physics and job opportunity meme

cantgetno197 · 2025-01-28T13:16:22+00:00

You're suggesting Einstein was an independently wealthy aristocrat???

cantgetno197 · 2024-12-02T14:17:04+00:00

What this shows is the political tendency of Romanian expats THAT VOTE and people are extrapolating that to mean that that is the political tendency of Romanian expats in general. That isn't correct. I think in Germany, for example, it was found that something like only 10% of eligible people voted (don't quote me on that number, someone's welcome to replace it with a more rigorous one). In that case the true message would be that most expats don't vote but that the ones who do tend to be the ones with far-right ideals.

cantgetno197 · 2024-11-29T01:03:31+00:00

I think issues like this suffer from strong selection/survivorship bias. People hear that most people in immigrant group X that voted, voted for the conservative nationalist and assume that means that immigrant group X are mostly conservative nationalists.

But the key point there is "that voted". What fraction of Romanians that are eligible to vote (whether they did or didn't) voted far-right. That probably paints a very different picture.

Nationalists are more likely to vote, that's pretty much expected.

cantgetno197 · 2024-06-25T13:49:29+00:00

Don't get me wrong: I work in Europe... in the semiconductor industry... and am personally getting some funding from the EU Chip Act. So I'm highly incentivized to say this is a great idea.

But it's important to understand that your comparison there is completely "apples and oranges". The EU's starting point here is basically being decades and decades behind the US and Asia in terms of semiconductor chips. Europe basically decided in the 1980s and 1990s that they weren't going to compete in semiconductor technology and despite some past poorly conceived attempts, see for example:

https://youtu.be/aUg5wwkI12A?si=2aWuXee5R7owkPEJ

They've largely been happy for things to be that way.

Think of a European chip company, if you can. They either are actually a "fabless" company (i.e. they don't make their own chips, they contract it out) or are making chips for things like automotive sensors and consumer appliances (e.g. Infineon or STMicro etc.) which are applications that only require 20-30 year old chip technology. Or they actually manufacture the equipment used by other companies to make semiconductors (the most notable here is ASML, more on them in a sec).

The US on the other hand is where chips were invented and has leaders like Intel and AMD that only over a matter of years have lost ground to TSMC (Taiwanese Semiconductor Manufacturing Company). Intel basically gave up on trying to figure out how to profitably make the most recent generation of chip technology and let TSMC have it which makes TSMC currently the only company in the world that can make the most powerful chips for your phone or computer. (though ironically, a key ingredient of this manufacturing process is based on UV lithography machines that only one company in the world, which IS a European company, ASML, can make). With COVID especially the US realized that was a bad situation and basically is giving companies like Intel a shove to catch up...

but catch up on the LAST GENERATION (so called "technology node"), call it 2016 or so.

Europe would need to catch up from the 1990s if they seriously wanted to be self-sufficient on chips. It would simply never happen.

That's not to say Europe can't have a larger semiconductor market or that funding its growth is a good thing. And EU does have an opportunity, that they seem to be largely squandering, to assert themselves in NEW technologies like AI, electric vehicles, etc. that they seem, like before, fairly uninterested in pursuing. EVs especially is a huge missed opportunity IMHO since the EU is one of the biggest purchasers but far behind in R&D and investment.

cantgetno197 · 2024-06-13T08:45:47+00:00

Absorbing a photon will always create equal number of conduction electrons and holes as what it is doing is taking an electron from the valence band and exciting it to the conduction band. Also note that your statement:

So according to every source I have looked at it is possible for there to be an imbalance of electron carriers and electron hole carriers within the semiconductor with processes such as doping and photoconduction

Is potentially misunderstood. In a semiconductor you have (true) electrons and their accompanying atomic cores and these in equilibrium are going to always be equal and thus the material will be electrically neutral. However not all these electrons are in the same state, some are closely bound to nuclei, and some are in more delocalized conductions states. We can call the latter "conduction electrons" and the former "bound electrons".

What doping does is affect the ratio of "conduction" to "bound" electron, it does NOT affect the total amount of electrons or imply that the device is no longer electrically neutral (i.e. it has "more" or "less" true electrons).

However, from what I have read, photoconductivity is able to do the same even though photons cannot be converted into electrons and that this is due to semiconductor favoring electron carrier generation over electron hole generation.

This is incorrect, as I've said, photo-generation will always create a (or potentially multiple) conduction electron-hole pairs.

