16 ms·
Electron band structure in germanium, my ass (2001)
- janandonly 2y agoIt takes a special kind of mind to appreciate this short post, not as fiction, but as truth and also as a jab at the physics sciences in general.
- viraptor 2y agoMore jabs available at https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~kovar/bio.html https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~kovar/bio.html and https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~kovar https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~kovar in general.
- fc417fc802 2y agoTaken down since you posted the links it seems. I wonder why?
- ssivark 2y agoWhy is it a jab at physics? It's honest and beautiful -- I imagine this is exactly what an experience on the cutting edge of experiment is like! :D Making this measurement (an ancient discovery) with latest equipment is easy, but imagine what it might have been like for the people who actually discovered this property of germanium. Our tools/probes cannot advance much faster than our understanding of a (related) subject -- we are constantly inventing/improvising tools using cutting edge scientific knowledge from a related field.
- throwway120385 2y agoI mean if you didn't already know how to solder to Germanium crystals you would have had to spend months experimenting with the material before you could get leads to stick.
- robocat 2y agoGoogle said (AI result): Soldering a lead to a germanium crystal typically involves using a gold-germanium solder alloy (like 88% gold, 12% germanium) due to its compatibility and good bonding properties Also one of the search results implied etching first could help remove germanium oxide and used a different solder: https://www.researchgate.net/post/How-to-solder-germanium-wafers https://www.researchgate.net/post/How-to-solder-germanium-wa... Plus you'd need to decide how to get a good thermal connection to set the temperature of the crystal - maybe via one big lead? Being in the future makes some things simpler? The little experience I've had with lab physicists showed they needed a good ability to build, debug and maintain their own equipment. You can't always rely on technicians.
- qwezxcrty 2y agoIn most but the very richest physics research groups there are no such thing called technicians. Except for shared equipment in centralized managed facilities like the nanofabs, even there you need to tune your own recipe...
- throwway120385 2y agoGood, but go back in time to the year 2000 and try to solve the problem with the technology extant at that time.
- lazide 2y agoEspecially when the entire concept might seem absolutely absurd at the time.
- RotationPedant 2y ago[dead]
- syndicatedjelly 2y agoI understood and appreciated it, and I’m not special
- blatantly 2y agoI appreciate it just from reading enough HN and XKCD
- analog31 2y agoI'm an industrial physicist, and the post put a smile on my face. And indeed, it's not fiction. It's a blast. You will go through times like this, I guarantee it. I've been wrestling with a cantankerous experiment for a couple of weeks. It produces reproducible results, but they don't make sense, and the work is not in a domain where discovering new physics by accident is likely.
- abhink 2y agoI spent a good minute looking at the exponential in graph, ignoring all the actual data points, thinking to myself that the experiment does show an exponential relation. Where's the lie? Guess that's the power pictures have over words.
- drpossum 2y ago[dead]
- nottorp 2y agoThere should be some more examples in how to lie with statistics?
- incognito124 2y agoBelieve it or not, there's an entire book about it!
- nottorp 2y agoYes, it's called "How to lie with statistics" :)
- worthless-trash 2y agoI believe this is commonly known as marketing.
- Supermancho 2y ago> ignoring all the actual data points Well that's your problem. The line is the predicted, not actual. How would you derive that line from plot of noise? >> I drew an exponential through my noise. The issue is that there was supposed to be a curve according to his reading, but the actual had no measurable trend. It's possible that the data was measured on the wrong scale. If you zoom out, those noise plots become a line segment. Then again, the predictable line is on the same scale (and we're assuming that it's correct according to his reading or the best he could fit) so zooming out would probably be a different form of lying with statistics via overfitting.
- layer8 2y ago(2000) (at most: https://web.archive.org/web/20001031193257/http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~kovar/hall.html https://web.archive.org/web/20001031193257/http://www.cs.wis...)
- mr_mitm 2y agohttps://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~kovar/cv.html https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~kovar/cv.html Looks like he went on get a PhD in CS and is now a staff SWE at Google, according to his LinkedIn. Guess he's rolling in cash after all.
- ALLTaken 2y agoYou're right, I looked up and he seems to work at Google as a SWE: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lucas-kovar-185a3531 https://www.linkedin.com/in/lucas-kovar-185a3531 Happy he made the leap and at least get's paid well now (I hope).
