March 14, 2004

Science in Action

Posted by Kieran

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 March 14, 2004 09:15 PM UTC
Comments

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.

Posted by will · March 14, 2004 11:07 PM

You do, of course, realize this is a joke, right?

Posted by Maynard Handley · March 14, 2004 11:09 PM

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. ;-)

Posted by will · March 14, 2004 11:17 PM

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.

Posted by Rick · March 14, 2004 11:36 PM

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.

Posted by Rick · March 14, 2004 11:36 PM

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”?

Posted by Kieran Healy · March 14, 2004 11:45 PM

Assuming that I don’t actually choke on my own spit laughing at the graph, I may change to Physics from CS!

Posted by tcb · March 15, 2004 02:09 AM

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.

Posted by Maynard Handley · March 15, 2004 02:53 AM

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.

Posted by Alan · March 15, 2004 08:16 AM

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.

Posted by Jeremy Osner · March 15, 2004 01:07 PM

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.)

Posted by Matt McIrvin · March 15, 2004 02:35 PM

“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.

Posted by Doug Turnbull · March 15, 2004 02:55 PM

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…

Posted by Doug Turnbull · March 15, 2004 02:57 PM

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).

Posted by AGM · March 15, 2004 04:58 PM

And try reading the rest of his website if you’ve got a few minutes. The bio is also rather amusing.

Posted by AGM · March 15, 2004 05:01 PM

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)?”

Posted by Backword Dave · March 15, 2004 06:01 PM

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.

Posted by Kieran Healy · March 15, 2004 08:16 PM

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.

Posted by anno-nymous · March 16, 2004 08:15 AM

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.

Posted by dave heasman · March 16, 2004 01:40 PM
Followups

→ Another disgruntled science student.
Excerpt: On the scientific method: Electron Band Structure In Germanium, My Ass 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 ...Read more at Things I've Seen
→ electrolit lightly.
Excerpt: Crooked Timber -> Electron Band Structure in Germanium, My Ass ->Electrolyte = BINGO. Particularly this on reviewing science fiction, along with 137+ comments. The bookmark is over yonder. ----->...Read more at BARISTA
→ electrolit lightly.
Excerpt: Crooked Timber -> Electron Band Structure in Germanium, My Ass ->Electrolyte = BINGO. Particularly this on reviewing science fiction, along with 137+ comments. The link is over yonder. ----->...Read more at BARISTA
→ But I thought physics was supposed to be much less sloppy than biology!.
Excerpt: Check out this amusing parody of a physics lab report, Electron Band Structure In Germanium, My Ass. I've been there. I've also been on the other side of the bench—you Read more at Pharyngula

This discussion has been closed. Thanks to everyone who contributed.