[00:00:05] Speaker A: Id the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: Welcome to id the future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott. Well, today I'm honored to welcome Forrest Mims to the podcast to discuss his new memoir, maverick Scientist my Adventures as an amateur. Your scientist. Named by Discover magazine as one of the 50 best brains and science, Mims is an instrument designer, a science writer, and an independent science consultant. He has made regular observations of the ozone layer, solar ultraviolet radiation, photosynthetic radiation column, water vapor, and aerosol optical thickness. Since 1989, at his Geronimo Creek Observatory in Texas, he cofounded Mitts, Inc. The company that introduced the first commercially successful personal computer and science probe magazine, which he edited. His columns have appeared in Scientific American, popular electronics, modern electronics, the citizen scientist, and elsewhere. His scientific publications have appeared in nature science, photochemistry and Photobiology, the Journal of Molecular Evolution, the Journal of Geophysical Research, Applied Optics, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, and other peer reviewed journals. He has also published over 60 books with publishers that include McGraw Hill, Apprentice Hill, Radial Shack, and others. His radial shack books alone have sold over 7.5 million copies. Mims has consulted for NASA and NOAA no. A NOAA, and is recipient of the Rolex award for enterprise. Forrest, welcome to idea the future.
[00:01:49] Speaker A: Thank you.
[00:01:51] Speaker B: Well, you forged a distinguished scientific career despite having no academic training in science. You're known for saying to be a scientist, you just have to do science. And you've written a memoir detailing your fascinating career in technology and science called Maverick Scientist my Adventures as an amateur scientist. It's published by Make Books, the organization behind make magazine and the make community of Doityourself makers across the globe, which I think is a good choice of publisher since you've been publishing columns at that magazine, inspiring makers of all ages and skills since 2009.
Well, I'm really excited to have you share with listeners some of your adventures and your achievements. In a few minutes, I'd like to start where I usually do at the beginning by asking you about your upbringing and how you got into science. But first, when did you realize it would be a good idea to write a book detailing your unusual journey into the world of science and technology?
[00:02:49] Speaker A: Well, actually, the book, maverick Scientist is my second memoir. The first memoir was written in 1985, but shortly after that, when I was a columnist for Scientific American for a very brief time and lost that position, I decided to transform my career into actually doing serious science, more so than doing electronic projects for magazines. And that turned out to be a much more successful career move than I ever anticipated. And that's why the new memoir.
[00:03:21] Speaker B: Okay, well, in the first part of this new memoir, you detail your experiences coming of age in the silicone era. I enjoyed reading about your childhood and teenage exploits in invention and discovery. And it sounds like your father's jobs as a us air force officer and a jet pilot and a civil engineer meant you had several places to call home and explore as a kid. Can you tell us about your upbringing and how it fostered your interest in science and technology?
[00:03:48] Speaker A: My father played a key role, and that's why his photograph is in the book. He was an air force pilot and, as you pointed out, a civil engineer. He was an architect. He was a sculptor. He was an artist. When we were young, we lived in various places. We lived in Alaska for three years. We lived in Florida for three years. In Florida, he designed two small Baptist churches and supervised their construction. That was back when concrete blocks cost only $0.17 each. Been quite a bit of increase in that cost over the years. And then he served in Vietnam as a combat pilot. And that highly motivated me that someday I would like to go to Vietnam also. And so during college, that was one of my goals.
[00:04:33] Speaker B: Wow. Well, you did a lot of exploring when you lived in Alaska. While there, you experienced the eruption of Mount Spur, the highest volcano in the aleutian ark. What was that like?
[00:04:43] Speaker A: Well, my mother was driving me to a doctor appointment. It so happened, and suddenly the sky became very, very dark. And she told me that was the eruption of Mount Spur, and that was ash from the volcano, and she had to have the headlights on. It was still very difficult to see where we were going. The air force had to bulldoze the ash from the Runway of the airport, Elmondorf air force base airport, because planes couldn't land or take off. In fact, my father had left earlier on an aircraft, along with other pilots, so they could put the planes in a safer location. Then back at the house, the ash was so dense that it was in our house, and even though my mother put tape around the doors and so forth, it still somehow managed to get into the house.
[00:05:28] Speaker B: Wow. What an experience. Well, while you lived in Florida, you got an early lesson in respect for electricity. That probably helped you later in, huh?
[00:05:37] Speaker A: Yeah, it almost killed me.
My brother and I were exploring a neighborhood under construction, and there was a house there that was being built, and I noticed a copper wire coming out of the side of the house where there was going to be an electrical outlet. So I wanted to know if there was actual electricity there. So I put one hand on my hip and the other finger, I gently touched that copper wire. That was not a good experience because I got a pretty terrific shock. But it taught me a valuable lesson that I still use about being very cautious about touching anything connected to household electricity.
[00:06:13] Speaker B: Now, your dad shared a story of creating a crystal radio, and you and your brother Milo wanted him to do it again. So tell us about the connection between science and technology that you learned as he put that together with you.
