electron brainsprain

Yup. All the universities are teaching "Entrepeneurship", which means promoting silly ideas to dumb VCs to finance a lifestyle.

Niels Bohr, 1958

"We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct."

The quote was reported by Freeman Dyson in a Scientific American article (volume 199, No. 3, September 1958, pp. 74-82).

Half a century ago is 1966, so your instructor wasn't being all that original.

That's right, but he was introducing newbies into the alien world of sub-atomic particles.

It has long been the case that any marketing presentation has at least one slide with an exponential takeoff after

No doubt there is a Dilbert to that effect.

Not so weird. The De Broglie wavelength of an electron, at condensed-matter energies (i.e., from thermal (~26meV) up to the work potential (at most, a dozen eV)), are some ~atoms across.

Well, that's unfair, for two reasons:

1. The high energy ones, that are doing the atomic stuff (valence electrons), are actually atomic-sized (and smaller). They're held with binding energies over 10eV. (Up to ~100keV for the lowest orbitals of heavy elements: you can see them with x-ray spectroscopy.)

But at thermal energies, yes, fairly large.

But anyway, that's the "size" in free space...

1. A crystal lattice is a periodic charge structure, which distorts the electron's wave function, causing it to spread out and wrap around many atoms at once, and dragging it in many directions (anisotropy -- different properties along critical points of the Brillouin zone, which are axes in k-space). The effect can perhaps be likened to viscous drag, but rather than being lossy, it's reactive. More like a loaded* transmission line.

*Loaded, as with ferrite and dielectrics.

Much as the equivalent permeability and permittivity of a system determine its transmission properties (like the propagation velocity), the crystal properties determine the equivalent mass and velocity of the electrons within.

So, the mass equivalent being large is simply because the atoms exchange momentum with the electron, weighing it down with extra energy. And the effect varies with direction.

Tim

Yeah, everyone wants to try out their latest elevator pitch. 8-(

--sp

Thanks Tim, and all responders, for the broader view. I am encouraged.

Thanks for this- prosaic explanations are rare!

Are we manufacturing a generation of losers?

Well, they've grown up on awards for participation, rather than success. They break down in tears at the slightest perceived, well, slight. Yes, I'd say generation snowflake is a loss.

If they are encouraged to raise money and start silly businesses that mostly fail, and they have to move back into mom's basement, I hope their tiny egos won't be bruised.

That's Hillary's next program. She'll guarantee the success of all entrepreneurs.

Sure. She'll undoubtedly be inspired by Trump's exemplary record of blaming others while going bankrupt. Or maybe Trump's plans which have the national debt expanding beyond anything previously imagined.

At least bankruptcy isn't a criminal offense.

Not even Trump would be that silly. Roughly 80% of start-ups fail within fi ve years. If there was any reliable way of identifying the 20% that will ma ke it, somebody would be exploiting it.

The whole venture capitalist business is predicated on backing enough start

-ups to recover all you losses on the small fraction who not only survive b ut also make a lot of money. Only 9% of venture capital funded projects mak e it to an initial public offering (on the stock market), but 26% get bough t out before they get that far (mostly for peanuts).

Trump's "The Apprentice" was all about getting entertainment out of rejecti ng hopeless startups, so this isn't exactly esoteric.

What's hilarious is that, in the crowdfunding/VC world, people get credit for previous failures! The more the better.

Once in England, railroad bridges tended to collapse, so builders were preferred for having previous failures, on the theory that more failures were improbable.

Den mandag den 24. oktober 2016 kl. 19.48.28 UTC+2 skrev John Larkin:

isn't your credit rating system kinda like that, had a loan and not completely failed paying it is better than never had a loan?

-Lasse

I never borrow money so my credit rating is terrible. But then, I don't care.

I put somewhere north of $10K on my (two) credit cards in the last two months. Always paid in full each month. It's convenient, SECURE, and I save money. A big credit score really helped a few years ago when we moved. Two mortgages were no problem, even when few were getting mortgage loans. I don't have the cash to pay for two houses.