6 ms·

Britney Spear's Guide to Semiconductor Physics (2000)

94 points by jdmoreira 11y ago

fegu 11y ago
I feel sad that the CV of this obviously talented physicist shows that he has spent the last 8 years working in search engine optimization for e-commerce websites. I wonder if society would not have benefited more if someone without a physics PhD took his job and he took one involving physics.
- jschwartzi 11y ago
  First we would have to find a research job which paid as well as SEO jobs do.
  - GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago
    Academic jobs have a lot more going against them than just the pay tho.
    - Grishnakh 11y ago
      Like what? From what I'm told by friends who are actually in academia, it's a pretty horrible environment because it's nearly impossible to get tenure any more and the competition is ridiculous, and then there's the whole "publish or perish" thing. The rewards just aren't worth it any more.
geyang 11y ago
lol this is an old one. I remember my advisor who was then a postdoc recommending it to me five years ago.
marshray 11y ago
Oh sure, you can find explanations of good conductors and semiconductors all over the web. But what I have never found is an explanation of poor conductors: How does electric current through a (non-super-) conductor convert energy to heat?
- ctz 11y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joule_heating#Microscopic_description https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joule_heating#Microscopic_desc... Basically, physical movement of electrons involved in the current flow is hindered by other electrons.
- bkcooper 11y ago
  How does electric current through a (non-super-) conductor convert energy to heat? You have a coupling to other, non-electron/hole degrees of freedom in the system. The stronger that coupling is, the easier it is to transfer energy between the systems and the worse your conductor tends to be.
  - acqq 11y ago
    As much as I know about the subject, I like this answer more than all others here. The "bumping" interpretations don't appear to match what we know about the atoms and the particles for many decades and look to me like an explanation for small kids.
- marshray 11y ago
  These are two great responses, but they seem to be saying opposite things. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10877128 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10877128 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10877121 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10877121 One says electrons bump into electrons, the other says electrons bump into non-charge-carriers. Someone on Twitter said it was phonons. I guess I can kind of imagine a pachinko machine, but this is all very unsatisfying. :-) Edit: From the Wikipedia link: "Charged particles in an electric circuit are accelerated by an electric field but give up some of their kinetic energy each time they collide with an ion" I mean, electrons are very very lightweight and tend to move quite slowly for typical currents. How much kinetic energy can they give?
  - ZenoArrow 11y ago
    > "I mean, electrons are very very lightweight and tend to move quite slowly for typical currents. How much kinetic energy can they give?" I only have a layman's understanding of this whole process, so I could be missing some important details, but I believe it's necessary to look at the atoms as a whole rather than just the electrons... Consider, the electrons (from the outermost orbit of the nucleus) are travelling from atom to atom (the ease by which they can come and go determines how conductive the material is). During this process, when an atom has more electrons than its stable state it is negatively charged, and when it has less electrons than its stable state it is positively charged. The greater the polarisation between the positively-charged atoms and the negatively-charged atoms, the more electrons can move through the material. I believe the potential difference between the poles is voltage, and the volume of electrons flowing at a given time is current, but I could be wrong on that.
calinet6 11y ago
You mean, Swift on Security wasn't an original idea?
- nailer 11y ago
  It was all borrowed from http://www.routergod.com http://www.routergod.com. They had Britney doing OSPF, Christina Aguilera on BGP, Mulder and Scully on IOS basics. All in Character. Whoever writes Securitay is probably an old BSD nerd.
jeffwass 11y ago
Ha, I am surprised to see that page on HN. I remember finding this way back in 2002, after making my own "Quick and Dirty Preview of Solid State Physics". I had to make this site for a seminar class. Basically each student had to present on some general physics topic and then make a webpage for it. http://www.pha.jhu.edu/~jeffwass/2ndYrSem/slide1.html http://www.pha.jhu.edu/~jeffwass/2ndYrSem/slide1.html Made me realise after coming across the Britney Spears page, the brilliance of basing a potentially dry academic presentation around a pop culture celebrity. Eg, another pop cultural site/meme around that time was MC Hawking (E=MC). Some guy made gangsta rap tunes using a voice synthesiser similar to Stephen Hawking's, with loose physics references. Btw - in my seminar class, the best presentation (maybe the only one I remember) was by one dude (now a professional astronomer) who interspersed graphs of cosmic inflation with pictures of an inflatable sheep sex doll. The prof wasn't too pleased. Not sure where that webpage is nowadays...
- roymurdock 11y ago
  The most recent instance I've seen of this pop culture/dry theory combo was in the movie The Big Short. They have Margot Robbie (Australian supermodel) sip champagne in a bubble bath while explaining the dynamics of the derivatives market and how it created a bubble in 2008. There's also a scene where Anthony Bourdain (celebrity chef) is prepping food in a kitchen and talking about fish stew as a metaphor for securitization and CDO's. I find that the best teachers have such a complete mastery of a subject that they can almost perfectly translate it into a common language (pop culture) to make it more relatable and entertaining. They let inquisitive students probe deeper, past the metaphor. The worst teachers usually keep things as academic and dry as possible as a shield against understanding, which leads to questioning, which might call the teacher's knowledge into question or derail the class.
  - VLM 11y ago
    The entire "Good Eats" series on the food network with Alton Brown? Light food biochemistry combined with entertaining pop culture references? The network is pretty boring now, focusing mostly on extremely shiny and polished aspirational personalities and the usual "reality" game shows, but in the old days the network used to be about food...
BostonEnginerd 11y ago
This was one of the more helpful resources I found in 2001/2002 when I was taking semiconductor physics.
- lordnacho 11y ago
  Same here. Same years even. I remember having a laugh and then realising it actually isn't made up gibberish.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
cpncrunch 11y ago
I was wondering "who the heck is the Britney Spear person", but submitter just put the apostrophe in the wrong place.
woodandsteel 11y ago
Then there is Danica McKellar from The Wonder Years, who really did get a degree in mathematics, and has written several books on the subject for young girls.
thehacker005263 11y ago
*Spears'
- tomkwok 11y ago
  > *Spears' No. Spears's
ccvannorman 11y ago
For a second I thought I was going to hear auto-tuned voice-overs of Britney songs replaced with Semiconductor Physics lyrics. I was disappointed. You have room to grow, britneyspears.ac.

