Report from 2025's 3rd year "Entropy and Temperature" lecture: gosh this is difficult to teach. One day I'll master the 2h rigorous introduction to entropy... Next year we might experiment with some of the heat engine-based derivations (God forbid). Kardar's approach is tempting: elegant & brief.

I spent some time this morning in Eisberg's Quantum Physics. It's stunning. There's a lot of hype about GenAI for learning. I buy it in domains where notation & facts are key (lean LaTeX; learn woodworking). But in science, nothing can replace a beautiful, well thought through textbook.

I spent the afternoon looking through CVs for a PhD program. All over the world, there are talented young engineers doing beautiful & subtle work. Yet so many of these bright minds have struggled to find work & stability in their home countries. It's heart breaking. We need to do better by them.

It's amazing how many equations which were historically derived via fancy math can, in hindsight, follow straight from dimensional analysis. To name a few, - Stokes equation - Darcy equation - Richardson-Zaki Any others?

Should be a fun weekend.

I take encouragement from the fact we have made so much progress in clean tech *in spite* of constant political pushback and a lack of sensible economic incentives. 35% of CCS projects are *not* run for the purpose of enhanced oil recovery, or any other purpose beyond preventing CO2 emissions. 1/

Among energy experts, "We DESPERATELY need a carbon tax" is uttered in private more and in public less than any other phrase. How did carbon taxation become toxic? Be creative. Link it to a UBI if you must. Because like it or not, market forces are our only way out of this mess. #EnergySky #GreenSky

Was talking with a senior colleague the other day about the multi-month process of submitting a manuscript before the internet. Typing a document, hand drawing figures, mailing the editors, mail from the reviewers. No wonder old papers show so much more love and care. #AcademicSky #EduSky

When should academics working on green technologies travel for international conferences? Asking for a friend. #AcademiaSky #GreenSky #EnergySky

There's a chance AI makes much engineering work redundant in the near future. But if it doesn't, it's certainly made it *much* harder to train engineers with assignments asking them to solve intermediate, stepping-stone problems. OpenAI's free O3-mini is scary-good at problems at that level.

Computers & Chemical Engineering has to be the most under-rated journal in terms of attention & respect received vs quality of articles published. There is no junk, no faff, and no care for 'hype': just hardcore math & engineering on real & hard problems. #Science #EnergySky #ChemSky

Rowan Williams' 'A Century of Poetry' has to be one of the best books I've read in years. Each poem is like a miniature puzzle expertly pulled apart by the former Archbishop. It's encouraging to see a book of such quality published today. #BookSky

Just threw my favourite reactor engineering problem at ChatGPT's new (free) o3-mini model and it nailed it. I came up with this problem years ago. It doesn't feel solvable at first: you need a good instinct for 1st-order reactions, and I haven't seen something similar in any textbooks. Impressive.

How did academics spend their time before personal computers were around? I forgot my laptop this morning; after the initial paralysis, I read a paper, got some writing done and responded to an urgent email on my phone. I like this pace. I might 'forget' my laptop again soon... #EduSky #AcademicSky

One of the best resources for applying learnings from the education research literature in the classroom also happens to be a post on teaching board games at boardgamegeek.com: boardgamegeek.com/thread/34301... #edusky #boardgames

Pet Peeve: Capital Pi is a terrible letter to use for a dimensionless group, as it makes writing products of groups confusing. My students learn the Buckingham Phi Theorem.

Math Humour

Very happy to share our latest perspective in Nature Chemical Engineering, 'Accelerating climate technologies through the science of scale-up.' We discuss tools academics and R&D engineers can use to accelerate the scaling of new technologies. Read it here! rdcu.be/d30IM @nature.com 🧪⚛️ 🧮 🔌💡

Kazuo Ishiguro's novels are perfect. 💙📚 Go - go read them all. Whatever you do, don't read a review; they spoil the effect entirely. You can trust me. Start with 'The Remains of the Day'. That is all.

New rule: Peer review requests shall not be sent from 20 Dec - 2 Jan. 🧪

I remember doing research on Liquid Organic Hydrogen Carriers (Formic Acid in particular) and realising *just* how inefficient & expensive they are. Liquefaction is much easier. But it's still very, very hard. As usual, Michael Liebreich says it best. #GreenSky 🧪🔌💡

I've spent the last little while reading the excellent (satirically titled) textbook 'Understanding Deep Learning' by Simon Prince. The field is a joy, and full of surprises. Take Double Descent: the unintuitive behaviour which is the mathematical cornerstone allowing massive LLMs to be trained. 🧵

Machine learning is the statistical physics of the 21st century: - Phenomena that emerge at scale. - Criticality phenomena (phase changes; critical points; double descent criticality.) - Practitioners using tools that work, though no one understands why (ergodicity; entropy; superposition; SGD).🧪⚛️

Meanwhile, across the Pond, Germany will shutter a key LNG import terminal in the first quarter of 2025, as EU energy crisis eases. oilprice.com/Latest-Energ... 🛢️🔥 🔌💡

I just stumbled upon this, & I’m betting you’ll want to bookmark it for 2025! 😀 Here's 240+ premade digital escape rooms, all organized by subject and grade level—and completely free! 🤯 sites.google.com/morgan.k12.g... Shoutout to @brandynichols.bsky.social for creating this masterpiece! #edusky

Sane scientist: Don't overfit your model. Have lots more data than parameters. Deep Neural Network with 65M parameters trained on 1M data points: Hold my beer

Pro-tip: if the axes and tick labels don't look too big when you generate your figure in Jupyter or Matlab, your font isn't large enough for a two-column journal article.

