Dr Thomas Moore
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drthomasmoore.bsky.social
Dr Thomas Moore
@drthomasmoore.bsky.social
Proud Husband. Doting Father.
Modelling & Developing Clean Energy Technologies @ Queensland University of Technology
I continue to vacillate on GenAI in teaching. This is ChatGPT on the isomorphism between the Ising and Gas Lattice models. Its explanation is the worst of both worlds: it sounds authoritative & plausible, yet is nonsensical. (We do have H[n] = H[1-n]). I worry about undergrads relying on this.
November 12, 2025 at 11:52 PM
Been very happy to discover standardebooks.org

A well-formatted ebook is so much more enjoyable to read. I've already read some Hemingway and the (hilarious) Jeeves Stories of P. G. Wodehouse; I now have some Agatha Christie lined up on my old kobo (plus more Wodehouse...).

📚💙
Standard Ebooks
Free and liberated ebooks, carefully produced for the true book lover. Download free ebooks with professional-quality formatting and typography, in formats compatible with your ereader.
standardebooks.org
October 20, 2025 at 12:21 AM
Quick Guide to STEM Mastery:

1. Learn math
2. Learn everything else

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October 13, 2025 at 7:35 AM
Is blue hydrogen as bad as grey hydrogen, or twice as clean as green hydrogen? Reasonable assumptions can lead to either result...
www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-gr...
How Green IS Blue Hydrogen?
or Why Green Tech Evaluation is Really, Really Difficult Howarth and Jacobsen's How Green is Blue Hydrogen is one of my favourite articles to come out in the last five years. Not because I agree with ...
www.linkedin.com
October 11, 2025 at 4:19 AM
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.
Entropy is one of the most difficult topics in all the physical sciences. There are as many ways to teach entropy as teachers who teach it. Today, I want to discuss a personal approach from a paper in Chemical Engineering Education.
🧵

journals.flvc.org/cee/article/...

#EnergySky #ChemSky #Science
Connecting Energy Dispersal and the Classical Definition of Entropy | Chemical Engineering Education
journals.flvc.org
July 28, 2025 at 5:02 AM
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.
June 23, 2025 at 12:34 AM
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.
March 17, 2025 at 6:01 AM
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?
March 6, 2025 at 11:46 PM
Should be a fun weekend.
March 4, 2025 at 9:36 AM
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/
February 24, 2025 at 11:13 PM
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
February 23, 2025 at 2:43 AM
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
February 19, 2025 at 6:21 AM
When should academics working on green technologies travel for international conferences? Asking for a friend.
#AcademiaSky #GreenSky #EnergySky
February 17, 2025 at 12:32 AM
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.
February 16, 2025 at 8:48 AM
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
February 7, 2025 at 7:53 AM
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
February 5, 2025 at 10:31 PM
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.
February 3, 2025 at 3:26 AM
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
February 3, 2025 at 2:15 AM
One of the best resources for applying learnings from the education research literature in the classroom also happens to be a post on teaching board games at boardgamegeek.com:

boardgamegeek.com/thread/34301...

#edusky #boardgames
Teaching Games: A Professional Educator's Perspective | BGG
There have been a few forums popping up recently about learning in board games. As both a board gaming enthusiast and a teacher with 15 years of experience, I wanted to share some of the principles th...
boardgamegeek.com
January 31, 2025 at 11:04 AM
Pet Peeve: Capital Pi is a terrible letter to use for a dimensionless group, as it makes writing products of groups confusing. My students learn the Buckingham Phi Theorem.
January 21, 2025 at 9:18 AM
Math Humour
January 7, 2025 at 1:10 AM
Very happy to share our latest perspective in Nature Chemical Engineering, 'Accelerating climate technologies through the science of scale-up.' We discuss tools academics and R&D engineers can use to accelerate the scaling of new technologies.

Read it here!
rdcu.be/d30IM

@nature.com 🧪⚛️ 🧮 🔌💡
Accelerating climate technologies through the science of scale-up
Nature Chemical Engineering - This Perspective argues that early assessments of technology-market fit, as well as how the physics governing system performance evolves with scale, can de-risk...
rdcu.be
December 24, 2024 at 10:52 AM
Kazuo Ishiguro's novels are perfect. 💙📚

Go - go read them all. Whatever you do, don't read a review; they spoil the effect entirely. You can trust me. Start with 'The Remains of the Day'. That is all.
December 21, 2024 at 10:47 AM
New rule:

Peer review requests shall not be sent from 20 Dec - 2 Jan.

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December 21, 2024 at 3:58 AM
I remember doing research on Liquid Organic Hydrogen Carriers (Formic Acid in particular) and realising *just* how inefficient & expensive they are. Liquefaction is much easier. But it's still very, very hard. As usual, Michael Liebreich says it best. #GreenSky 🧪🔌💡
A thread for those who think we're going to be importing lots of hydrogen over vast distances.

1. Shipping liquid hydrogen is not going to be a thing. To understand why, you need to understand that hydrogen is basically liquid, -253C escapey, explodey expanded polystyrene.
December 20, 2024 at 5:57 AM