOldie but goodie. Reminds me of another oldie, Andras Konya's "My C++ Experience/Disaster", which is sadly gone from the internet now.
- mar77i 9y agothis, perchance? http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/classic/message5877.html http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/classic/message5877.html
- vymague 9y agoThat's just an excerpt from the whole essay. It seems all of his essays are gone from the internet.
- edflsafoiewq 9y agoIs this the whole thing? https://www.c-plusplus.net/forum/p1223938#1223938 https://www.c-plusplus.net/forum/p1223938#1223938
- vymague 9y agoI would guess the letter sent to Bjarne is just one part of the essay. As you can see from this snapshot: https://archive.fo/mMrs1 https://archive.fo/mMrs1, the essay starts with, "I strongly dislike the "wildly popular" computer language C++. My experience with it has been nothing but a disaster...".
- dljsjr 9y agoOh man. In the junior year of my Physics degree we had a special lab section called "Modern Physics Lab". It was 2 credits (a lab is normally 1 credit in the Florida university system and denotes how much time you're in the classroom during a week), and basically a self-study course on how to properly conduct experiments in the modern physics domain. Replicating results from early modern physics like Milliken oil drop, identifying lattice structures using X-ray spectroscopy, etc. Everything in the lab was broken, and the faculty knew it. They told us on syllabus day that about 50% of our lab time was going to be spent repairing the old shitty equipment. Why? Because unless you're working at MIT or CERN that's how labs in the real world work. Everything's broken and you don't have any funding but you still have to publish. And truth be told I learned more about both basic circuits and how to foster a "get shit done" attitude from that class than any other lab class I had to take. The modules were on a rotation and I remember one of the groups that ended up on a particular experiment spent almost the entire semester fixing one module that nobody got to do that semester. It was an old out-of-production expansion card that plugged in to some old DOS box and interfaced with some piece of tech I can't remember. Literally everything about the setup was out of production. The amount of investigation and creativity they had to come up with in order to try and fix that experiment was impressive. I don't remember if they succeeded. That lab was an experience.
- bsder 9y ago> Why? Because unless you're working at MIT or CERN that's how labs in the real world work. Everything's broken and you don't have any funding but you still have to publish. That's close, but not quite the real issue. The lesson is to document everything. Repeatability IS an issue even if no one is going to repeat the experiment--because YOU need that information to make any progress. It allows you to isolate to one thing, change one thing, and see what the result is. And THAT is the core of debugging. I wish I could send every programmer through a physics lab class. The number of times I have had the following conversation with software people is staggering: "Well, I did X and it didn't work." "Oh? So, what was it supposed to do before you did X and what was it supposed to do afterword?" "I dunno." "THEN WHY THE HELL DID YOU DO X AT ALL?" <bangs head on table>
- Balgair 9y ago
- std_throwaway 9y agoThis post shows how the "weak" are weeded out from the sciences. If your frustration level is as low as shown in the article, you won't become happy doing science. If you instead like getting hit in the face repeatedly for years, welcome onboard until you fall off!
- inglor 9y agoHe ended up finishing his BSc and got a PhD at CS, works at Google now.
- godelmachine 9y agoI remember reading about this post on Quora two years ago. A Raytheon Engineer who went by the name of Jacob Vanwagoner had posted this. Pretty impressive fella.
- snambi 9y agoThis is my experience as well. The readings never matched what the text books said. Whenever the graph didn't match everyone told me that equipment was old or not calibrated. But it happened in all the equipment and at different labs. Fortunately I never cared about physics and simply started doing computer science.
- nategri 9y ago"Electron Band Structure in Germanium, My Ass (I Will Not See the Electron Band Structure in Germanium)"
- foobar1962 9y agoNot what I was expecting but exactly what my day needed.