Catboy physicist 🏳️‍🌈🧶⚛️

Nicholas Decker: Hero. (And fucking hilarious.)

@Suflaky Or you could just try not putting things that don't exist in your papers and take responsibility for your name being on them???

It reads as a 1-year ban but it's actually a lifelong ban, because there's no point to post on arXiv if you're already accepted in a peer-reviewed conference. Seems very excessive to me, and very prone to false-positives. For example, I write comments to myself for future edits,

@LinkofSunshine I mean, you can, it is real, so technically he is totally correct.

Bro

@singhabhi I would say how people are acting about it is more "disgusting" than "weird." Most of these people are just pieces of shit who can't stand the fact that people who think differently than them exist.

This pile-on on Nicholas Decker is so weird. Who knows how his PhD research will turn out but we do know he can read dense material closely, and write well. If he becomes “just” a Tim Harford translating academic econ faithfully for broad audiences, that’d be a big win 🤷🏻‍♂️

@cupcakemichimu @taco_lord94 @BUNNIMODER I didn't say we shouldn't have them, I am explaining the technical engineering reasons why we don't. And until people like you acknowledge that engineering is a real thing and it actually is extremely logistically complex, WE WILL NOT HAVE IT BECAUSE IT WILL NOT GET DONE.

@stringlandscape @taco_lord94 @BUNNIMODER Then we can and should have solar. It's not like oil drilling and refinery and burning and getting that energy to the grid isn't logistically complex

this is literally exactly why we don't have solar because electricity prices go negative when you build enough and it not longer becomes a scarcity you need to pay 3 billionaires for access to

@cupcakemichimu @taco_lord94 @BUNNIMODER It doesn't mean you *can't* have it, it means that doing it at scale is very nontrivial and requires complex infrastructure that specifically supports it. If you don't do those things, then you can't have it.

@stringlandscape @taco_lord94 @BUNNIMODER I'm failing to see why this means we can't have solar? Hella places have residential sell back systems and solar farms obvs are anyway coordinated with the grid

@WKCosmo @DeivonDrago They're flavor-fluid.

@DeivonDrago Well neutrinos are non-trinary, so what the hell, anything goes.

Are Black Holes gendered? Seems like they were the first victims of male pattern baldness. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-hair_t…

@TSAdedara Hi "STEM scholar" here. I talk condescendingly about social sciences and humanities because of what *they* say, not because of what some dummy tells me to think. See, the thing about STEM is that we don't really GAF what others tell us to believe. That's kinda how science works.

I am beginning to think that the way STEM scholars and grad students condescendingly talk about social sciences and humanities is an institutional orientation their faculty instill in them. This constant disrespect seems like a consensus and fosters close mindedness among them.

@Zynyattaa @captgouda24 My publications pay me zero dollars, I do not own my research in the technical legal sense, and did not get millions of dollars in grant funding.

@stringlandscape @captgouda24 I wouldn’t call millions of dollars in grant funding, proprietary ownership of research, and name-brand value from publications low value at all. PhD students punch way above their weight.

Harvard should crush the strikers. Don't give them an inch. The good grad students are there to do research, not quarrel.

@jfreem4n @Anterior658444 @captgouda24 They need to be paid comparably to their alternatives in other industries, ie, market wages, otherwise we will lose extremely valuable people to places where they will create less value than they would have.

@Anterior658444 @captgouda24 They are in grad school though? They’re not working 9-5s. They’re grading papers and hosting office hours. And they’re given a stipend that equals the median individual income in the US. Doesn’t even matter though because since when do grad students need to have “plenty of money”

@Zynyattaa @captgouda24 To drive the point home: this is true even accounting for the fact that the value most grad students generate is very low!

@captgouda24 Grad students do not get paid nearly enough money for the value they generate.

@captgouda24 There's no way the actual number on the paychecks people are getting is not anywhere near what's being claimed.

@captgouda24 IDK if people are just totally pulling numbers out of their asses, or they're relying on the lie-reporting that U's love to do about any numbers (eg doing things like counting a tuition waiver as pay, or not taking into account non-waived fees, etc).

