Here I present my notes and resources that I used throughout the Experimental Physics year-long course.
In the Fall Quarter, we had to complete three labs and quite simple lab reports, mostly talking about the data collection and analysis. This quarter was definitely the turning point to start documenting everything you complete so that others can replicate your result. Then you have to speak about the impact of your experiment and what your conclusions are.
In the Winter Quarter, we only had to complete two labs, but we also had to participate in paper discussions. I believe we had two sessions throughout the quarter where the lab instructors shared papers related to experimental physics aimed at or completed by junior undergraduate physics students, and we would discuss good and bad things about their explanations. This quarter was a bit more relaxed compared to last quarter, but the labs were still a bit difficult.
In the Spring Quarter, we again only had to complete two labs, but we had to re-analyze a past lab to present it as an article and provide peer feedback. The two labs weren’t as difficult since I’d been getting a bit used to the groove of barely understanding the theory from the wiki-experiment explanations, playing around with the apparatus collecting relevant data, drawing some light conclusions, writing everything down, and editing to a lab report. By this point we were expected to provide a more thorough analysis of our data. The article was the major pain in the butt: we had to go back with the same data and implement instructor feedback to re-write a lab report as an article, and providing others with peer feedback.
Overall this class was good to start thinking in the mind of a scientist of asking questions and figuring out how to probe an answer for the question. The main skill I learned was being able to scientifically write out what I had completed. I already had coding experience, so the programming was alright for me. Plus, they mostly provide template jupyter notebooks to complete the analysis.
For each lab, I share a lab report with feedback in comments from graduate student TAs:
Also here is the journal article I wrote for the Mossbauer Spectroscopy lab along with the initial feedback I received. It’s nice to see how I would write physics labs and change over time. This was a fun class, except for the having to spend 8-hours every other week inside a basement physics lab part. The uncertainty analysis was the bane of my existence for so many hours throughout my third year at the University of Chicago.