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.

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).

I looked at my mess of data and chuckled.

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.

On the plus side, it's a great way to learn to be really ingenious with limited resources. We figured out how to get accurate hysteresis loops for ferrous samples using a breadboard, an ancient laptop, a few clicks of Cu wire and a bucket of miscellaneous components. That was shortly after we flooded the lab testing Reynold's number for shear-resistant fluids with plumbing parts.

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.

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.

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?

That site actually does have some decent articles related to semiconductor physics, the whole "Britney Spears" thing is just a gag to show how simple they've made it (though the humor is likely to be appreciated only by Physics geeks :)

My advice if you care about that sort of thing: link in further, e.g., http://britneyspears.ac/lasers.htm

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

http://replay.web.archive.org/20001002213854/http://www.brit...

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

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.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_units

I guess if you tried to measure π by constructing circles, you'd actually be measuring the curvature tensor of space (which is an experimental observation), not π (which is just π).

That's a book that deliberately starts out with the silliest possible model and then gradually introduces more and more sophisticated models until the book runs out of pages or your head explodes, whichever comes first. ;)

An important insight, however, is that the simple models are incredibly useful. When I was a teenager I used to fret that the teachers were showing me the simple models first because they were fools, or because they thought we were fools. But it turns out that they are doing so to call attention to certain important general features without distracting you with irrelevant detail.

My favorite class in all of science was Roald Hoffman's chemistry class, the highest numbered class in the Cornell chemistry department, a class which represented the point where chemistry and physics merge to become the same subject. And Hoffman deliberately used a relatively simple model of molecule-molecule interactions in a solid, the Hückel model:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hückel_method

Moreover, Hoffman would communicate in pictures as much as in math.

I don't mind simplified incorrect models so long as they're presented that way (so I don't want to read a "all that stuff we just covered? Yeah it's wrong"-ish sentence after the fact) and the full truth is eventually revealed in an understandable way. I want a full picture of something, not a partial incorrect picture of something, it scares me that some people never stop thinking of an atom as a small planetary system.

It's a very specific book, but it does explain for example why you can assume that only electrons at the Fermi energy contribute to transport phenomena (aka "current").

I guess for somebody not into mesoscopic transport, only the first three or four chapters will be of interested. But for my diploma thesis (which ended too badly to link it here) it was a real live safer.

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

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.

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

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

Including the correlation coefficient!

This advice should be told to all high schoolers.

Well, at least male ones.

What use is physics when you have an infinite tape?

Wasn't that the GP's point that to make the transition from CS to programming some knowledge of physical realities of computers might be useful??

(My impression is that $150k is a plausible entry-level quant salary, but it seems a bit strange to describe that as "mid-six-figure".)

  (a*b)^1/2 # geometric mean, square root of the product of the two numbers
  (10^5 * 10^6)^(1/2) # substitute in for 10^5 and 10^6, the limits of the six-figure range
  (10^(5+6))^(1/2) # simplify inner product
  (10^11)^(1/2) # more simplify
  10^(11 * 1/2) # move the 1/2 in, and ...
  10^(11/2) # simplify
  10^5.5 # and finally you get the same result

http://tinyrock.com/resources/4000918/Bandgap-Measurements-I...

Has it really been 10 years!

    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))

>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.

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...

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.