Electron band structure in germanium, my ass (2001)

Reception and tone of the essay

• Many readers find the piece both hilarious and painfully accurate, seeing it less as parody and more as a truthful snapshot of life in experimental physics.
• Some frame it as a jab at physics pretension and textbook hero‑worship; others insist it’s “honest and beautiful,” capturing what cutting‑edge experiments often feel like.
• Several physicists say it mirrors their own lab experience: long stretches of confusion, bad data, and the low odds that anomalies signify “new physics.”

Experimental reality and equipment limits

• Commenters dwell on how hard it really is to do the germanium experiment with limited budgets and older technology: soldering to germanium is nontrivial, thermal anchoring is tricky, and instrumentation in ~2000 was worse than today.
• Broader point: experimentalists must be part machinist, part engineer; most groups lack technicians, so students build, debug, and maintain their own finicky setups.
• LabVIEW and other fragile lab tools come up as shared pain points in undergrad and research labs.

Data, curve fitting, and “lying with statistics”

• Several note how easy it is to be fooled by a smooth theoretical curve drawn through noisy data, especially when plotted by a computer.
• The essay’s “I drew an exponential through my noise” is used to discuss overfitting and visual deception, connecting to “How to Lie with Statistics” and marketing practices.
• Commenters from other subfields report similar abuse of curve‑fitting and omission of residuals or goodness‑of‑fit metrics to make weak data look convincing.

Physics culture and hero narratives

• People criticize the way physics is taught as a clean sequence of triumphs by geniuses, contrasting that with the messy, error‑prone reality (including historical anecdotes about Einstein, Hilbert, Millikan, etc.).
• Others argue that hero stories are both inspiring and misleading, and that failure and stumbling are inherent to genuine discovery.

Careers, tools, and openness

• Commenters note the author later switched to computer science and now works in industry, taking this as a commentary on how society values physics vs. software work.
• There’s frustration about closed, undocumented research software (e.g., DFT codes), parameter “secret sauce,” and paywalled papers that make reproduction intentionally hard.
• Tooling debates arise: proprietary plotting tools (Origin) are praised for convenience; open tools (matplotlib, R, ggplot) for transparency but criticized as cumbersome for deadlines.

Education, grading, and perverse incentives

• A large subthread shares stories of labs where honest but noisy or impossible measurements earned bad grades, while massaged or fabricated “correct” results were rewarded.
• Many see this as training students to please authority rather than report reality, and connect it to broader issues in science: p‑hacking, publication bias, and pressure to match expected outcomes.
• Some teachers in the thread counter with examples of good practice: grading on reasoning and error analysis, not closeness to canonical values, and explicitly rewarding discussion of failure.

Meta and availability

• The original page intermittently 404s; multiple archive.org links are shared to preserve it.