Will Kinney
@WKCosmo
Followers
40K
Following
41K
Media
9K
Statuses
54K
Cosmologist, physicist, dirtbag mountain biker, expat Montanan, Copernican extremist. Part of the problem.
Buffalo, NY
Joined January 2017
The second paperback printing of An Infinity of Worlds is out! https://t.co/bp6PtYgOl1
amazon.com
In the beginning was the Big Bang: an unimaginably hot fire almost fourteen billion years ago in which the first elements were forged. The physical theory of the hot nascent universe—the Big Bang—was...
7
7
74
See also water usage by data centers.
When I was in college, I took a class and the teacher was anti-nuclear, but he was also smart, so he knew there was no threat of a meltdown, and that waste was easy to store, so he had to invent something else to be Bad About Nuclear Plants. What he came up with is that the
1
1
6
Hear me out: HEP institutions in the US propose the "Donald Trump Big Beautiful Mega-Collider". Gold plated magnets, a big portrait of Our Glorious Leader in every office.
19
4
113
When I was in college, I took a theatre class at University of Montana. The instructor was an absolute raging narcissist, and a bully. There was a girl in my class, who was Native American, and also extremely hot. Just stunningly beautiful. And he HATED her. There was no
The 4th @Columbia Task Force Report on Antisemitism just dropped and the findings are INSANE. Students were scapegoated, stereotyped, denied access to class, and had their privacy violated, all by remorseless faculty, who made no effort to hide their bias. Buckle up 🧵👇 1/6
7
5
112
We still have them, and we all kind of like them. They're harmless and cute, and we still give them their own department in the college. But they're not flying us to the moon, or making microchips, or building artificial minds.
4
1
23
When the scientific method took hold in natural philosophy in the Renaissance, it almost immediately accelerated into the distance, leaving behind an increasingly irrelevant population of pure philosophers.
1
0
15
But that's not why we FUND science. We fund science because it produces socially beneficial results. Anything that achieves that end more effectively is going to win.
3
0
11
This is certainly true, that individually, many scientists pursue the craft as a means of aesthetic self-fulfillment.
1
0
6
Feynman famously said, "Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it."
3
1
24
This is like complaining that calculus makes it too easy to solve problems, and we should stick to geometry.
1
0
21
No it isn't.
Really underscores the need to distinguish “science as a product” (as in cancer or fusion research) from “science as an expression of human intellectual curiosity” (as in everything else). GenAI is clearly useful to the former, and (potentially) highly destructive to the latter.
1
0
34
21st Century air combat is going to be wild.
The Royal Australian Air Force achieved a major milestone in the future of air-to-air combat this week, with an Australian-designed and manufactured Boeing MQ-28A “Ghost Bat” Stealth, Multirole Combat Drone having successfully tracked, engaged, and destroyed a Phoenix Jet
3
2
29
OpenAI leadership (@gdb, @markchen90) are promoting a paper in Physics Letters B where GPT-5 proposed the main idea — possibly the first peer-reviewed paper where an LLM generated the core contribution. One small problem: GPT-5's idea tests the wrong thing. 1/
17
59
469
Goid god, if you're buying groceries ONLINE, you are by definition very much not in the "I can't afford basic needs" demographic. https://t.co/e5DZ6HjkK2
@Groundwork @KatieJWells @ConsumerReports @MorePerfectUS @bencasselman @nytimes When we reached out to Instacart they copped to the experiments– but they said the price hikes are negligible. For families forced to cover groceries on the credit card, or who have to choose between groceries and the electric bill, $1200 a year is NOT negligible. 8/9
1
0
17
This ... is how markets work.
@Groundwork @KatieJWells @ConsumerReports @MorePerfectUS @bencasselman @nytimes Companies no longer price according to how much it cost THEM to make something. Instead, they price based on what YOU are willing to pay. An army of pricing advisers–a cross between the Geek Squad & Seal Team Six–is helping them to execute these high-tech pricing experiments. 6/9
9
0
50
There is no energy shortage. Degrowth is civilizational suicide.
1 kg of uranium contains 950 MW-days of energy if fully fissioned. That’s 8.2x10^13 joules USA has 700,000 tonnes of uranium stockpiled, mostly in depleted uranium format which is fertile. That’s 5.75x10^22 joules The ONLY way to access this energy reservoir is with fast
17
26
324
🚨 BREAKING - Preview #StarTrek: Starfleet Academy! In this preview of #StarfleetAcademy, the USS Athena is attacked by unknown hostiles! 🖖 What do you think of the series so far? 👀
9
1
23
Weinberg never missed.
@cosmicfibretion Weinberg on Wolfram: “so might a carpenter, looking at the moon, suppose that it is made of wood”
13
15
301
... but friends, it is actually that crazy. https://t.co/AGVTR3hIio
0
0
6
Hoven doesn't actually link to the substack in question, so I was a little skeptical that it is actually as crazy as it sounds...
1
0
11