Electron Band Structure in Germanium, My Ass (2001)

Oh man. In the junior year of my Physics degree we had a special lab section called &quot;Modern Physics Lab&quot;. It was 2 credits (a lab is normally 1 credit in the Florida university system and denotes how much time you&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;re working at MIT or CERN that&#x27;s how labs in the real world work. Everything&#x27;s broken and you don&#x27;t have any funding but you still have to publish.<p>And truth be told I learned more about both basic circuits and how to foster a &quot;get shit done&quot; 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&#x27;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&#x27;t remember if they succeeded.<p>That lab was an experience.

Virtually everything, and I mean everything in your post was wrong, but I still enjoyed the hell out of it.<p>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.”<p>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!

&quot;<i>...by waving your hands and chanting &quot;to first order&quot;.</i>&quot;<p>I&#x27;ve found that to be very successful in all walks of life.

Why the experimental points don&#x27;t have error bars?<p>Is it not possible to use four terminal sensing? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Four-terminal_sensing" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Four-terminal_sensing</a> Perhaps the sample is too irregular, but for very low resistance samples using only two terminals never work.<p>Can they use a lock-in amplifier? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Lock-in_amplifier" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Lock-in_amplifier</a> When it works, it&#x27;s like magic. I&#x27;m not sure that it is useful here<p>&gt; <i>I attached them as appropriate to the second-rate equipment I scavenged from the back of the lab, none of which worked properly.</i><p>Yep, that&#x27;s usual.<p>In next life, remember to be a mathematician.

I 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.<p>Edit: could be I&#x27;m thinking of Britney Spears&#x27; Guide to Semiconductor Physics, and I read this article later.

Discussion from 2010: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=2513293" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=2513293</a>.

There are actually more women in physics and other natural sciences than CS. So, don&#x27;t despair, your chances are already better than most geeks!

I remember reading this when it was first published. I was a freshman student taking physics at the time, cranking out truly boring and awful &quot;lab reports&quot; once a week.<p>I think this got printed up and hung in the dorm common room as some cathartic exercise.<p>I dimly remember some other reports of a similar style on other subjects, but I don&#x27;t recall what they were beyond that.

This is my experience as well. The readings never matched what the text books said. Whenever the graph didn&#x27;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.

This post shows how the &quot;weak&quot; are weeded out from the sciences. If your frustration level is as low as shown in the article, you won&#x27;t become happy doing science. If you instead like getting hit in the face repeatedly for years, welcome onboard until you fall off!

I 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.

Oldie but goodie. Reminds me of another oldie, Andras Konya&#x27;s &quot;My C++ Experience&#x2F;Disaster&quot;, which is sadly gone from the internet now.

Not what I was expecting but exactly what my day needed.

&quot;Electron Band Structure in Germanium, My Ass (I Will Not See the Electron Band Structure in Germanium)&quot;

Mods: The title is wrong; this was written in 2001.<p>Citation: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;pages.cs.wisc.edu&#x2F;~kovar&#x2F;cv.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;pages.cs.wisc.edu&#x2F;~kovar&#x2F;cv.html</a>