- blatantly 2y agoThat this is the chosen path says alot about how we as a society allocate money and value things.
- palmotea 2y ago> (2000) It was probably actually written sometime prior to June 1999, because that's when the author got his Physics BS at Stanford (https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~kovar/cv.html https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~kovar/cv.html). I kinda want to know more of the backstory around this. What grade did he get? Or was this a private venting exercise he later put up on his webpage, once he was well clear of the course? The author did eventually go into CS, I wonder if this project was his actual breaking point. https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~kovar/bio.html https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~kovar/bio.html
- Y_Y 2y agoA thing of beauty is a joy forever - John Keats Honestly, physics is so full of pretension and hero worship. Even among seasoned lecturers there's a tendency to mythologise the progress of the art by making it sound like all the great results we rely on were birthed fully-formed by the giants who kindly lend us their divine shoulders. Ironically there's a kind of Gell-Mann amnesia here, working scientists know that must of your work will consist of stumbling down blind alleys in the dark and looking for needles under lampposts that aren't even near the haystack. I'm reminded of an anecdote which I can't currently source, but as I remember it Hilbert was trying to derive the Einstein Field Equations by a variational method. He correctly took the Ricci curvature R as the Lagrangian, but then neglected to multiply by the tensor density, sqrt(-g). This is kind of a rookie mistake, but made by one of the history's greatest mathematical physicists. Anyway I love this article, it's a breath of fresh air and rightly beloved by undergrads. (edit: for a counterpoint to this work please see another classic: "The physics is the life" -http://i.imgur.com/eQuqp.png http://i.imgur.com/eQuqp.png )
- api 2y agoJust physics is like this? Hero worship like this is pretty endemic. It’s weird because on one hand it promotes this disempowering mythology that all progress comes from a vanishingly tiny fraction of humanity, but on the other hand people find it inspiring because if heroes exist then it means people (and maybe you!) can do amazing things. It’s a weird double edged sword.
- Y_Y 2y agoFwiw I certainly didn't mean to say this is unique to physics, I'm just not qualified to comment on other fields. Furthermore you make a good point, the hero worship is fruitful. Anecdotally I'd say a full third of my undergrad cohort cited Feynman's auto-hagiography as part of their decision to study physics. (I also note that any double-edged polyhedral sword is necessarily degenerate.)
- russdill 2y agoThere's a single instance in Einstein's notebooks where he attempts to use numerical methods to come up with a result. He manually graphs some result of the cosmological constant and then integrates it by counting the squares under the curve.
- HiPHInch 2y agoI took some effort to change my research interest from computer vision to DFT calculation in quantum chemistry. Honestly, I'm kind of frustrated now, too many work is close-source in this area. The research paper will tell you everything except how to reproduce this work in minimal effort, it's like they are hiding something. They also using a `Origin` to plot and MS Word to write paper, which is also non-free licensed, and made them harder to collaborate and reproduce.
- gaugefield 2y agoThis issue also bugged me for a while. It is more of cultural issue, and older the research group is, the less likely it is for research software to be open, in my experience. In the area of deep learning based simulations, one good example of an open software is netket. The researcher their is pretty active in terms of github/gitlab/huggingface ecosystem.
- qwezxcrty 2y agoI miss OriginPro in my undergrad when we had campus licenses for, before moving to matplotlib for data visualization. matplotlib is simply too disappointing for making publication quality figures. The most recently encountered problem is how to plot with a broken x-axis, which is one of the most basic need in physical science but requires a non-trivial amount of hacking to get with matplotlib. Open source tool or not, I don't care at all as I get the science right. I have already enough frustration dealing with my samples, so I simply want the least frustration from the software I use to plot.
- prennert 2y agoMatplotlib is a bit painful. Often seaborn will work quicker, especially when using Pandas dataframes with proper column names and seaborn compatible layout. Its annoying that you cannot create a broken axis out-of-the box, but I am sure you can wrap this to make your own convenience function: https://matplotlib.org/stable/gallery/subplots_axes_and_figures/broken_axis.html https://matplotlib.org/stable/gallery/subplots_axes_and_figu...
