
Electron Band Structure In Germanium, My Ass  - bootload
http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~kovar/hall.html
======
JonnieCache
Hah, this exactly mirrors my experience in chemistry lessons aged 15. Failing
to reproduce experimental results with broken equipment then faking the data
with an excel function to get the teachers off my back so I could go back to
doing something useful like staring out of the window, or using the magnesium
ribbon to heat-seal peoples pencil cases shut.

Good to know that it carries on up to the undergraduate level. And I even
managed to associate with women during my eventual CS degree! Feeling pretty
smug right now.

~~~
yummyfajitas
_Failing to reproduce experimental results with broken equipment then faking
the data with an excel function to get the teachers off my back..._

I had the exact opposite experience. I once failed to get an experiment
working, but kept trying until I was the last person in the lab. Eventually
the professor asked why I hadn't finished, and together we discovered the
spectrometer was utterly broken.

He gave a a grade of 0-25% to everyone who got the "right" answer, depending
on how realistically they faked it (some people didn't bother to add noise or
quantize their answers).

~~~
alex_c
Your own example suggests you're in the (vast) minority.

~~~
starwed
Eh, in my experience, despite the fact that points were not deducted for
getting the "wrong" result, and they were frequently told so, students still
preferred to falsify data.

I think it is because if they get the "correct" result they can also just copy
an analysis from elsewhere, whereas with the "wrong" result they would have to
actually do it themselves.

~~~
schmittz
That's so funny because I always loved getting the answer wrong. I could get
full credit for explaining possible sources of error, versus having to develop
a well-established analysis independently. You'd think more students would
think this way.

------
JoeAltmaier
I had this insight in Junior High - testing friction by putting blocks on top
of other blocks, or in a block train, and using a 'force meter' to see how
hard I had to pull. The 'force meter' was a piece of spring steel stuck into
another block, with a hook on the end.

It was totally non-linear on every surface I tested. The book said it was
supposed to be linear. The students were all furtively fudging it, and
eventually the teacher said something like "well, its supposed to be linear so
do the best you can".

Insight: this was all a bunch of crap. Turns out that friction is totally non-
linear anyway, for most materials, but I didn't read that until 20 years
later.

~~~
Zaak
That reminds me of a story about Richard Feynman visiting a physics class
outside the US. The diplomat types were very upset with him for pointing out
that their books and classes were terrible, teaching things like the energy of
a ball going down an incline without taking rotational kinetic energy into
account.

~~~
tesseract
<http://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education>

~~~
Zaak
Yes, thank you. That's exactly the one I was thinking of.

------
perlgeek
He's so totally right about the hand waving approximations used in solid state
physics.

All fields of physics need to use some approximations, but those in the solid
state were usually the ones with the worst reasons, just things like "it works
if we do that" or even "it doesn't if we don't do this".

It went on like that in three courses (two on solid state physics, one on
electronics).

Only after that did I happen to come across a decent book which explained some
of the approximations in a way that didn't make me cringe, and some of the
stuff started to make sense in retrospect. Others are still a mystery to me,
and probably always will be.

~~~
tzs
If anyone needs a refresher in semiconductor physics, there's a good one at
this Britney Spears site: <http://britneyspears.ac/>

edit: how the heck does a link to an excellent introduction to semiconductor
physics get voted down in a thread about an article relating to semiconductor
physics?

~~~
biot
While there does appear to be some physics articles on the site, the whole
thing appears to be cloaking itself in legitimacy as a scheme to get inbound
links and drive up its page rank score. Their strategy is likely to get people
linking for the physics so that they can sell links for heating oil prices,
concert tickets, physics help, and so on. It's more about the advertising than
the physics.

I'm sure there's a less spammy physics site you could have linked to?

~~~
JonnieCache
On the contrary, the page is a piece of internet history. As you can see from
the domain, it was created by an academic in an early example of titlebait.

