Why I am not an experimentalist; or, making faces with photolithography

In 2019, I spent six months in Gothenburg, Sweden at the Chalmers Institute of Technology. I was working in the lab of Per Delsing doing nanofabrication in my gap year before grad school, and it was not going well. Have you ever wondered how computer chips are made? A chip is basically a block of silicon covered in an immense tangle of thin wires and pieces of doped silicon. These wires are…