- russdill 2y agoAnyone who did undergrad lab work around 2000ish might throw in some comment about lab view software and the number of times it crashes and loses all your data
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- ptsneves 2y ago2000s? My university's wind tunnel instrumentation was mostly LabView.
- russdill 2y agoIt's been around a very long time and continues to be relevant. It's just a window in time where it was feasible to have a graphical application made on labview to be accessible to undergrads crossing over with such a thing being quite unstable.
- immibis 2y agoI once wrote A* in LabVIEW for a robot. It was a competition sponsored by National Instruments, so the code was supposed to be in LabVIEW. Another person wanted to write it as a C plugin, but I thought that was cheating. There's A* built into LabVIEW, but it's for completely generic graphs so it takes a lot longer to run. The rewrite brought it from about 10 seconds to compute a path, down to about 0.5 seconds.
- wholinator2 2y agoLmao my entire undergraduate physics program is still entirely labview instruments.
- ALLTaken 2y agohahaa, I love it! That's right there is engineering and true work and dedication. Can hear the frustration and it's 100% warranted. I wish universities were better equipped for what you pay. Where is all that money going anyways? Leaking like free electrons?
- abakker 2y agoThe gym, I think. Usually the brand new buildings, too.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ninetyninenine 2y agoIt’s going to the salaries of a few elite people in the university system. It’s not that far off from the wealth inequality of the real world.
- hermannj314 2y agoThe 2023 education and general fund budget for Penn State allocated 5.7% to equipment and maintenance and repairs of approx $2.5 billion in use. I assume that would include thing other than just lab equipment. Overwhelmingly, most education fund use goes to salary, benefits and student aid (~$2 billion, 81%). Interestingly the amount of money raised by tuition and fees almost exactly matches the amount spent on salaries, benefits and student aid. So one way of viewing it is that things like lab equipment are basically funded by grants, gifts, and state appropriations. I assume this would be similar at Wisconsin in the late 90s, I doubt universities have changed much. Maybe research budgets offer more flexibility and better equipment but I doubt the undergrads get to touch that stuff. Source: budgetandfinance.psu.edu
- ALLTaken 2y agoWow, you went down the rabbit-hole, much appreciated! Do I understand correctly, that your analysis boils down to the money is indeed being pocketed rather than used for equipment or improving anything at all at the university?
- NoMoreNicksLeft 2y agoA+, recommending for accelerated PhD program.
- fithisux 2y agoBrilliant man.
- wigster 2y agoso funny. i've read a few chapters of Discworld books that made me titter a lot less
- jerf 2y agoOne of my Core Memories when it comes to science, science education, and education in general was in my high school physics class, where we had to do an experiment to determine the gravitational acceleration of Earth. This was done via the following mechanism: Roll a ball off of a standard classroom table. Use a 1990s wristwatch's stopwatch mechanism to start the clock when the ball rolls of the table. Stop the stopwatch when the ball hits the floor. Anyone who has ever had a wristwatch of similar tech should know how hard it is to get anything like precision out of those things. It's a millimeter sized button with a millimeter depth of press and could easily need half a second of jabbing at it to get it to trigger. It's for measuring your mile times in minutes, not fractions of a second fall times. Naturally, our data was total, utter crap. Any sensible analysis would have error bars that, if you treat the problem linearly, would have put 0 and negative numbers within our error bars. I dutifully crunched the numbers and determined that the gravitational constant was something like 6.8m/s^2 and turned it in. Naturally, I got a failing grade, because that's not particularly close, and no matter how many times you are solemnly assured otherwise, you are never graded on whether you did your best and honestly report what you observe. From grade school on, you are graded on whether or not the grading authority likes the results you got. You might hope that there comes some point in your career where that stops being the case, but as near as I can tell, it literally never does. Right on up to professorships, this is how science really works. The lesson is taught early and often. It often sort of baffles me when other people are baffled at how often this happens in science, because it more-or-less always happens. Science proceeds despite this, not because of it. (But jerf, my teacher... Yes, you had a wonderful teacher who didn't only give you an A for the equivalent but called you out in class for your honesty and I dunno, flunked everyone who claimed they got the supposed "correct" answer to three significant digits because that was impossible. There are a few shining lights in the field and I would never dream of denying that. Now tell me how that idealism worked for you going forward the next several years.)
