Ancient Web: Britney Spears' Guide to Semiconductor Physics Is Real

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Yes, the website is really called Britney Spears' Guide to Semiconductor Physics. No, Britney Spears did not secretly abandon pop music to explain quantum wells. The actual story is better Internet.

Visit Britney Spears' Guide to Semiconductor Physics

The site was written and designed by Carl Hepburn while he was a postgraduate student at the University of Essex. Hepburn explains that he started the pages while studying for his dissertation because he wanted to consolidate what he was learning about semiconductor physics while also learning HTML.

Then he added Britney Spears so people would remember the website.

It worked.

Under the joke is an actual physics tutorial

The navigation covers semiconductor basics, crystal structures, junctions, finite-barrier quantum wells, radiative recombination, carrier transport, density of states, edge-emitting lasers, vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers, photonic crystals, fabrication and photolithography. There is even a semiconductor-term "lip-glossary."

The tone may be absurd, but the subject matter is not random filler. Hepburn had a theoretical-physics degree and an experimental-physics master's degree and was working on a PhD involving GaInNAs vertical-cavity semiconductor optical amplifiers. His master's dissertation on the temperature dependence of long-wavelength VCSELs was linked from the site.

This is an excellent old-Web trick: hide serious information inside something weird enough that people voluntarily tell their friends about it.

SEO before everybody called it SEO

Modern marketing departments spend enormous amounts of time trying to manufacture memorable hooks. A physics student put a global pop star next to semiconductor equations and accidentally solved the problem twenty years ago.

For webmasters, the lesson is not "put celebrities on everything." The lesson is that useful information benefits from a recognizable frame. The strange part got people through the door; the real technical content gave the page a reason to survive after the joke should have expired.

The semiconductor guide remains online, still explaining VCSELs under a banner nobody could confuse with a university textbook.

Read Britney Spears' Guide to Semiconductor Physics

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.