Britney educating physicists & cited during job interviews
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At the dawn of the millennium, something beautiful and weird emerged from the era’s cultural detritus and made it onto the then-burgeoning internet: Britney Spears’ Guide to Semiconductor Physics, found via the unassuming URL britneyspears.ac.
The site featured pages of information on everything from the basics of how semiconductors work—for example, how materials like silicon can be “doped” with impurities to carry an electrical current, and are the basis of modern electronics—to entries on the “finite barrier quantum well” and “photolithography”.
All of it is allegedly written by Britney Spears, whom the site casts as being a physics genius as well as a pop star. But in reality, the site was was created by a young theoretical physics post-grad at the University of Essex named Carl Hepburn.
Even Spears’ record label gave the site their blessing. Fifteen years later, the guide is still up, vintage glamour shots of Spears and all.
Besides shoring up his legacy, Hepburn says he’s paid to keep the site live for all these years in the hopes that people will still learn something from it. It’s also often mentioned in job interviews, he told me, which isn’t surprising for a web developer, and probably explains why the site contains a link to his CV. But it really does seem like Hepburn cares more about education than he does job prospects; he runs another site, Splung (gross), that contains reams of esoteric explanations of topics in physics, written by Hepburn, but without all the Britney pics.