- sobriquet9 2y agoI think if you showed not only the point estimate, but also some measure of uncertainty like standard deviation, it should have given you a passing grade. It's hard to say why an answer like 6.8 +- 5 is wrong. Even if you don't yet have formal statistical chops, it should be at least possible to show cumulative distribution function of results that will convey the story better than a single answer with overly optimistic implied precision.
- cosmic_quanta 2y ago> (...) the apparent legitimacy is enhanced by the fact that I used a complicated computer program to make the fit. I understand this is the same process by which the top quark was discovered. This is both hilarious and more common than you might think. In my field of expertise (ultrafast condensed matter physics), lots of noisy garbage was rationalized through "curve-fitting", without presenting the (I assume horrifyingly skewed) residuals, or any other goodness-of-fit test.
- giacomoforte 2y agoI also regret studying physics, lol, although in my case I thought fiddling with algebra would be the best job ever, until I got bored of using my mind as a compiler.
- roadbuster 2y agoI read this in 1999 when entering university. It was so refreshing hearing a student provide a glimpse into the boots-on-the-ground reality of undergrad life at these world-renowned institution. The closing sentence is also prescient; the author pivoted to CS, ultimately completing his doctorate at the University of Wisconsin at Madison https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~kovar/ https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~kovar/
- madcaptenor 2y agoLinkedIn has him as Staff Software Engineer at Google: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lucas-kovar-185a3531/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/lucas-kovar-185a3531/
- perlgeek 2y agoI'm pretty sure he's rolling in cash now :-)
- moffkalast 2y agoBut still doesn't have any women ;)
- djmips 2y agoNot so fast... You might be surprised.
- sizzle 2y agoSomeone send him a link to this HN post and invite him to join us!
- lucisferre 2y agoI read it about the same time. My friends and I (all of whom declared Physics and most of us switched to other majors before graduating) had tears in our eyes reading it. Funniest thing I had ever read. I'm glad he's doing well.
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- skrebbel 2y agoSeriously I wish more science writing resembled this
- jpm_sd 2y agoA classic I will never not upvote. Maybe the frustrations of undergrad lab work would be easier to swallow if they were better situated in historical context. This kind of result should give the experimenter some sympathy for the folks who originally made these discoveries, with less knowledge and worse equipment. But I don't think it's usually explained that way.
- jpmattia 2y agoWhile the post is amusing, somebody needs to say it: Band structure and the theory of solids is some of the most beautiful physics out there. The fact that it has completely altered society as we know it is merely secondary. :)
- est 2y agomaybe related? Cracks in the Nuclear Model: Surprising Evidence for Structure https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qynSxOS_HFc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qynSxOS_HFc
- cynewulf 2y agoIf anyone is wondering what the author is up to these days, apparently he's a staff engineer at Google according to his LinkedIn.
- credit_guy 2y agoBut that so-called best fit line is not an exponential. Exponential functions are convex, that line is concave. I’m afraid you’ll have to repeat the experiment.
- klysm 2y agoIt’s not literally a pure exponential function but it might have exponential terms as opposed to polynomial or linear terms
- shadowgovt 2y agoThis reminds me of how the Fahrenheit scale came about. For all its flaws, Fahrenheit was based on some good ideas and firmly grounded in what you could easily measure in the 1720s. A brine solution and body heat are two things you can measure without risking burning or freezing the observer. Even the gradations were intentional: in the original scale, the reference temperatures mapped to 32 and 96, and since those are 64 units apart, you could mark the rest of the thermometer with a bit of string and some halving geometry. Marking a Celsius scale from 0 to 100 accurately? Hope you have a good pair of calipers to divide a range into five evenly-spaced divisions... Nowadays, we have machines capable of doing proper calibration of such mundane temperature ranges to far higher accuracy than the needle or alcohol-mix can even show, but back then, when scientists had to craft their own thermometers? Ease of manufacture mattered a lot.
