[00:00:04] Speaker A: Id the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: Welcome to id of the future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott. Today I'd like to read for you an exclusive excerpt from Maverick Scientist, my adventures as an amateur scientist.
Maverick scientist is the memoir of Forest Mims, who forged a distinguished scientific career despite having no academic training in science.
Named one of the 50 best brains in science by Discover magazine, Forrest shares what sparked his childhood curiosity and relates a lifetime of improbable, dramatic, and occasionally outright dangerous experiences in the world of science.
At 13, he invented a new method of rocket control.
At 17, he designed and built an analog computer that could translate Russian into English and that the Smithsonian collected as an example of an early hobby computer.
While majoring in government at Texas A and M University, Forrest created a handheld radar like device to help guide the blind, and during his military service, he had to be given special clearance to do top secret laser research at the Air Force weapons lab. Why? Because while he lacked the required engineering degree, they wanted his outside the box thinking. On the project, he went on to co found Mits, Inc. Producer of the first commercially successful personal computer, wrote a series of electronics books for RadioShack that sold more than 7 million copies, and designed the music synthesizer circuit that became known as the infamous Atari punk console. All this came before he started consulting for NASA's Goddard Space Flight center and NOAA's famous Mauna Loa Observatory and earning the prestigious rolex award.
This intimate portrait of a self made scientist shares a revelatory look inside the scientific community and tells the story of a lifelong learner who stood by his convictions even when pressured by the establishment to get in line with conventional wisdom.
With dozens of personal photos and illustrations, maverick scientist serves as proof that to be a scientist, you simply need to do science.
Today. I'll start by reading the preface to the book. I'll follow that with a portion of the final chapter titled mavericks do not retire. And then I'll close with the maverick scientist. By Forrest M. Mims III preface Hawaiis Mauna Loa Observatory, the world's most famous atmospheric monitoring station, is perched on the barren slope of the world's largest volcano, 11,200ft above the Pacific.
One afternoon, I was there alone, analyzing my ozone data, when the blaring of a horn suddenly blocked the whirring sound of nearby air pumps.
Moments later, a car door slammed shut and a man began shouting and banging on the steel door of the building where I was working. As the banging continued, I walked toward the door and heard the man shouting again and again, are any scientists in there?
Finally I shouted back, how can I help you? The banging stopped, and a friendly voice gently replied, are you a scientist?
When I slowly opened the door, a cherubic fellow with a short grey beard smiled broadly and respectfully asked, are you a real scientist? Though I received a Rolex Award for my homemade instrument that measures the ozone layer, and I published my discovery of an error in NASA's ozone satellite data in Nature, the world's leading scientific journal, I do not have a science degree.
Yet no one had ever asked me whether I was a scientist, much less a real scientist. My life was an ongoing series of science adventures and projects, and I, too, had spent years banging on the doors of science, sometimes successfully. But I did not want to disappoint the visitor by telling him I was self taught. Those thoughts spun through my mind before I offered a four word reply that would need a whole book to explain. This is that book.
Whether you want to join me in doing science or simply accompany me on some of my adventures, like the gentleman who banged his way into the Mauna Lo Observatory, this book is for you.
Now I'll read a small section of chapter 23 of the book, titled mavericks do not retire, where it all began childhood visits to see Papa, my blind paternal great grandfather and my great grandmother in Lufkin, Texas, made a permanent impression on me. I remember the front porch swing and the record player in their tiny living room, where he listened to recordings of the Bible on vinyl discs provided by the National Library Services Talking Books program at the Library of Congress.
As I mentioned earlier, during one visit I accompanied him on a walk and was amazed how he could count the power poles along the rural road.
Today, one of papas canes hangs by our front door, where it reminds me of his strong work ethic and faith. It also reminds me of the childhood visits when the old man with empty eye sockets under his snow white hair called us to his chair and carefully felt our faces with his big hands to see how we had grown.