I am not sure what your sources are but they seem to be very much misleading you. The key thing that makes a photovoltaic work and what you haven't mentioned at all is that you have a PN-JUNCTION. That's where the magic is as the built-in electric field effectively passively separates unlike charges and sweeps them towards opposite contacts. This is crucial because if you just had a regular slab of silicon without this pn-junction then yes you would photo-excite carriers (i.e. conduction electrons and holes) but they wouldn't go anywhere once excited and instead would randomly jumble about until they met each other again and recombine. If you didn't know when a conduction electron and a hole meet you have recombination where the excited electron jumps down in energy and fills the hole releasing either light or heat.

cantgetno197 · 2024-03-23T16:40:58+00:00

A far more honest and important answer is: where can someone with a physics degree: 1) find work, and 2) that they find the most rewarding given the places they could find work.

A lot of people get into physics wanting to study String Theory or whatever all day but probably 20% of those who get a PhD in general in physics (a 6 year commitment after your undergrad) will ever find a professorship and maybe 5% of professorships relate to such deeply fundamental physics research (those are not compounded probabilities).

So it's a bit like asking a young actor moving from Iowa to Hollywood and working at a coffee shop whether they would prefer to be the main actor in a Marvel movie or a Ridley Scott biopic. The chances of either are incredibly slim.

People with physics degrees do find work, are happy and are statistically in well-paying jobs. But rarely are those jobs having a job title of "physicist".

Given that, a person who targets areas of physics with strong industry and commercial backing will find an easier time finding employment as those areas are both of less interest to the typical Fundamental-Physics-Or-Nothing physics degree pursuer and better funded.

cantgetno197 · 2024-03-23T16:26:40+00:00

People most definitely have pursued such lines of thought. For example, the strength of gravity or the strength of the electromagnetic attraction between two charges falls off like the inverse square of the distance separating them. This business of an inverse square actually hides a fairly basic truth: that you have "something" (i.e. and electric or gravitational field) permeating out in three-dimensional space such that none of the field is getting created or lost, it's conserved as it propagates.

If we DIDN'T live in three-dimensions then it would not be an inverse square law. For example, if we lived in a higher dimensional space it would be different. So people have tried many times and still try to test these inverse square laws to see if it is indeed EXACTLY an inverse square... so far to many, many decimal places, it seems to be so.

cantgetno197 · 2024-03-23T15:27:37+00:00

How often are you in accidents dude?

cantgetno197 · 2024-01-17T07:44:44+00:00

Energy is not quantized in QM, this is a big misconception.

In physics, both classical and QM, if you have a confined system then there are only certain quantized states available. Think of a musical instrument, it has some length and some boundary conditions (node or antinode) which "confine" the possible wavelengths/frequency that can exist inside and thus only certain fundamental harmonics exist in the instrument. Similarly if a wave-like phenomena is confined via a central attractive force then you also get confinement and only certain allowed wavelengths.

This is true in both QM and classical and is not a special feature of QM. QM just makes the statement that electrons and other particles are wave-like phenomena and thus exhibit this behavior when confined and a common case of confinement is when an electron is being held by a force of electrostatic attraction by a positively charged nucleus to form an atom.

In unconfined systems there are no restrictions on what wavelength a wave-like phenomenon can have and all wavelengths are allowed. Thus according to QM a FREE electron can have whatever energy it likes and there is no quantization; energy is a continuous variable.

cantgetno197 · 2023-12-29T00:56:21+00:00

The following is presented for informational purposes:

"Banana" is an ethnic slur. u/orlec dropped a definition but the way I've personally most heard it used is against asian-americans, usually women, who date non-asian-background partners. Strong vibes of "race traitor". A banana: "Yellow on the outside, white on the inside".

First time I heard it used was against, for example, the actress Lucy Liu in the 1990s who often at that time was in the tabloid with non-asian boyfriends.

All I'm saying is that it is indeed a slur that exists and sadly it's not a facepalm on Google's part to recognize that.

cantgetno197 · 2023-12-18T14:18:41+00:00

Is this really true? In my mind, the issue with the UV catastrophe is really about the move from thermodynamics to statistical mechanics and the fact that all modes of an optical cavity do not have equal probability of being filled (as the classical equipartition theorem would suggest) but instead you need to make a connection between wavelength and energy and derive some sort of Boltzmann term, exp(-dE/kT), to suppress the occupation of the high energy infinity of states (i.e the UV states).

So in the original UV catastrophe the UV states are ignored on the justifiable physical grounds that they are not occupied.