- oddmiral 2y ago100 + 28 degrees are not harder to mark than 64, and then aim 0 and 100 properly. :-/
- shadowgovt 2y agoWhat would be the process to do that? To aim 0 and 100 properly, you'd need a tool to calculate a 100:28 (25:7) ratio on an arbitrary distance, wouldn't you? One can build such a tool, but it's not a doubled-over piece of string.
- fluoridation 2y agoSurely you can simply use a ruler and rotate it away from the parallel to achieve any arbitrary scale, right?
- shadowgovt 2y agoIf you happen to have a good ruler (again, 1720s... Those also cost money or time to make). A ruler and a T-square would work. But still, it's more complicated and requires a lot more bench to secure things in place at angles than folding a piece of string in half.
- chrysander 2y agoVery much my undergrad lab education experience... I currently write my master's thesis in experimental quantum computing - the platform is similar to what Google published in December, just with less qubits. A lot of it just comes down to how much money the lab can spend to get the best equipment and how good your fabrication is. You can have the best minds in experimental physics, but without the right equipment the grad students are just busy trying to make things work somehow and waste months if not years away.
- sevensor 2y agoI TAd a semiconductor fabrication lab class 20-odd years ago. Mostly it was about making sure the students had the absolute fear of God put into them about working with HF, but there was also a bit at the end where you actually got to do a voltage sweep and characterize your transistor. If in fact you had made a transistor rather than a needlessly complicated resistor. The other TAs and I passed this paper around and thought it was just hilarious.
- dvh 2y agoAnd then there are Etsy moms making frosted shot glass
- sevensor 2y agoI would make them reread the MSDS.
- kragen 2y agoI've seen an MSDS for sodium chloride USP that recommends against use in food, and says that you should wash your skin with abundant water for 15 minutes if you contact it and seek immediate medical attention if it gets in your eyes (after, of course, spending 15 minutes in the eyewash station). It also warns you to keep it away from sources of ignition, that it should not be released into the environment, and that you should not handle it without gloves and face protection. Here, this is the first sodium chloride MSDS I googled up: https://www.fishersci.com/store/msds?partNumber=S64010&productDescription=SODIUM+CHLORIDE+USP%2FFCC+10KG&vendorId=VN00033897&countryCode=US&language=en https://www.fishersci.com/store/msds?partNumber=S64010&produ...
- throwanem 2y agoFortunately, HF is as safe as NaCl. Or so I take you to suggest, this otherwise totally failing to follow from anything anyone has said...
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- BeetleB 2y agoOh, BTW, the whole "Friction is directly proportional to the normal force": My Ass! I could never reproduce it well in the lab, because it's really not true. Take a heavy cube the shape of a book. Orient it so that the spine is on the floor. It's a lot more friction to move it in one direction than in the transverse direction. Yet the normal force is the same. Any kid knows this, and I feel dumb it never occurred to me till someone pointed it out to me.
- mizzao 2y agoIs this possibly because you need to use additional force to horizontally stabilize it in one direction (perpendicular to the spine) but not the other?
- mercutio2 2y agoI was about to say exactly this. Applying force directly to the center of gravity with one finger is hard. You end up applying torque plus adjustments in response to that torque. And that is heavily dependent on your moment of inertia, unlike the normal force. But I do agree that explanations of friction are right up there with “how do airfoils work” where poor instructors are liable to get long past the edge of their knowledge and just make shit up.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- FacelessJim 2y agoThe “proportionality constant” is doing a lot of work in that claim. A lot of “constant” parameters are swept under the rug. If you fix enough stuff that claim is indeed correct, although I agree a bit simplistic
- emmelaich 2y agoYep, cars can accelerate at over 1g.
- dragonwriter 2y agoFriction is proportional to the normal force, more specifically, it is the normal force times the coefficient of friction. What you are describing (if the normal force is actually the same) is a contact situation where the coefficient of friction is different in different directions (anisotropic friction.)
- myfonj 2y agoNot that it is important, just spotted that the page's HTTP headers report impressive Last-Modified: Sun, 26 May 2002 22:33:04 GMT (And the HTML code structure matches that era perfectly.)
- basch 2y agoNot anymore :(
- mrguyorama 2y agoThis should be a reminder that more than you would expect, "the results didn't replicate" is really a statement of how difficult science is to do well.
