This physics student should get a mark for creative writing.
Abstract: The exponential dependence of resistivity on temperature in germanium is found to be a great big lie. My careful theoretical modeling and painstaking experimentation reveal 1) that my equipment is crap, as are all the available texts on the subject and 2) that this whole exercise was a complete waste of my time.
He gets more frustrated explaining the frustration - funny stuff.
Published 3 years, 2 months agoElectrons in germanium are confined to well-defined energy bands that are separated by “forbidden regions” of zero charge-carrier density. You can read about it yourself if you want to, although I don’t recommend it. You’ll have to wade through an obtuse, convoluted discussion about considering an arbitrary number of non-coupled harmonic-oscillator potentials and taking limits and so on. The upshot is that if you heat up a sample of germanium, electrons will jump from a non-conductive energy band to a conductive one, thereby creating a measurable change in resistivity. This relation between temperature and resistivity can be shown to be exponential in certain temperature regimes by waving your hands and chanting “to first order”.
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I guess with that attitude he will never go for an advanced degree.
I remember a friend of mine saying that the higher he went with his education the more he knew about one certain topic. He figured that if he went all the way to PhD level he’d know everything about one thing, and devoted so much of his life to it, he’d know nothing about anything else! Duh!
Glad I know a little about most things - just enough to get into trouble! <[;-)
This “frustrated undergrad” now has a PhD in computer science!
Reminds me of a story I read about a physics exam in which students were asked to describe how they might use an accurate barometer to measure the height of a tall building. One student apparently wrote, “drop the object from the roof of the building and time the descent. Use Newton’s laws to valculate the height.” It wasn’t wrong, so he couldn’t be failed, but it wasn’t what they were looking for. The student was allowed to answer the question again. This time he wrote, “Tie the barometer to some string. Lower the barometer from the roof. Measure the string used.” He was given one last chance. He wrote, “Go to the building’s janitor. Say ‘If I give you this barometer, will you tell me how tall the building is?’!”
Allegedly, he passed.