Decarbonizing the economy is like eating an elephant - you just do it one bite at a time.

Love this article from @quantamagazine.bsky.social on the 200th anniversary of Carnot's 'On the Motive Power of Fire'. They've outdone themselves - a fantastic introduction to the state of the art. www.quantamagazine.org/what-is-entr... 🧪⚛️

#Victoria launches consultation on the next step its Gas Substitution Roadmap, including options to extend the ban on new connections and mandate the transition to electric appliances in gas-connected homes

An Impression from an Outsider: Researchers in Deep Learning are experimentalists who don't need to clean up glassware or use soapy water to find leaks in a pressure vessel. 🧪🧮 ⚛️ #AI #MachineLearning

For anyone else who believes "Laudato Si" is the sanest book on climate change yet written... Thanks @katharinehayhoe.com! go.bsky.app/RMWNiio

In one year, I genetically engineered the boring Arabidopsis into a beautiful ornamental flower 🧬🌹 Here is how and why I gave this model organism a visual upgrade 🧵(1/7)

🦟 New Hope for Malaria Prevention A new malaria vaccine offers 55% protection in young children, targeting the blood stage of the parasite - a first in vaccine development. This could transform the fight against one of the world’s deadliest diseases. 🔗 www.thelancet.com/journals/lan... #SciComm 🧪

I love this figure from an old Bardow-group paper which (like most of their work) has aged remarkably well. Not all uses of clean electricity have equal impact in terms of reducing lifecycle CO2 emissions! pubs.rsc.org/en/content/a...

With young kids, I've read The Wind in the Willows many (many) times. It's a perfect book. This scene always brings to mind the academic etiquette which forbids 'any sort of comment on the absence of one's friends from a group meeting at any time, for any reason whatsoever'. 🧪🔌💡💙📚

What are the best science/engineering feeds to subscribe to on Bluesky? I'm currently following #GreenSky, #EnergySky and #Science - any others worth knowing about? 🧪🔌💡

Nice new paper from CMU PhD student Ethan Sunshine on surrogate model development for simplifying optimisation. I learned a lot about surrogates & optimisation as this project evolved... 🧵 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... #EnergySky #GreenSky #Science

Calling all Macro Energy Systems enthusiasts. I created this macro energy systems starter pack. Featuring @jessedjenkins.com @gruberte.bsky.social @jfdecarolis.bsky.social @patricia-levi.bsky.social #energySky Let me know in the comments who I missed and I'll add them. go.bsky.app/TTnoSNL

In my experience, three things are often missed in the discussion of ‘synthetic fuels’ or ‘e-fuels’ such as methanol (for shipping), hydrogen (for industrial heat) of CH4 (for heating). 🧵 #EnergySky #GreenSky #Science 🧪🔌💡

This paper from Howard Herzog is getting a lot of attention around here. I like it a lot, but it also fails to address a few important points. A 🧵. news.mit.edu/2024/reality... #EnergySky #GreenSky #Science

I'm a carbon capture guy after all. The word cloud doesn't lie. Courtesy @scholargoggler.bsky.social via @sylvaingigan.bsky.social

Entropy is one of the most difficult topics in all the physical sciences. There are as many ways to teach entropy as teachers who teach it. Today, I want to discuss a personal approach from a paper in Chemical Engineering Education. 🧵 journals.flvc.org/cee/article/... #EnergySky #ChemSky #Science

There are a million chemists on here - surely one of you can help me. I have an electrochemical cell that induces a spatial pH change, which triggers a reaction in the bulk of a fluid (between the electrodes). This reaction generates entropy as it happens fast & is far from equilibrium. 1/2

If you work at DOE/EPA/DOI and are likely to be cut in the next admin or are leaving voluntarily, DM me! I'm writing an article to help companies snatch up the highly talented staff of these agencies and help the ex-govt employees find a job to further the climate transition #energysky

2024 marks the 200th anniversary of Carnot’s famous treatise, ‘On the Motive Power of Heat.’ One day we’ll discuss how he formulated a complete theory of reversible heat engines without understanding that heat is a form of energy. 🤯 But today, we'll look at the little-appreciated Appendix A. 🧵 🧪🔌💡

Carbon Capture energy requirements have fallen almost 50% in the last 20 years, but the most significant process improvements came from an unassuming paper from 2016. Let me tell you the story of the Advanced Flash Stripper. 🧵 pubs.rsc.org/en/content/a... 🧪🔌💡 #Science #EnergySky #GreenSky

Here's a starter pack of engineers (and a few scientists) working in Clean Tech R&D. Let me know if you'd like to be included! #EnergySky #GreenSky #Science 🧪🔌💡 go.bsky.app/2Um4Ubc

Here's a nice tool for finding like-minded people on #bluesky bsky-follow-finder.theo.io

"Why are electricity prices so high if renewables break generation records and are so cheap?" I have been asked. The main reason: Gas still sets the price 63% of the time in wholesale electricity markets in EU27 & >90% in some countries. The graphic is from the Draghi Report.