You’re right and I should have worded that better. The experiment itself wasn’t random, though the outcomes might not have been predicted.
I was born and educated thus that I got the solution first: transistors are made with doped silicon that allows current to flow when such and such a field is applied because of holes and electrons, etc., etc.
Implicitly, I’d assumed that the creators of the transistor just had this theory. They knew about current and charge carriers and the electron configuration of different atoms, so they could just combine these and figure out a workable design. It was surprising to methat key parts of the picture weren’t theory driven in this way, instead the unanticipated outcome of experiments where they didn’t have good theory.
You’re right and I should have worded that better. The experiment itself wasn’t random, though the outcomes might not have been predicted.
I was born and educated thus that I got the solution first: transistors are made with doped silicon that allows current to flow when such and such a field is applied because of holes and electrons, etc., etc.
Implicitly, I’d assumed that the creators of the transistor just had this theory. They knew about current and charge carriers and the electron configuration of different atoms, so they could just combine these and figure out a workable design. It was surprising to methat key parts of the picture weren’t theory driven in this way, instead the unanticipated outcome of experiments where they didn’t have good theory.