- vegadw 2y agoFor me, it wasn't the subpar equipment, it was the subpar instruction. I will never forget trying to explain to the graduate TA leading my circuits 1 lab, that, no, you can not use a multimeter to measure impedance of an element in a circuit while the circuit is live, and that that is dumb for multiple layers of reasons. He got pissed off at me for questioning his authority, I told the class "Uh, guys, why don't we all wait until [GTA's name] and I talk this out to proceeded, unless ya'll want to be replacing fuses in the multimeters" that REALLY pissed him off. He was yelling. He told me I needed to talk to him in the hallway. I informed him that if I was wrong, this would be a great lesson for the class, and that, no, I will not being going somewhere to be yelled at in private, anything he had to say could be said there. That really did it. He yelled more. I was laughing at his tantrum. He took me up to the lab lead (not the prof overseeing the class - not 100% sure of how this person fit into the the hierarchy), intending to get me kicked out of the class for disrespect. He goes on to this guy about how I'm the worst, and I just stand there, smiling. Finally, lab lead guy has gotten tired of the second hand yelling, and asks for my side - He wasn't oblivious to the fact that I'm sitting there fiddling with my 12AX7 necklace while leaning on my longboard I burnt with high voltage. I oozed the hardware hacker ethos very visibly - and I respond simply "He told the class to measure impedance, with an ohmmeter, while the circuit was live" It was at that moment I learned it was this lab lead's role to repair equipment (or at least replace fuses) when things like this happen. Watching that GTA have to tell the class "I was wrong" after he was yelling at me in front of everyone had to be the best. --- Fast forward a year, and I got to deal with even more mind numbing stupidity: https://opguides.info/posts/whydidipay/#8---senior-spring-20 https://opguides.info/posts/whydidipay/#8---senior-spring-20
- DylanDmitri 2y agoWe went to school together :) I would agree with Prof Sayood's "Signals and Systems" was a great class. I would agree that many TAs, including myself when I was a TA, were confused and/or overwhelmed.
- dvh 2y ago>Do you have any idea how hard it is to solder wires to germanium? I've just soldered SOT-723 onto SOT-23 adapter board, I can solder anything to anything
- immibis 2y agoThis is about the material, not the size. If the solder just doesn't stick, it doesn't matter how big it is. Common solder is, of course, designed to stick really well to copper. Which it does. To solder more exotic things, you probably need a completely different alloy.
- curtisszmania 2y ago[dead]
- titizali 2y ago> I should've declared CS. I still wouldn't have any women, but at least I'd be rolling in cash. Should we tell him?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- huqedato 2y agoNobel prize, quick!
- aledalgrande 2y agoROTFL at the abstract
- jiggawatts 2y agoI'll repeat the same comment I made to the same article when it posted here about a year ago: As an odd coincidence, I did the same experiment on a shoestring budget with substandard equipment also. I too used a fancy computer algorithm to get a best fit. Except that I managed to get four significant decimal places in the result — an improvement over the (also outdated) textbook. The author of the angry rant had a life-defining experience of overwhelming frustration. The same scenario resulted in a positive life-defining experience for me It’s funny how unpredictably things pan out even in identical circumstances…
- blatantly 2y agoNice chart. Can't rule out the old null hypothesis eh!
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y agoLooks like he didn't measure the temp correctly, who knows what the real temp was inside the crystal.
- rvba 2y ago> Do you have any idea how hard it is to solder wires to germanium? Has science gone too far? :D
- trelane 2y agoAh, a perennial favorite. Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16360479 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16360479 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23494243 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23494243 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37026780 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37026780 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2513293 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2513293
- lenocinor 2y agoSadly, now that the page has been taken down, maybe this is the last time we will see it here.
- aramattamara 2y agoTry faking your data next time, dude! You will be famous for some time. Do you even know how hard it is to make data points that seem natural but follow some clear pattern you want it to follow? I spent a good half of a day looking for that proper inverse formula.
- tomcam 2y agoCan we agree that this is one of the greatest abstracts of all time?
- promiseofbeans 2y agoThe main lesson I was taught by undergrad chemistry and statistics is that the point of science is to lie and massage your terrible incorrect results until they look realistic, claim any remaining error was due to the shitty inprecice equipment you're saddeled with, and turn it in, because you don't have enough time or money to try again.