Looking back, it was as if his sturdy fingers were sculpting my future, for he had inspired a dream that led to my science career. The explosion for many years I had wondered how Papa had been blinded. I knew that the accident had occurred in 1906 while he was working on the track bed for a new railroad, and a few years ago I found memoirs by Papa and Nana, my grandmother, that included more details. The key detail was that Papa's father in law, Jay Norries, had a contract with the Kansas City, Mexico, and Orient Railway to prepare the track bed for a half mile segment 15 miles south of Sweetwater, Texas.
During October 1905, Papa, his brother, and his father in law drove three wagons to Sweetwater, where they hired five men as helpers. Within a few months, Papa's wife, Melissa, arrived with her two young daughters. Letha, who was only four at the time she became my grandmother, and her baby sister Pearl, Papa's mother in law, also arrived with her daughters. My grandmother's memoir describes how the women did the cooking. The men were only a hundred feet from the end of the half mile contract when they reached a rise that would require explosives to remove.
The afternoon of May 3, the fuse Pawpaw ignited burned much faster than expected, and a massive explosion stopped his watch at 04:20 p.m., Letha, who we called Nana, wrote that her father was blown into thick brush that saved his life. She remembered how he was a mass of blood and that one eye and part of his face was torn away and destroyed. The remaining eye was damaged and had to be removed without sedation.
After 16 days in the railroad hospital in Fort Worth, he returned to the worksite to help finish the job.
The Texas and Oklahoma railroad details in Pawpaw's memoir provided enough information to look for the accident site on Google Earth, and I soon found a likely location, the correct distance from Sweetwater, where the railroad track passes through a cut in a ridge. I then contacted Larry Locke, who owns the only train on the Texas and Oklahoma railroad track between Sweetwater and the buzzy Unisem USA cement plant at Mary Neal. I told Larry about Papa and asked permission to hike to the site along the railroad track with my cousin, Don Mims instead. I was surprised when Larry offered to take Don and me to the site on his train. The morning of October 31, 2017, Don and I arrived at the pickup point to wait for the train. We soon heard a train whistle, and a minute later a beautiful blue engine with three bright headlights appeared. I launched my Mavic pro camera drone and took photos and a video of the trains, two engines and 71 cars as it approached.
Engineer trainee Kenneth Ballinger and conductor trainee Austin Kammer helped us carry our gear up the steps to the cabinet. There we met engineer Lonnie Clowers, who has been driving the train on the Texas Oklahoma railroad short line to the cement plant for 19 years. We then stood on the platform at the front of the locomotive as we headed south at 10 mph. An hour and a half later, Lonnie checked the Google Earth photo I gave him and said we were nearly there. Suddenly we recognized a pattern of juniper trees that matched the Google Earth image, and Lonnie stopped the train. The accident site while Austin watched me make aerial photos of the site with the drone, Don and Kenneth hiked to the top of the ridge about 15ft above the west side of the tracks. After I landed, the drone, Don and Kenneth arrived with a crushed, rusted out blasting powder keg they had found on the ridges crest. Dupont was embossed around the bottom of the keg, and 25 pounds was embossed in the center of this unexpected find. The provided significant evidence that the accident had happened where we stood. The brush where Pawpaw landed was probably the juniper trees along the east side of the railroad track.
Based on the diameter of their trunks, some of those trees had been there in 1906. Drone photos reveal the campsite after our trip, I downloaded the drone photos and was surprised to see what we had missed at the site. A large stone circle adjacent to the railroad track and several smaller partial circles Nana had written in her memoir, my first memories are from living in a tent about 15 miles from Sweetwater, Texas, alongside the roadbed which my grandfather Norris had contracted to build for the Orient and Santa Fe Railroad. The stone circles were just 200ft from the end of the half mile section of roadbed, and a creek was only 400ft away. Could these stone circles be their campsite? We contacted Larry Locke to inform him about what the aerial photos revealed, and on May 1, 2018, Larry took us to the site in his high rail, a pickup truck with railroad wheels that can be lowered onto railroad tracks.
