Electron Band Structure in Germanium, My Ass (2001)
Oh man. In the junior year of my Physics degree we had a special lab section called &quot;Modern Physics Lab&quot;. It was 2 credits (a lab is normally 1 credit in the Florida university system and denotes how much time you&#x27;re in the classroom during a week), and basically a self-study course on how to properly conduct experiments in the modern physics domain. Replicating results from early modern physics like Milliken oil drop, identifying lattice structures using X-ray spectroscopy, etc.<p>Everything in the lab was broken, and the faculty knew it. They told us on syllabus day that about 50% of our lab time was going to be spent repairing the old shitty equipment. Why? Because unless you&#x27;re working at MIT or CERN that&#x27;s how labs in the real world work. Everything&#x27;s broken and you don&#x27;t have any funding but you still have to publish.<p>And truth be told I learned more about both basic circuits and how to foster a &quot;get shit done&quot; attitude from that class than any other lab class I had to take. The modules were on a rotation and I remember one of the groups that ended up on a particular experiment spent almost the entire semester fixing one module that nobody got to do that semester. It was an old out-of-production expansion card that plugged in to some old DOS box and interfaced with some piece of tech I can&#x27;t remember. Literally everything about the setup was out of production. The amount of investigation and creativity they had to come up with in order to try and fix that experiment was impressive. I don&#x27;t remember if they succeeded.<p>That lab was an experience.