[http://replay.web.archive.org/20001002213854/http://www.brit...](http://replay.web.archive.org/20001002213854/http://www.britneyspears.ac/)

Its basically a reverse rickroll. "Britney Spears" was by far the most
searched-for term on the internet for a long time.

~~~
biot
.ac is the country code for Ascension Island and domains on that TLD are
required to be academic in the same way that Colombia's .co domains are
required to be companies (in other words, there is no requirement). There's a
page on how to advertise on the site and a merchandise page as well. Sorry,
but I'm still not seeing how this wasn't built as primarily a revenue
generator.

~~~
JonnieCache
Hmmm... Well in that case for more evidence I am going to have to fall back on
the assertion that I remember hearing a reference to it being set up in the
90s by a physics professor as a joke, in a documentary about memes on BBC
Radio 4:

<http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00zlk03>

Although you can't stream that programme and I appreciate that my half-
recollections are hardly convincing.

What does seem likely is that the site was in fact set up in the 90s by a
physics professor as a joke, _and_ since then it has been used to make money,
precisely because it was popular and unusual at the time. Maybe he sold it to
someone back in the good old 90s bubble, when men were men and a domain name
was a business model.

(Fun Fact: That documentary was presented by the woman who wrote the article
about LSD that was on here recently.)

~~~
tzs
Here's a BBC text article about the site:
<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/1306364.stm>

~~~
biot
Kudos to the postgraduate student for getting all that PR coverage. He could
be raking in a few hundred to a few thousand dollars per month depending on
advertising rates and Britney merchandise sales.

------
laeus
This "lab report" always brings back good memories because it indirectly
launched my career in the game industry. I was finishing up my CS degree at UW
Madison and working in Mike Gleicher's computer graphics lab in Spring '02. I
had previously met Lucas through a fellow CS student (Alex Mohr, now at
Pixar). At some point, Lucas was contacted by the AI programmer at Ensemble
Studios (Mike Kidd). Mike, a UW alum, had seen the Germanium treatise and
wanted Lucas to apply at ES. A month later, knowing how eager I was to join
the game industry, Lucas mentioned Mike's email to me and forwarded him my
info. Long story short, I got an interview at ES and was hired straight out of
college into a dream job.

I look forward to seeing this link pop up again in a few years. :)

------
elwin
I sympathize with the horrible equipment. While getting a physics degree, I
had a lab where we measured resistivity. My team was the last to succeed in
getting numerical data from the 20-year-old oscilloscope via floppy disk. The
students scheduled after us had to take a digital photograph of the
oscilloscope screen and reconstruct the data from that.

Broken equipment is not confined to undergraduate classes. A few terms later,
I had to use the digital photograph method to get data from a spectrometer in
a research lab. If my analysis had succeeded, we would likely have published,
and the professor would have had a chance at tenure, all on the strength of
data obtained by counting pixels.

------
wbhart
Oh, lovely story. I had precisely this happen in Physics at Uni. I wrote down
every piece of data, wrote out my computations in full. When I submitted it, I
got a D. I challenged my prof to check any one of the data points or
computations and exhibit a single error (I knew he wouldn't because I had
checked myself). He refused to check even a single one. Every single person
for 20 years had fudged the results!!

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cubicle67
I read an essay, I think by Isaac Asimov, where he described a graph like this
as a "shotgun curve"

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jrockway
Yeah, I remember a number of labs where I didn't get the data that was
expected and had to do the experiment again. Knowing the expected result,
producing excellent data was easy; instead of a painstaking data-collection
process, I outsourced that to a "function" with "noise". Hey look, r=0.999!

I understand this is the same process by which the top quark was discovered.

~~~
starwed
_Hey look, r=0.999!_

I had to grade physics labs one semester -- this was always an instant tell
that students were making shit up. :)

~~~
5teev
I wish I'd even once had students who understood the experiment well enough to
fabricate data.

------
joss82
"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."

