Pharyngula: An honest science student

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PZ Myers is a biologist and associate professor at the University of Minnesota, Morris.
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« Plan B, again | Main | Why does everyone hate Richard Cohen? »

An honest science student

Category: Humor
Posted on: May 9, 2006 7:46 AM, by PZ Myers

Whillikers has found a most excellent scientific paper. If that's what physics is like, you should see the noise we get in biology.

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Comments

That one's been floating around on the internets since *I* was in grad school! Still pretty damned funny, though.

Posted by: Dr. Dave | May 9, 2006 8:07 AM

Delightful. I love the computer-generated curve fitting the data. I wish I could make that much sense out of the data in my life. Thanks, PZ.

Posted by: zilch | May 9, 2006 8:08 AM

Great paper - I sent it to my daughter - she took a physics course last quarter.

Posted by: J-Dog | May 9, 2006 8:15 AM

Yeah, that one was *is* real old (as if the final line about CS people being rich by itself didn't firmly place it in in the 1980s or 90s)

It's almost as hoary as the old "What they write in scientific papers and what they really mean" list -- you know, the one that goes:

"It has long been known that..." means "I haven't bothered to look up the original reference."

etc.

Posted by: Jonathan Badger | May 9, 2006 8:23 AM

Agghh...speaking of second-rate equipment. I took a electronic measurement tools lab last year (VOMs, Oscilloscopes, up to second order circuits). My bench oscilloscope was malfunctioning almost every class, and I would end up switching two or three around until I found one working properly. This is the measurement tools lab! If the measurement tools don't work, then how can you learn to use them? I was fortunate, having used all the instruments in the lab before in other places, so I knew when they were messing up.

Posted by: JoeB | May 9, 2006 8:39 AM

Also note that it is hosted on a compsci department website. Good stuff.

Posted by: cinkcool | May 9, 2006 8:49 AM

The only time I ever got better than a simple "check" on a physics lab report was when did Millikan's oil drop experiment. Taking all the sources of error into account, I showed that the charge multiples were integers to within an error of +/- 0.5. It seems that my analysis was unusually good in noting that this made the results completely worthless.

Posted by: PaulC | May 9, 2006 8:57 AM

That CompSci department was fairly generous and gave a good account with web access to anyone who took even the basic programming class. 10 years ago, that was more than the physics department offered, though I don't know about at the time that report was written.

Posted by: Romalar | May 9, 2006 10:13 AM

I'm afraid, this measurement nightmare has nothing to do with noise. It's simply wrong way of seting the entire thing up - germanium is very heat sensitive, and you can get permanent changes in its properties with temperatures barely above 100 C, so if the guy simply soldered two wires to it he scrambled its properties beyond recognition...

Posted by: T_U_T | May 9, 2006 10:17 AM

#10

PZ: This is off topic, but there's something wrong with the link to your Richard Cohen thread. It's impossible to get into it to post. Clicking it produces a '404 not found' error screen.

Posted by: George Cauldron | May 9, 2006 10:26 AM

#11

If you like this sort of the thing, you should go to Piled Higher and Deeper and read the archive from the first comic.

Posted by: Blake Stacey | May 9, 2006 10:27 AM

#12

That CompSci department was fairly generous and gave a good account with web access to anyone who took even the basic programming class. 10 years ago, that was more than the physics department offered, though I don't know about at the time that report was written.

Yep. Even though I was a bacteriology undergrad at Madison, I received my first view of the Internet by taking a CS course. Of course, this was around 1989, and having access to the Net mostly having access to Usenet groups, but that was my first step towards a road of ruin.

Posted by: Jonathan Badger | May 9, 2006 10:30 AM

#13

I remember reading that paper three or four years ago when I was a physics major.

I am enjoying my math degree.

Posted by: Troutnut | May 9, 2006 11:43 AM

#14

I do hope this overworked experiment is a fabrication. Soldering leads to a semiconductor will give confusing dopant and Schottky diodes at the terminals, of which the later have a different thermal behaviour. I would expect the data too look rather noisy.

Posted by: Torbjörn Larsson | May 9, 2006 12:27 PM

#15

PaulC,
I had a cool coincidence doing the oil drop. The charge we came up with was almost exactly 1/3 of an electron charge, out to 4 decimal places. We decided that we had isolated a quark. The fact that we had +/- %600 error was not important. None of us had a watch with a second hand, so we counted out loud to time the drop's transit...I figure we were pretty close to a second per count.

Our undergrad labs were stocked with junk. Then we went off to co-op jobs at labs awash with Reagan's Star Wars money and got to play with REAL toys. Ill-conceived boondoggles have their merits. I also learned the valuable art of how to write a proposal. Did you know that virtually anything can be used in missile defense?

Posted by: Njorl | May 9, 2006 12:41 PM

#16

It took a little while to get into that because I kept reading "germanium" as "geranium". I imagine it would be pretty hard to solder wires to a geranium. African violets, maybe not quite so much.

Posted by: Rey Fox | May 9, 2006 2:20 PM

#17

That write-up reminded me of the physics practical (on hysteresis) in which my partner and I ended up spending most of the time (and write-up) demonstrating, with supporting calculations of course, that the equipment with which we had been provided wasn't actually capable (ie according to its specifications and the tests we did) of achieving the experimental results we were expected to graph. As far as I recall we got an alpha on it.

Posted by: SEF | May 13, 2006 8:26 PM