Science in Action
People inclined to make sweeping judgments about the nature of the natural and social sciences based on a glancing acquaintance with the idea of falsification and a collection of popular books about quantum mechanics should read ‘Electron Band Structure in Germanium, My Ass’. (Via Electrolite.)
posted on Sunday, March 14th, 2004 at 9:15 pm
As someone who has never found an undergraduate laboratory course to be worthwhile, having taken several in materials, EE, and physics—this seems all too familiar.
You do, of course, realize this is a joke, right?
The data set is surely a joke, as you shouldn’t get more than a few percentage points of error in a solid state lab, even if you’re lazy and, say, don’t correct for input impendence, component tolerance, etc. But also a joke is turning in 25 pages of boilerplate each week. ;-)
CS? Computer Science? What, you’d rather be a waiter? Just fake it better, quit bitching and get a job as a prof at a community college. CS. Sheesh.
CS? Computer Science? What, you’d rather be a waiter? Just fake it better, quit bitching and get a job as a prof at a community college. CS. Sheesh.
You do, of course, realize this is a joke, right? Gee I dunno, Maynard, it looked kinda serious to me. Don’t all revolutionary science papers end in the words, “My Ass”?
Assuming that I don’t actually choke on my own spit laughing at the graph, I may change to Physics from CS!
You do, of course, realize this is a joke, right? Gee I dunno, Maynard, it looked kinda serious to me. Don’t all revolutionary science papers end in the words, “My Ass”? Ha! At least one will when I publish my revolutionary “Vortex theory of time” paper. Archimedes Plutonium will weep at the depth of my insights.
I invite anyone who thinks that the social sciences and the physical sciences are of equal rigour to undertake the following trial: 1. Select some arbitrary number of passers-by and attempt by logical reasoning from well-founded premises to persuade them to adopt your political beliefs. 2. Observe whether the aforesaid passers-by are slowly drifting away from the surface of the Earth. I mean, they could, couldn’t they? Gravity is just a theory, after all. Sokal demonstrated that quite convincingly.
Kieran, thanks for the link to your old post on social science vs. science—a fine post in its day and it has aged well.
Let’s just say that that brings to mind certain classroom experiences of my own. (Such as the first time I tried to do the Millikan experiment and learned more about electric shocks than about the quantization of electric charge. Or the superconductivity exercise that mostly taught me never, never, never to work with liquid helium ever again. The Fourth Law of Thermodynamics is that working that close to absolute zero is a complete pain in the ass.)
“Let’s just say that that brings to mind certain classroom experiences of my own.” Yep. I have several years running of independant data confirmations that disprove Rutherford’s atomic model. Nobody could get that piece of crap experiement to work. (Never a good sign when your grad TA looks at your data during your oral presentation and the first words out of his mouth are “something is terribly wrong here.”) Unfortunately I couldn’t find the actual prediction of the plum pudding model, because I bet it would have fit my data better than Rutherfords inverse cosine to the 4th. And it would have been fun to present that.
Oops—Rutherford’s model predicted an inverse sine to the 4th, not cosine. Not that any of you likely care any more than I do…
ROTFLMAO (for those who don’t know, that translates roughly as “laughing so hard I’m gaining abdominal definition from the exercise”). At least this one is creative. Where I’m at, I’ve seen reports with much less content and much less discussion. The conclusion actually discusses something, anything, an impressive feat for an undergrad! (shades of SNL’s Celebrity Jeopardy sketches).
And try reading the rest of his website if you’ve got a few minutes. The bio is also rather amusing.
Alan, I don’t believe that ” the social sciences and the physical sciences are of equal rigour” but what has point 1 got to do with social science?—it sounds like an exercise in rhetoric to me. Point 2 doesn’t work either. No one disputes that people don’t float away, the question is, “why don’t they (when leaves, feathers, bubbles, etc sometimes do)?”
I invite anyone who thinks that the social sciences and the physical sciences are of equal rigour Alan, whoever you’re arguing with here doesn’t seem to live in this thread.
I think Alan might be responding to the “sweeping judgments” link. His comments seem to be directly relevant to that post and discussion, and so aren’t inappropriate here.
His comment on moving to Computer Science may be better understood once the date of origin of the piece is determined. I first read it several years ago. Mailed it out, even.