Electron band structure in germanium, my ass (2001)

A thing of beauty is a joy forever - John Keats

Honestly, physics is so full of pretension and hero worship. Even among seasoned lecturers there's a tendency to mythologise the progress of the art by making it sound like all the great results we rely on were birthed fully-formed by the giants who kindly lend us their divine shoulders.

Ironically there's a kind of Gell-Mann amnesia here, working scientists know that must of your work will consist of stumbling down blind alleys in the dark and looking for needles under lampposts that aren't even near the haystack.

I'm reminded of an anecdote which I can't currently source, but as I remember it Hilbert was trying to derive the Einstein Field Equations by a variational method. He correctly took the Ricci curvature R as the Lagrangian, but then neglected to multiply by the tensor density, sqrt(-g). This is kind of a rookie mistake, but made by one of the history's greatest mathematical physicists.

Anyway I love this article, it's a breath of fresh air and rightly beloved by undergrads.

(edit: for a counterpoint to this work please see another classic: "The physics is the life" -http://i.imgur.com/eQuqp.png )

There seems to be a bit of confusion about the Hilbert-Einstein controversy [1], and I believe consensus is that Hilbert derived the equations a few days before Einstein, but did not claim ownership of the research. But this is the first time I'm hearing that Hilbert made a mistake. (I mean, maybe he did, but he got the right result eventually.)

[1] https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/56892/did-hilber...