Don and I spent several hours carefully exploring the stone circle campsite while taking many photos from the ground and the drone. I photographed 14 species of pink, yellow, blue, and white wildflowers scattered among the limestone rocks and slabs. Our visit was only three days before the anniversary of the accident, 112 years before. The women and girls back then must have enjoyed seeing the same flowers that were the last papa saw.
We then explored the ridge where Don had found the blasting powder keg. During the October visit, we found a dozen more kegs, including some crushed under large boulders. Thanks to Larry and his crew, we discovered facts about our family history that had long been unknown, and we found and explored the campsite where our ancestors had spent five chilly months while the man and their crew worked on the roadbed. The personal computer era might have been delayed several years or more if intel had not developed the 8080 microprocessor. The Altair 8800 microcomputer would never have been developed at MITS if Ed Roberts had not been determined to build a computer, Microsoft would never have begun in Albuquerque. If the Altair 8800 had not been the COVID story of the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics.
And myths would have never begun if Papa's blindness had not inspired the travel aid for the blind that led directly to my model rocket light flasher article in model rocketry.
Thats why I brought something special to where Pawpaw lost his eyes, one of the leds Texas instruments had given me in 1966 for the prototype travel aid for the blind.
I photographed the led lying on limestone shards blown apart where the explosion occurred 112 years before Papas tragic accident inspired my science and electronics career. And that remote site south of Sweetwater is where it all began.
Epilogue the preface related how the man banging on the door at the Mauna Loa Observatory smiled and politely asked, are you a real scientist? No one had ever asked me that, and I did not want to disappoint a visitor who had gone to considerable trouble to drive what was then a miserable road to the observatory to meet a real scientist. After all, I am just a self taught scientist.
So I paused several seconds before providing the four words that required this book to explain, I just do science.
This brings to mind J. R. R. Tolkien's the Lord of the Rings, which closes with Frodo giving Sam the unfinished memoir by Bilbo and Frodo. Frodo then tells Sam that the book ends with several blank pages that he should use to describe his personal reflections.
I suggest you do likewise by acquiring a notebook to record your observations of the natural world and your personal science related projects and activities.
If you enjoy experimenting while cooking, you are already doing science.
You are doing it. Likewise, if you take regular photographs of the sky and sunsets, keep a record of precipitation where you live, or take photographs of birds that appear at feeders and wildflowers that bloom in a nearby park.
If you're a student, you might learn more from science projects, possibly much more than from the courses you take.
Electronic instruments described in my books and those by other experimenters can provide you with the means to pursue much more advanced projects.
When Doctor Jonathan Witt, a close friend and executive editor at the Discovery Institute press, read this manuscript, he suggested the title and wrote that this memoir should inspire up and coming scientists, particularly those who may feel themselves outside the standard pathways to scientific accomplishment. For example, persons like you who lack a tenured academic post, complete with a lab and graduate students at a top university, your memoir is a call to action. Get out there. Stop making excuses and discover something a great big wondrous world awaits.
Jonathan is right. I hope my adventures in the world of science will inspire you to join me in making inventions and exploring, measuring, and photographing the natural world.
Perhaps your personal scientific adventures can provide a sense of accomplishment, benefit humanity, and advance our knowledge of our planet and the universe.
Several years before the 30th year of my near daily atmospheric measurements arrived, I mentioned to my brother Milo that 30 years of measurements are considered a climatological mean.
Milos enthusiastic response was, why dont you set a goal of 50 years? That had never occurred to me, but thats the goal I have set, plus a year to write the summary paper. Ill need that extra year for ill be 95 years old when the 50th year arrives. By then I hope to have learned that many others have joined me in conducting long term monitoring of the environmental world that sustains us.
That was a reading from maverick scientist my adventures as an amateur scientist by Forrest Mims III. Be sure to also listen to our two episode interview with Forrest about his book.
Get your own copy and learn more about this inspiring
[email protected]. Maverick that's discovery.org maverick for id the future. I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks for listening.
[00:16:20] Speaker A: Visit
[email protected] and intelligent design.org dot this program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