94 points by jdmoreira 11y ago

fegu 11y ago

I feel sad that the CV of this obviously talented physicist shows that he has spent the last 8 years working in search engine optimization for e-commerce websites. I wonder if society would not have benefited more if someone without a physics PhD took his job and he took one involving physics.

jschwartzi 11y ago
First we would have to find a research job which paid as well as SEO jobs do.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago
  Academic jobs have a lot more going against them than just the pay tho.
  - Grishnakh 11y ago
    Like what? From what I'm told by friends who are actually in academia, it's a pretty horrible environment because it's nearly impossible to get tenure any more and the competition is ridiculous, and then there's the whole "publish or perish" thing. The rewards just aren't worth it any more.

geyang 11y ago

lol this is an old one. I remember my advisor who was then a postdoc recommending it to me five years ago.

marshray 11y ago

Oh sure, you can find explanations of good conductors and semiconductors all over the web. But what I have never found is an explanation of poor conductors: How does electric current through a (non-super-) conductor convert energy to heat?

ctz 11y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joule_heating#Microscopic_description https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joule_heating#Microscopic_desc... Basically, physical movement of electrons involved in the current flow is hindered by other electrons.
bkcooper 11y ago
How does electric current through a (non-super-) conductor convert energy to heat? You have a coupling to other, non-electron/hole degrees of freedom in the system. The stronger that coupling is, the easier it is to transfer energy between the systems and the worse your conductor tends to be.
- acqq 11y ago
  As much as I know about the subject, I like this answer more than all others here. The "bumping" interpretations don't appear to match what we know about the atoms and the particles for many decades and look to me like an explanation for small kids.
marshray 11y ago
These are two great responses, but they seem to be saying opposite things. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10877128 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10877128 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10877121 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10877121 One says electrons bump into electrons, the other says electrons bump into non-charge-carriers. Someone on Twitter said it was phonons. I guess I can kind of imagine a pachinko machine, but this is all very unsatisfying. :-) Edit: From the Wikipedia link: "Charged particles in an electric circuit are accelerated by an electric field but give up some of their kinetic energy each time they collide with an ion" I mean, electrons are very very lightweight and tend to move quite slowly for typical currents. How much kinetic energy can they give?
- ZenoArrow 11y ago
  > "I mean, electrons are very very lightweight and tend to move quite slowly for typical currents. How much kinetic energy can they give?" I only have a layman's understanding of this whole process, so I could be missing some important details, but I believe it's necessary to look at the atoms as a whole rather than just the electrons... Consider, the electrons (from the outermost orbit of the nucleus) are travelling from atom to atom (the ease by which they can come and go determines how conductive the material is). During this process, when an atom has more electrons than its stable state it is negatively charged, and when it has less electrons than its stable state it is positively charged. The greater the polarisation between the positively-charged atoms and the negatively-charged atoms, the more electrons can move through the material. I believe the potential difference between the poles is voltage, and the volume of electrons flowing at a given time is current, but I could be wrong on that.

