Charlie Wood

LEGAL RELEASE FORM: You agree to let us film you
ME: Seems OK
FORM: We own your face forever
ME: Ummm
FORM: We own your face via technologies that haven’t been invented yet
ME:
FORM: in other galaxies
ME: OK hold on
FORM: If we kill you during filming you’re not allowed to scream

Global Electricity Mid-Year Insights 2025 | Ember Solar and wind outpaced demand growth in the first half of 2025, as renewables overtook coal’s share in the global electricity mix.

Solar & wind met 109% of new electricity demand, globally, in the first half of 2025.

Renewables are handling all new demand & are inexorably moving beyond, to chip away at the FF foundation.

China Is Beating the US in the Battle for Energy Export Dominance China’s exports of clean energy technology hit a record in August, with $20 billion shipped globally.

"Energy dominance," you say?

As of this year, *China is exporting more clean-energy technology than the US is exporting the dirty stuff*.

The future is green energy & China, not the US, is set to dominate it.

Nobel Prize in Physics 2025 The Nobel Prize in Physics 2025 was awarded jointly to John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis "for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an...

John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis have won the Nobel Prize in physics for showing that quantum mechanics describes the behavior of objects much larger than atoms.
www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physi...

The world: 🔥🔥🔥

Scientists, in the background:

How We Came To Know Earth | Quanta Magazine Climate science is the most significant scientific collaboration in history. This series from Quanta Magazine guides you through basic climate science — from quantum effects to ancient hothouses, from...

Climate science is the most significant scientific collaboration in history, and its lessons are a massive human achievement. “How We Came To Know Earth,” our new series, is a guide to the modern understanding of fundamental climate science. www.quantamagazine.org/series/clima...

surely someone will do it faster now!

Scalable Chrysopoeia via $(n, 2n)$ Reactions Driven by Deuterium-Tritium Fusion Neutrons A scalable approach for chrysopoeia - the transmutation of base metals into gold - has been pursued for millennia. While there have been small-scale demonstrations in particle accelerators and proposa...

huh. along with abundant clean energy, fusion reactors might also be able to make *tons* of gold.

arxiv.org/abs/2507.13461

With Tom Lehrer's passing, I suppose this is a moment to share the story of the prank he played on the National Security Agency, and how it went undiscovered for nearly 60 years.

This is absurd.

The red supergiant Betelgeuse is the bright feature in this image.

But that darker blue splotch is a *companion star* that's just been discovered—and it orbits so close to Betelgeuse that it's inside the larger star's outer atmosphere.

150 years ago you could get published in Nature by just describing how cute your pets are.
www.nature.com/articles/012...

A speaking giving a talk on a stage with slides projected behind them.

This year it is 10 years since the discovery of #GravitationalWaves in 2015!

www.ligo.caltech.edu/video/ligo20...

@ligo.org @egovirgo.bsky.social
#GW150914
#GR24Amaldi16

"The Chipotle where Thomas Paine wrote Common Sense" encapsulates so much American history

Oh no

NSF budget would close down one of LIGO's sites. This would be, to put it lightly, a catastrophe for gravitational wave astronomy.

"In FY 2026 NSF will operate only one of the two sites
and will support a reduced level for technology development."
bsky.app/profile/hast...

First sigma-eight. Now g-2. Anomalies are dropping like flies this year.

Absolutely delighted by this Andalite balloon animal—the work of Josh Steinhouse, The Geek Balloonist: thegeekballoonist.com/home

He does a mean E.T., too.

Thanks for the smile, Josh. ❤️

#Animorphs #BalloonArtist

Singularities in Space-Time Prove Hard to Kill | Quanta Magazine Black hole and Big Bang singularities break our best theory of gravity. A trilogy of theorems hints that physicists will need to go to the ends of space and time to find a fix.

Do singularities exist? I'd always thought they were purely mathematical artifacts, but recent work in mathematical physics work from @bousso.bsky.social and others hint otherwise (for sufficiently broad definitions of "singularities" and "exist").

www.quantamagazine.org/singularitie...

Finding Beauty and Truth in Mundane Occurrences | Quanta Magazine The physicist Sidney Nagel delights in solving mysteries of the universe that are hiding in plain sight.

👀 On our radar: Beautiful physics of the ordinary

💬 “My deep and abiding feeling is that if you look at anything closely enough, there will be new riches to be found” —Sidney Nagel

✍️ Charlie Wood, @quantamagazine.bsky.social

🔗 www.quantamagazine.org/finding-beau...

YouTube video by Toran Seru the room temperature room

It is that one glorious week of the year where New York feels like The Room in Community

youtu.be/VxxYqE4Gil8?...

Love it when my worlds collide

He was so fun to talk to!

Finding Beauty and Truth in Mundane Occurrences | Quanta Magazine The physicist Sidney Nagel delights in solving mysteries of the universe that are hiding in plain sight.

Why do drops leave ring-shaped stains? Why do splashes splash? Had great fun chatting with Sid Nagel about beautiful, unappreciated physics right under our noses.

www.quantamagazine.org/finding-beau...

What a day to have studied Latin in Chicago.

Curved grid representing space descending onto a black hole at the bottom of the screen. There is a cartoony rocket ship in the middle of the screen, and many little white dots scattered around the grid. There are numbers above each dot and rocket, each currently set to different values.

For #BlackHoleWeek, why not go explore spacetime around a black hole?

Oh... because it'd be incredibly dangerous?
Good point.

Well, how about you use this (nearly*) perfectly safe simulation. testtubegames.com/blackhole.html

*There is always a small risk of collapsing into a simgularity.

I tore through all 60ish Animorphs books a few years ago and was shocked at how good they were. Can confirm they're a great read and long overdue for their prestige HBO show.

#GravitationalWaves provide a unique way to study black holes

This Orrery (by Zoheyr Doctor) illustrates the diverse black hole binaries and neutron star black–hole binaries from our O3b run. More massive binaries are shown as orbiting more slowly

#BlackHoleWeek 🔭

Trump Calmly Reminds Nation That Desire The Root Of All Suffering WASHINGTON—Seeking to reassure the public after his latest tariffs sent both U.S. and international markets into free fall, President Donald Trump calmly reminded the nation Thursday that desire is th...

Just incredible that Trump is turning Onion headlines into real headlines in less than a month

theonion.com/trump-calmly...

www.nytimes.com/2025/04/30/u...

how many wikipedia editors does it take to change a light bulb? so far 3439 different people have contributed to the "incandescent light bulb" article but it's not done being changed yet so who knows

A table comparing the computational power of HPC and a furnace

Pocket guide to materials discovery calculation methods (repost from the other place)