Electron band structure in germanium, my ass (2001)
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Electron band structure in germanium, my ass (2001)
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Re: Electron band structure in germanium, my ass (2001)
#2It 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.
Re: Electron band structure in germanium, my ass (2001)
#3I 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.
Re: Electron band structure in germanium, my ass (2001)
#4(2000)
(at most: https://web.archive.org/web/20001031193257/http://www.cs.wis...)
Re: Electron band structure in germanium, my ass (2001)
#5It 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.
More jabs available at https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~kovar/bio.html and https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~kovar in general.
Re: Electron band structure in germanium, my ass (2001)
#6(2000) (at most: https://web.archive.org/web/20001031193257/http://www.cs.wis... )
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.
Re: Electron band structure in germanium, my ass (2001)
#7A 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 )
Re: Electron band structure in germanium, my ass (2001)
#8I 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.
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Re: Electron band structure in germanium, my ass (2001)
#9A 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 m…
Just 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.
Re: Electron band structure in germanium, my ass (2001)
#10A 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 m…
There'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.