@podsekalnikov Yeah WTF are these people getting their PhDs in that they can work regular business hours and that's it?

"They are not working 9-5." That true, because 8 hours a day is totally insufficient for graduate students to get all of their work done.

@Matt_Stefon @podsekalnikov Yeah, I don't know where the fuck people are getting these insane numbers from. I went to a good school, not all that long ago, and didn't get paid anywhere near the numbers people are claiming.

@podsekalnikov “Stipend that equals the median individual income in the U.S.” my ass! Maybe in 1955! My stipend when I was in. doctoral program before I left it: $4,000 for the academic year!

@DeivonDrago Sometimes my cats will play by running full-speed into each other and tackling each other. It's like those old cartoons where you just have a ball of cat. It's very impressive.

It occurs to me that cats are mew-on colliders.

@taco_lord94 @BUNNIMODER That's not how it works. The flow of power through the entire grid is what needs to be exactly balanced at all times. Putting energy into a battery is just consumption of power from the grid's POV, that doesn't solve the problem of how to know if and when and how much goes where.

@stringlandscape @BUNNIMODER What? Produced power doesn’t have to match consumption. Excess power would be stored in the batteries.

@DeivonDrago That's why we need to accelerate the particle accelerator itself to near the speed of light. Decay problem solved!

2/4 Problem #1: muons are absurdly unstable. They live for about 2 millionths of a second. That's your entire window to create them, cool them, accelerate them to near light speed, and smash them together. Most accelerator tech assumes you have all day.

1/4 Why don't we have a muon collider design yet? Physicists love the idea - muons are basically heavier electrons, perfect for probing new physics at high energies. But actually building one is a crazy engineering puzzle.

@isthisnessicary @is_OwenLewis @girllich1 Grifting

@is_OwenLewis @girllich1 Name one thing he hasn't failed at, one thing that has been a little right?

Okay folks, this qualifies as BREAKING NEWS! Harold “Sonny” White, the warp drive pioneer behind NASA’s EagleWorks Lab, just stepped out of stealth with Casimir Inc. to unveil MicroSPARC: the first battery free chip to harvest continuous electrical power straight from the quantum vacuum via the Casimir force. The 5 mm × 5 mm device uses millions of custom microscale Casimir cavities fabricated on a substrate. Inside each cavity, two fixed conductive walls create a region of negative vacuum pressure (the well known Casimir effect). Stationary micropillars anchored in the middle act as antennas. Electrons from the cavity walls then quantum tunnel to the pillars because the interior is a lower energy “quieter” zone — and the probability of tunneling back is orders of magnitude lower. This one way “quantum ratchet” flow generates a measurable DC current with no external power source or moving parts. Prototypes already fabricated at university nanofab facilities (Texas A&M AggieFab, MIT.nano) have been tested in RF-shielded, low noise chambers for weeks. The team reports outputs ranging from millivolts to volts at picoamp to microamp levels using precision electrometers and Kelvin Probe Force Microscopy. Target performance for the first commercial chip: ~1.5 V at 25 µA (≈40 µW continuous). Stacking and scaling could reach milliwatts or even watts per device. Initial applications are ultra low power: always on IoT sensors, wearables, and medical implants. Longer term roadmap includes trickle charging phones, powering small electronics, and eventually grid independent homes or EVs. Commercialization is targeted for 2028, starting at ~$100/W before dropping toward $10/W. White ties the work directly to his earlier theoretical paper on emergent quantization from a dynamic vacuum and sees it as a practical power source for the deep-space missions he’s long championed. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and independent scientists have so far declined public comment. But if the engineering scales as hoped, MicroSPARC would represent a genuine paradigm shift: continuous, maintenance free power drawn from the fabric of spacetime itself. A bold leap from warp-drive theory into real hardware. Progress (and vacuum-powered chips) marches on. Photo: MicroSPARC | Casimir Inc. Source: thedebrief.org/free-energy-fr…