Dr Thomas Moore

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.

Certainly the low hanging fruit!

'We need them to be low' and 'there are realistic policy levers & technologies to make them low' are not always the same thing :)

Yes... provided your upstream methane emissions are low!

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.

As a chemical engineer who has spent more time with the Ergun Equation than the Darcy-Weisbach, I have no dog in this fight.

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?

Massive cyclone, my house.

Should be a fun weekend.

This is the first I've heard of this; my first reaction is 32 km/h is very, very slow...

#EnergySky #GreenSky #Science

We can make this happen today. Change is within reach. But it requires political talent, political will, persuasion, and a clear-eyed understanding that, with the right economic incentives, dominoes will fall fast. And don't forget to emphasise - a world without oil is a far, far better one. 6/6

Imagine what we could do, and how quickly we could do it, if sensible financial incentives - a price on carbon, a trading scheme with teeth - were in place *today*. Engineers around the world would jump at the chance to show the costings finally make sense, we need to start now, no time to waste. 5/

The same story holds in solar, in wind, in batteries. It's visionary engineers who want to make a difference, pushing against the tide to bring technologies to reality. 4/

Engineers who understand the science, and hate the economic situation we find ourselves in, where there are no incentives for cleaning up processes. Engineers who pushed against shareholders worried about NPV and IRR. Engineers who pushed against politicians worried about the next election cycle. 3/

Think about it. These are multi-billion dollar chemical processes running for no reason whatsoever beyond removing CO2. How did those projects come about? One word: engineers. Engineers who believed in a cleaner industry pushing hard internally for trials, demonstrations, and projects. 2/

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/

As we've seen around the world, if you don't label it a tax, someone else will label it for you!

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

And the Paris Peace conference!

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

One day at a time, one sentence at a time - you got this!

tweaked question.

tweaked answer

Update: there's still some strange fragility. If I tweak the problem slightly, the smooth reasoning stalls out, and we get nonsensical answers. I have not idea what o3 is doing here.

Reactor Engineering

Answer

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

Chaotic Evil confirmed.