alt Hacker NewsIt takes a special kind of mind to appreciate this short post, not as fiction, but as truth and also as a jab at the physics sciences in general.
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Why is it a jab at physics? It's honest and beautiful -- I imagine this is exactly what an experience on the cutting edge of experiment is like! :D
Making this measurement (an ancient discovery) with latest equipment is easy, but imagine what it might have been like for the people who actually discovered this property of germanium. Our tools/probes cannot advance much faster than our understanding of a (related) subject -- we are constantly inventing/improvising tools using cutting edge scientific knowledge from a related field.
I'm an industrial physicist, and the post put a smile on my face. And indeed, it's not fiction. It's a blast. You will go through times like this, I guarantee it.
I've been wrestling with a cantankerous experiment for a couple of weeks. It produces reproducible results, but they don't make sense, and the work is not in a domain where discovering new physics by accident is likely.
I understood and appreciated it, and I’m not special
I appreciate it just from reading enough HN and XKCD
More jabs available at https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~kovar/bio.html and https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~kovar in general.