calinet6 11y ago

You mean, Swift on Security wasn't an original idea?

nailer 11y ago
It was all borrowed from http://www.routergod.com http://www.routergod.com. They had Britney doing OSPF, Christina Aguilera on BGP, Mulder and Scully on IOS basics. All in Character. Whoever writes Securitay is probably an old BSD nerd.

jeffwass 11y ago

Ha, I am surprised to see that page on HN. I remember finding this way back in 2002, after making my own "Quick and Dirty Preview of Solid State Physics". I had to make this site for a seminar class. Basically each student had to present on some general physics topic and then make a webpage for it. http://www.pha.jhu.edu/~jeffwass/2ndYrSem/slide1.html http://www.pha.jhu.edu/~jeffwass/2ndYrSem/slide1.html Made me realise after coming across the Britney Spears page, the brilliance of basing a potentially dry academic presentation around a pop culture celebrity. Eg, another pop cultural site/meme around that time was MC Hawking (E=MC). Some guy made gangsta rap tunes using a voice synthesiser similar to Stephen Hawking's, with loose physics references. Btw - in my seminar class, the best presentation (maybe the only one I remember) was by one dude (now a professional astronomer) who interspersed graphs of cosmic inflation with pictures of an inflatable sheep sex doll. The prof wasn't too pleased. Not sure where that webpage is nowadays...

roymurdock 11y ago
The most recent instance I've seen of this pop culture/dry theory combo was in the movie The Big Short. They have Margot Robbie (Australian supermodel) sip champagne in a bubble bath while explaining the dynamics of the derivatives market and how it created a bubble in 2008. There's also a scene where Anthony Bourdain (celebrity chef) is prepping food in a kitchen and talking about fish stew as a metaphor for securitization and CDO's. I find that the best teachers have such a complete mastery of a subject that they can almost perfectly translate it into a common language (pop culture) to make it more relatable and entertaining. They let inquisitive students probe deeper, past the metaphor. The worst teachers usually keep things as academic and dry as possible as a shield against understanding, which leads to questioning, which might call the teacher's knowledge into question or derail the class.
- VLM 11y ago
  The entire "Good Eats" series on the food network with Alton Brown? Light food biochemistry combined with entertaining pop culture references? The network is pretty boring now, focusing mostly on extremely shiny and polished aspirational personalities and the usual "reality" game shows, but in the old days the network used to be about food...

BostonEnginerd 11y ago

This was one of the more helpful resources I found in 2001/2002 when I was taking semiconductor physics.

lordnacho 11y ago
Same here. Same years even. I remember having a laugh and then realising it actually isn't made up gibberish.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

cpncrunch 11y ago

I was wondering "who the heck is the Britney Spear person", but submitter just put the apostrophe in the wrong place.

woodandsteel 11y ago

Then there is Danica McKellar from The Wonder Years, who really did get a degree in mathematics, and has written several books on the subject for young girls.

thehacker005263 11y ago

*Spears'

tomkwok 11y ago
> *Spears' No. Spears's

ccvannorman 11y ago

For a second I thought I was going to hear auto-tuned voice-overs of Britney songs replaced with Semiconductor Physics lyrics. I was disappointed. You have room to grow, britneyspears.ac.