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- smaddox 2y agoFor those who are actually interested in this field, the proper way to measure this would be with a four point probe. You do need a constant current source and a high-impedence voltage meter, though. Also, you don't need to solder wires to the sample. But if you want to measure the hall resistance of a thin film of a semiconductor, you can solder a glob of indium on to four corners of a 1 cm x 1 cm wafer, put it in a magnetic field, and then do basically the same measurement as four point probe, except not inline.
- krige 2y agoI felt that, I felt that deeply One of the most devious analytic chemistry labs I had was the one where the spectroscope was ancient, its tray was less transparent and more milky white, and the fluid to analyze was some sort of expired flavored water. The attempt vs result chart looked exactly like that figure. A really eye-opening experience in many ways.
- bryanrasmussen 2y agoI was excited at first because I thought he had found Electron band structure both in germanium, and his ass, but I was woefully mistaken.
- DeathArrow 2y agoBefore we had silicon based semiconductord we had germanium based semiconductors. I wonder if we can build chips using germanium. If yes, how would they compare with silicon made chips?
- aylmao 2y agoFun fact, he did end up switching to CS [1]: > Ph.D. Computer Science, November 2004 > University of Wisconsin, Madison > M.S. Computer Science, May 2001 University of Wisconsin, Madison > B.S. Physics, June 1999 Stanford University [1] https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~kovar/cv.html https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~kovar/cv.html EDIT: Went on to work at IL&M for 5 years and has been at Google for 14 [2]. My guy did indeed end up rolling in cash haha [2]: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lucas-kovar-185a3531/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/lucas-kovar-185a3531/
- nonrandomstring 2y agoSoldering to germanium? Personally I wouldn't have even tried such a method - rather pin the crystal between two spung gold contacts.
- stackedinserter 2y agoHave anyone tried to recreate this experiment since 2001?
- Paul-Craft 2y agoArchive link, since the original seems to have disappeared completely: https://archive.is/1s9Jd https://archive.is/1s9Jd
- aquarin 2y ago"Sorry! The URL you requested was not found on our server."
- saertyaetawer 2y agoI've seen this reposted many times, many places, and I always wonder ... maybe this person was just not very good at soldering. I had professors order me to do things they didn't know how to do themselves many times. Working with zero competency and support is the norm in academia. Soldering is a bit of an art. I'm a natural, soldering, brazing, and welding are really, really easy for me, but some people never get it and never improve. I did a four-month welding course and there were some people who were no better at the end than they were at the beginning.
- vagy 2y agomy ass analyzed here https://youtu.be/1P0Z1yq-2FQ https://youtu.be/1P0Z1yq-2FQ
- Terr_ 2y ago> Sorry! The URL you requested was not found on our server. 404 error now, perhaps some admins took it down due to traffic? The user's directory is still linked from the listing [0] though. [0] https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/ https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/
- squeegee_scream 2y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20241211151047/https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~kovar/hall.html https://web.archive.org/web/20241211151047/https://pages.cs....
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- johnobrien1010 2y agoWayback Machine Link: https://web.archive.org/web/20250311184956/https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~kovar/hall.html https://web.archive.org/web/20250311184956/https://pages.cs....
- joquarky 2y agoLooks like the article is 404 for some reason. https://web.archive.org/web/20250311184956/https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~kovar/hall.html https://web.archive.org/web/20250311184956/https://pages.cs.... Summary: ``` The author sets out to investigate the temperature-dependent resistivity of germanium, a classic topic in solid-state physics. However, they quickly become disillusioned with both the theory (which they find overly abstract and nonsensical) and the practice (plagued by faulty equipment, uncooperative materials, and lack of support). Their experimental setup involves a precariously mounted crystal, unreliable tools, and a leaking thermos of liquid nitrogen. Despite their intense effort, the data collected fails to demonstrate the expected exponential relationship. In frustration, the author draws a curve "through the noise" hoping it will look convincing enough to pass. Ultimately, they conclude the project—and their choice to study physics—was a total waste of time and regret not choosing computer science instead, where at least they'd be making money, if still unlucky in love. ```