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Brian Skinner
16.3K posts
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Brian Skinner
@gravity_levity
"All who have passed the age of 30 are joyless grotesques, endlessly fussing about things of no importance" -George Orwell
sites.google.com/view/skinner-p…
Joined September 2009
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  • Pinned
    user avatar
    Brian Skinner
    @gravity_levity
    Nov 19, 2024
    I guess I'm on the other site now. Give me a heads-up (here or there) if you want me to follow you there.
    2.9K
  • user avatar
    Brian Skinner
    @gravity_levity
    Aug 10, 2018
    1/ Who wants to hear some scientific intrigue? A few weeks ago, a group of physical chemists posted a paper online announcing the observation of superconductivity at room temperature. Today I posted a comment pointing out something funny in their data.
    arXiv logo
    arxiv.org
    Repeated noise pattern in the data of arXiv:1807.08572,...
    A recent preprint [arxiv:1807.08572] has reported the observation of room temperature supercondutivity in a nanostructured solid composed of gold and silver nanocrystals. Given the extraordinary...
  • user avatar
    Brian Skinner
    @gravity_levity
    May 17, 2021
    Replying to @Thinkwert
    This was my office copier, where the only button with any wear on it was the 1. Then people were surprised when I started using it without being told the code.
  • user avatar
    Brian Skinner
    @gravity_levity
    Aug 8, 2020
    same energy
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    Brian Skinner
    @gravity_levity
    May 1, 2017
    This thread is everything.
  • user avatar
    Brian Skinner
    @gravity_levity
    Jul 26, 2023
    Okay, a number of people have asked me to give my opinion about this new claim of "The First Room-Temperature Ambient-Pressure Superconductor". I am not a real expert in superconductivity, but I am a guy on the internet with opinions, so here we go with some early reactions:
    user avatar
    nephew jonathan (NYC to ATX)
    @nephew_jonathan
    Jul 25, 2023
    arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/pape… room-temp superconductor at ambient pressure, can be made in a high school chem lab (except for the lead compounds) @eigenrobot @literalbanana
    1.1M
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    Brian Skinner
    @gravity_levity
    Aug 22, 2019
    Fight me
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    Brian Skinner
    @gravity_levity
    Oct 15, 2019
    1/ My latest paper is a mathematical model of "prestige bias": arxiv.org/abs/1910.05813 Here's a bit of the back story about where this paper comes from. When I became a postdoc at MIT, I noticed that people started to treat me differently.
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    Brian Skinner
    @gravity_levity
    Jun 16, 2020
    1/3 The most pervasive toxic behavior in science (and especially theory) is posing: pretending at deep or extensive understanding, or that difficult things are "obvious" or "trivial" for you, or that you have understand something for a long time that others are just learning.
  • user avatar
    Brian Skinner
    @gravity_levity
    Mar 6, 2021
    Finally got one of those yard signs so that I too can join the culture wars
  • user avatar
    Brian Skinner
    @gravity_levity
    Jun 23, 2022
    Received some enlightenment from one of my fellow Physics Olympiad coaches about the difference between heat and work in thermodynamics
  • user avatar
    Brian Skinner
    @gravity_levity
    Aug 10, 2018
    Replying to @gravity_levity
    18/ A few updates: During the last 18 hours I've gotten a lot of emails. Mostly emails from colleagues, the kind where the whole body of the email is something like: "Wow." "OMG" "Nice find!" "This made my day." "!!!!!!!!" "This is the best paper you've written." (Which, ouch.)
  • user avatar
    Brian Skinner
    @gravity_levity
    Oct 5, 2022
    Life cycle of a physicist:
  • user avatar
    Brian Skinner
    @gravity_levity
    May 30, 2020
    I think I was well past a PhD in physics before I realized that a rocket never actually has to achieve "escape velocity" in order to escape earth's orbit. It can be lifted arbitrarily slowly, so long as the thrust always exceeds the local gravitational force.