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 "lab reports" once a week. I think this got printed up and hung in the dorm common room as some cathartic exercise. I dimly remember some other reports of a similar style on other subjects, but I don't recall what they were beyond that.
Electron Band Structure in Germanium, My Ass (2001)
31–40 of 40 posts
Re: Electron Band Structure in Germanium, My Ass (2001)
#32I 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.
Re: Electron Band Structure in Germanium, My Ass (2001)
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's just an excerpt from the whole essay. It seems all of his essays are gone from the internet.
Is this the whole thing? https://www.c-plusplus.net/forum/p1223938#1223938
I would guess the letter sent to Bjarne is just one part of the essay. As you can see from this snapshot: https://archive.fo/mMrs1, the essay starts with, "I strongly dislike the "wildly popular" computer language C++. My experience with it has been nothing but a disaster...".
Re: Electron Band Structure in Germanium, My Ass (2001)
#34Oh man. In the junior year of my Physics degree we had a special lab section called "Modern Physics Lab". It was 2 credits (a lab is normally 1 credit in the Florida university system and denotes how much time you'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 dro…
> Why? Because unless you're working at MIT or CERN that's how labs in the real world work. Everything's broken and you don't have any funding but you still have to publish.
That's close, but not quite the real issue.
The lesson is to document everything. Repeatability IS an issue even if no one is going to repeat the experiment--because YOU need that information to make any progress. It allows you to isolate to one thing, change one thing, and see what the result is. And THAT is the core of debugging.
I wish I could send every programmer through a physics lab class. The number of times I have had the following conversation with software people is staggering:
"Well, I did X and it didn't work."
"Oh? So, what was it supposed to do before you did X and what was it supposed to do afterword?"
"I dunno."
"THEN WHY THE HELL DID YOU DO X AT ALL?"
Re: Electron Band Structure in Germanium, My Ass (2001)
#35Oh man. In the junior year of my Physics degree we had a special lab section called "Modern Physics Lab". It was 2 credits (a lab is normally 1 credit in the Florida university system and denotes how much time you'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 dro…
I remember my 2 unit physics Lab Class, barely. We did the Millikan Oil Drop as one of three of the horrendous experiments we had to preform. Jesus.
The experiment, in brief, is to irradiate tiny oil drops and then tune a pair of charged plates until you can get one oil drop to levitate. Since electrons are unitary in charge, you can then back calculate the charge of the electron based on the charge you put on the plates.
The set up is that you have a microscope, an oil atomizer to make the drops, the charged plates, and a small radioactive source to put electrons on the oil drops. Spritz, open the lead chamber, irradiate, look at the drops in the microscope, tune the charge, repeat.
Numerous problems emerged:
Myself and my partner were pretty blind without our glasses, which you have to take off to use the microscope. So we could see nothing. (found this out on the first day, fuuuuun)
The oil drops, when imaged, are about the same size as your retina cells, in the given microscope. This means you can never be sure that you have an oil drop or your eyes are just too noisy to see it. (found this out by the end of the first week)
The room must be perfectly dark to see the oil drops in dim light, also you must take data on a computer or by writing somehow. (found this out on the first day too)
The small bit of radioactive material was made radioactive in 1961. Given the halflife of the sample, my banana was more radioactive (found this out in 2 weeks)
The plates weren't connected to anything. (2 weeks wasted)
The oil atomizer was meant for baby oil, not vegetable oil, as was given to us and wasn't actually atomizing anything. (another weeks wasted)
The end result was, well, nothing.
We got nothing. Not for lack of trying. I think I slept about 2 hours a night that whole quarter, the rest of the time was spent in the lab and on HW for other classes. My partner and I discovered that if you put your thumb over the co-ax of a high voltage, low current powersource it would zap you something fierce and keep you awake through the early morning hours. I also discovered that taking 2 ibuprofen per Rockstar will lessen the jitters of the caffeine enough so that you can read your own writing later on. So that's nice, I guess.
Stay in CS kids. Physics is for idiots.
Re: Electron Band Structure in Germanium, My Ass (2001)
#36Oh man. In the junior year of my Physics degree we had a special lab section called "Modern Physics Lab". It was 2 credits (a lab is normally 1 credit in the Florida university system and denotes how much time you'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 dro…
I remember my 2 unit physics Lab Class, barely. We did the Millikan Oil Drop as one of three of the horrendous experiments we had to preform. Jesus. The experiment, in brief, is to irradiate tiny oil drops and then tune a pair of charged plates until you can get one oil drop to levitate. Since electrons are unitary in charge, you can then back calculate the charge of the electron based on the charge you put on the pl…
> Myself and my partner were pretty blind without our glasses, which you have to take off to use the microscope. So we could see nothing.
Intuitively, this doesn't make sense to me. Microscopes have a focus. You should be able to adjust that focus such that the microscope is also correcting your vision, just like I (very nearsighted) have no trouble using binoculars without wearing my glasses.
What am I missing?
Re: Electron Band Structure in Germanium, My Ass (2001)
#37This is my experience as well. The readings never matched what the text books said. Whenever the graph didn'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.
Re: Electron Band Structure in Germanium, My Ass (2001)
#38"Electron Band Structure in Germanium, My Ass (I Will Not See the Electron Band Structure in Germanium)"
Re: Electron Band Structure in Germanium, My Ass (2001)
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember my 2 unit physics Lab Class, barely. We did the Millikan Oil Drop as one of three of the horrendous experiments we had to preform. Jesus. The experiment, in brief, is to irradiate tiny oil drops and then tune a pair of charged plates until you can get one oil drop to levitate. Since electrons are unitary in charge, you can then back calculate the charge of the electron based on the charge you put on the pl…
> Myself and my partner were pretty blind without our glasses, which you have to take off to use the microscope. So we could see nothing. Intuitively, this doesn't make sense to me. Microscopes have a focus. You should be able to adjust that focus such that the microscope is also correcting your vision, just like I (very nearsighted) have no trouble using binoculars without wearing my glasses. What am I missing?
Honestly, you are right, but it was nearly a decade ago now. We should have seen something.
We should have done a lot of things better, actually.
Maybe we really didn't have a microscope? The apparatus was built in ~1961 and had been used yearly for the next 50 years. Any semblance of a manual had long since disappeared. Perhaps a lens or two had been raided in the 1980's ans we couldn't figure that out in the soup of other problems. I've really no idea, a decade on, which of the problems we were having that was our 'show-stopper'.
All I know is that Advanced Physics Lab (2 units) continued the time honored tradition of the Physics major breaking you, and then kicking you while you were down and laughing at your idiocy, for 4 years straight.
Somehow, I miss those times...
Re: Electron Band Structure in Germanium, My Ass (2001)
#40Not what I was expecting but exactly what my day needed.