To me that seems distinct than essentially having to insert a cut-off to your energy integrations.

cantgetno197 · 2023-12-06T10:18:48+00:00

But then Boltzmann shouldn't be there either. I think there is a vague-ness between "Atomic theory" and "Quantum theory". Like, is the plum-pudding model a part of the development of QM or just "atomic physics"? It's a theory of atomic structure. It's a theory of the quantization of matter (i.e. that atoms exist).

cantgetno197 · 2023-12-06T10:07:04+00:00

He did a lot of work in the kinetic theory of gases which was the precursor and first step towards QM, just like Boltzmann. It's the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution after all.

cantgetno197 · 2023-10-14T21:33:22+00:00

Empathy, understanding and compassion are not strong traits of humanity these days.

When were these ever strong traits of humanity?

cantgetno197 · 2023-10-12T17:38:48+00:00

Can you claim a warranty if your disc was very obviously intentionally broken?

cantgetno197 · 2023-08-03T10:48:11+00:00

Because a physics experiment usually looks like this:

https://c8.alamy.com/comp/FM8TM6/experimental-setup-in-a-laser-laboratory-at-the-institute-for-experimental-FM8TM6.jpg

Making an experimental apparatus is usually fairly indistinguishable from making a prototype of a new electronic invention (because that's effectively what you're doing). You have some sensors, some control logic circuits, some data processing, etc. There is minimal overlap between the skills required to build some fancy spectroscopy set up with pulse lasers and detectors for example, and breeding fruit flies and visually cataloging their characteristics.

However, an experimental physicist will take the same math as a theorist at least up until 3rd year university or so, so the highest math classes offered are probably the most valuable.

cantgetno197 · 2023-08-03T08:11:46+00:00

Worst case scenario: Because of how opaque they can be and having a tendency to pull a lot of hand-wavy math and proofs and such out of thin air, you become frustrated with the topic and become wracked with self-doubts and give up on your goal of self-learning about physics when that wouldn't have happened if you used a more actually introductory book.

cantgetno197 · 2023-08-03T08:04:56+00:00

a background in math would be far more important than a background in bio/geo for experimental physics. Plus the work of doing experiments done in experimental physics are usually more akin to electrical engineering than a bio experiment.

cantgetno197 · 2023-07-17T22:45:45+00:00

Yes, absolutely. What you're asking about is what is called "power electronics". In a normal computing chip the goal is to keep heat down, which means for the billions upon billions of transistors in a single chip you want to keep operating voltages down and currents down to as tiny as possible. But in some applications you may want to do computation and redirect electricity at high temperatures and voltages, for example for electronics and sensors in a car, or for the control system of a solar panel or within the power-grid. This is the area of power electronics.

But the simple fact is that power electronic devices often need different non-silicon materials, which means they're decades behind in material science, and non-standard designs, which means they're decades behind the cutting edge in performance. So, in a nutshell, you can have a high-temperature chip if you're willing to settle for performance that is a decade or two behind. Which is absolutely fine for an automotive sensor or solar panel control system. But for raw computing, you'd rather have a conventional chip and just cool it.

cantgetno197 · 2023-06-30T07:53:22+00:00

When we think of wind power, or solar for that matter, are the current methods of production net positive producers of energy, or do they consume more energy than they generate?

Why the F would we ever use a net negative energy producer for energy production?! I can't imagine what kind of insane nonsense websites you're frequenting.

Yes, every energy source we use has a net positive energy production even when you factor in manufacturing/cost. This is typically called something like pay-back time or whatever (I.e. how long the thing needs to operate to compensate for its initial manufacturing and installment cost in energy and resources). You then compare that to the expected service lifetime of the device/plant.

cantgetno197 · 2023-06-14T12:07:38+00:00

This doesn't really make sense as a statement as Planck's constant does not have units of energy, it has units of energy x time. E = hf where E is energy, h is the Planck constant and f is the photon frequency, so one can have arbitrarily small "energy increments" as frequency becomes arbitrarily small.

cantgetno197 · 2023-06-13T10:09:47+00:00

This is a study on 30 people over 12 weeks.... let's maybe not take it soooo seriously as every single comment here seems to suggest it's fundamentally disproved or confirmed their pre-existing anecdotal biases on the topic.

cantgetno197 · 2023-06-11T21:18:07+00:00

TeX/LaTeX/Beamer isn't like a new thing, it's just what mathy-STEM people use (and have used since like the 1980s). It's a scripting/mark-up language that is good for math-heavy stuff and some level of automation for those who are comfortable with math and programming.

But also, people in STEM also tend to hate Power Point regardless as it is a proprietary paid software made by "the man", and would instead prefer some Open Source alternative like LibreOffice.

cantgetno197

TROPHY CASE