"Oooh, that could be good! You'd run the risk that making it transparent in some frequencies would make it less absorbent in other frequencies, and you'd need a backup system or really good insulation to make sure you still had hot water when it wasn't sunny."

"Well, the insulation is a separate engineering issue to the layering. That's probably already solved by someone."

"Yup, no need to reinvent the wheel there. Just something that could affect the cost."

"Cost is a such big deal, though. An amazingly efficient piece of tech that costs twice as much is only good for, like, remote arctic stations, or space, where just getting it there is expensive and reliability is critical."

"Definitely. So if the panels are going to be wrapped around water pipes, at least one panel is going to be on the far side at any given time, having its sun blocked by another one. I think you might actually want something like half black panels, half solar."

"Er, actually, you get black-painted metal or plastic, which gets really hot, and run thin pipes up and down a couple dozen times through that instead of trying to curve everything around it. Better not to make yourself any extra engineering challenges, yeah?"

"Oh, and then stick the transparent solar panels over top of the rest of it? That could work."

"Yeah. But solar panels are - kind of really complicated physics, actually, so I'm gonna need to research them and see if the whole transparent thing is even slightly a thing."

"Yeah, materials science is tricky. Stuff that naively sounds like it should be trivial can turn out to be next to impossible, or occasionally vice versa."

"Renewables are very cool, though, aren't they? My family had a road trip to see some relatives last summer, and during part of it there was just this - massive field of wind turbines, must have been thousands of them, stretching out over the corn fields in Illinois. Each one with a little red light on and off in perfect sync. After sunset it looked like some kind of alien landing, almost."

"Oh, I love seeing wind farms. They're beautiful to look at but also beautiful, like, conceptually----the reminder that clean energy is a thing, that our civilization built this stuff."

"Sure helps motivate everyone that the nature spirits blow up coal plants and hydro dams sometimes though."

Margaret sighs and shakes her head. "Yeah. I get why they do it, sort of--imagine if you lived in a river and someone was dumping poison in it--but if everybody blew up the things they hated, there'd be nothing left that wasn't blown up."

"Yeah. To be fair, I am pretty sure that was a glib oversimplification on the part of the website I read it on."

"Yeah. If I ever meet a nature spirit maybe they'll decide to give me their side of the story."

"Mm. Magic is annoying. Scientifically, I mean. I'm sure there's some underlying rule to it all... The Greeks thought the sun was pulled by a god... But really, themed outfits? Monsters attacking writing? I have no idea."

"The monsters attacking writing needs to stop. Everything else is an exciting if frustrating scientific puzzle. Especially the themed outfits."

Speaking of magic, have they gotten to somewhere nobody is likely to overhear them?

They're in an empty hallway, heading towards the parking lot. "There's fairly good statistics on some things, but I don't know if any scientists are close to figuring out the, like, deeper level of it all."

"Yeah. All this data, and no theories to explain it."

"You can keep a secret, can't you, Teddy?"

"Well, that depends on the secret, doesn't it? But according to the usually accepted colloquial value of that question - yes."

"I promise it's a secret I would keep for someone else and that I expect you won't be any worse off for knowing."

"Well, this sounds important. Yes, I'll keep quiet."

"I met a genie that likes robots and I think I can get them to make me a spirit-bearer!" she says, hushed but excitedly.

"-A genie? Really? Aren't they dangerous?"

"This one hasn't done anything except ask me adorable newbie engineering questions and offer me magic in exchange for getting to watch me making my spider-bot. And, uh, hang out in my basement watching me do it."