This advice should be told to all high schoolers.

Well, at least male ones.

~~~
dagw
A couple of the best programmers I've ever met majored in physics.

~~~
aidenn0
While I would like to think you were talking about myself, I'm guessing you're
thinking of people more along the lines of Dennis Ritchie.

------
nhebb
This is why the only lab I enjoyed was in Materials Science. The goal of the
labs was never to try to get the data to match some pre-defined equation.
Instead, the goal was to test materials and interpret the results. Plus, we
got to break stuff. :)

~~~
schmittz
As a materials science major, this comment made me smile. All my labs at
Carnegie Mellon were like that, it was(is) great. We just take a bunch of
materials and then argue which one would be the best choice. The only time I
had to produce results was when we synthesized a known superconducting
structure and just had to show that it superconducted (how strongly wasn't
important). Good times that sound much better than people's experiences in
physics and chemistry. Vindication!

------
ldite
Funny as hell when I was a physics undergraduate 10 years ago, and still funny
now. I still routinely use the phrase "to first order" when justifying
horrific approximations.

------
tinyrock
The crap results were probably due to the soldering messing around with the
crystal properties. Using a pressure-contacts approach instead seemed to do
the trick:

[http://tinyrock.com/resources/4000918/Bandgap-
Measurements-I...](http://tinyrock.com/resources/4000918/Bandgap-Measurements-
In-Ge)

Has it really been 10 years!

------
linker3000
I see the test results for germanium but where are the results for his ass?

------
jabo
I don't understand a wee bit of that, so Go Computer Science! :)

~~~
lloeki
He's unit-testing Germanium.resistivity(intensity, temperature) like so:

    
    
        fixed_i = lambda t: Germanium.resistivity(42, t)
        for t in range(100, 350, step=10):
            assertEqual(fixed_I(t), k*math.expr(t/tref))
    

Unfortunately fixed_i returns results akin to /dev/urandom because of broken
hardware.

~~~
Groxx
That is an absolutely fantastic summary. I upvoted the parent just to get this
one more attention :D

~~~
lloeki
Good questions deserve an upvote just as much as getting answered :)

------
mikecane
This pops up every few years. I always forget it and laugh out loud brand new
when re-reading it.

------
Groxx
An oldie, but a goodie. Easily my favorite scientific report paper of all
time.

> _Banking on my hopes that whoever grades this will just look at the
> pictures, I drew an exponential through my noise. I believe 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._

Absolutely brilliant.

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sliverstorm
The way I have always approached labs is a thorough report on my procedure,
complete results (totally wrong or not) and an analysis of Whether I got good
results, Why I got the wrong results, How might one improve the experiment to
get better result...

That has always served me well. I don't usually get A+'s on lab reports, but I
think that's my fault and for an unrelated reason.

It certainly seems to me reflection on what was done and thoughtful analysis
on why it was good/how it could be fixed (with specific statements or
suggestions, not general ones)/what went wrong demonstrates understanding of
the material that simple results do not. I guess if you are being trained
primarily to be a lab worker who's _job_ is to produce accurate numbers,
that's important, but if the labs are for learning...

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BrotherSand
Hilarious! First time I've seen this and I laughed so hard I had tears running
down my face. I think it was figure 1 "check this shit out" that made me
really lose it. Got some odd looks on the train.

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bluesmoon
During my physics practicals for my high school final exam, I had to measure
the voltage of a Daniel Cell using a Dry Cell (1.5V), a 2metre length of wire
and a bunch of other stuff.

The only problem... the dry cell was dead, so only carried 0.8V or something.
So, my results consistently showed that the Daniel Cell had a PD of 1.7V (it's
supposed to be ~1.1V).

The examiner came up with a brilliant solution to "fix" my data. Switch the
labels on the data columns.

------
beefman
All scientific results should be reported this bluntly.

------
Niksko
Ah, physics, the slower cousin of mathematics. How I weep for you.