[00:06:27] Speaker A: That's a good question. He built this radio on a small piece of plywood about the size of. They call them breadboards. Hobbyists call that a breadboard. And it was like 1ft across, or even less than that, maybe eight inches wide. And the coil for the radio was a toilet paper tube, which he had shellac so that it would be rigid. Then he wound a coil around that tube, mounted that on the board. Then he had a piece of copper tubing that was open. And that's where we put one of the crystals in my rock collection. And then we attached a safety pin to the board and we could pick out the best places on the crystal for the highest quality signal.
I learned a lot from that experiment. Not only that it was possible to do that, but also about the crystal itself. How was that crystal able to demodulate the signal coming through the air? And I didn't know back then how that was happening, but it motivated me to study that later in life.
[00:07:23] Speaker B: Wow, that's awesome. Yeah. And how does it. I mean, can you explain that in a nutshell?
[00:07:28] Speaker A: I would have to use a blackboard where you are sitting and where I am sitting, there are radio waves from satellites and radio stations and wifi and everything else coming through the air. And they're alternating current. You might see their ac up and down. And if you can just take off the top half of that alternating current, you could convert that into a signal that's usable. And in the case of a radio, you're looking at the audio portion. If it's video, you're looking at the video portion. So that's just ultra simple explanation, but it requires quite a bit more.
We need a blackboard to really show you how it all.
[00:08:06] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Well, what a cool early experience.
Speaking of experiences, you had many of them, and you detail a lot of them in your book. How did the experience of Hurricane Flossie come full circle with your work at Hawaii's Mona Loa Observatory almost half a century later?
[00:08:22] Speaker A: Great question.
Flossie was not a huge hurricane, but it was strong enough to require us to take precautions around the house and so forth and make sure there was nothing outside that could be blown away.
An interesting aspect of the hurricane was the eye. The eye passed directly over Fort Walton beach, where we then lived. And so during the eye, we could go outside, the sky was blue and appreciate everything and put some chairs back where they had blown away. And then 20 minutes later, the other half of the hurricane arrives and blows everything. So all the trash cans that would be blowing to our left along the street were now blowing right along the street. That was interesting. It made me all my life wondering about how hurricanes can do that. And then later in life, I was actually able to meet the gentleman who was one of the most prominent hurricane scientists. And when he was eight years old in Corpus Christi, Texas, as a little boy, a giant hurricane hit Corpus Christi and flooded his house. And that's how he became a hurricane scientist later in life. His name is Robert Simpson, and he's responsible for naming the hurricane intensity scale.
[00:09:34] Speaker B: Okay, that's awesome. That, that came full circle.
[00:09:36] Speaker A: Yeah. Yes. And he also founded Hawai's Monoloa Observatory, which is fascinating. And that occurred in 19. Well, he was in Hawaii as a meteorologist, and when he was assigned stateside, he became the first director of the National Hurricane center. And the scientist at the National oceanic and Atmospheric Administration wanted to know more about his background. And so while he was preparing to take that new position, he visited New Mexico, and they asked him to visit the Sunspot observatory in southern New Mexico, up in the Mount Sacramento mountains at 9800ft elevation. When he visited, he met a fellow named Ralph Stair, who was trying to measure the solar constant. In other words, how much sunlight is occurring from a high altitude without any appearance from dust and clouds and things like that. And the gentleman making those measurements, Mr. Stair was having a huge problem because of sand being blown over the mountain from white sands. And he was quite angry because he had spent all that time getting his experiments set up and couldn't do them. And then Mr. Simpson, by that time, Dr. Simpson said, well, I know a place in Hawaii where you could do this mona loa mountain. And I have a little tiny observatory on the top, but it didn't last very long, but we might be able to get you the funding to build a permanent station a little bit lower down the slope where it would be more protected. He arranged for $20,000 of national hurricane money to go to Ralph's deer and bingo. They built the observatory, and it was dedicated in 1956.
[00:11:12] Speaker B: Wow. And you would later spend a lot of time there, and we'll get into that later on. Well, during the fall of 1957, you got up early one morning to see the rocket booster that carried Sputnik, the world's first artificial satellite, racing across the sky. And that wasn't long before you, for Christmas, got the materials you needed to build your first transistor radio. How did those experiences affect you?
[00:11:37] Speaker A: Well, watching the Sputnik booster rocket was fascinating. First of all, it flickered as it went across the sky, and that's because the rocket was actually rotating or it was tumbling through the.
So I didn't realize that would actually happen. A meteor, for example, is a steady source of light as it flies to the sky. But that rocket was tumbling. And then as far as the radio, my mother said each of us, my dad was in Korea at the time on an air force assignment. And my mother said, you can each have $10 for Christmas. This was back in 1955, 54, 55. And with my $10, she ordered for me the parts to build a one transistor radio. And so that was a huge thing for me. And so I built it based on plans and a science magazine, actually, popular mechanics magazine. And within a few days, I was, a few days of Christmas, I was listening to radio programs.
[00:12:33] Speaker B: Okay, so it wasn't courses at school necessarily that were getting you into science. It was the natural world, these hobby science magazines, and of course, lots of trial and error experiences and experiments. The early interest and experience your parents facilitated obviously played a role, too. What did you study, though, when you got to college? Did you think, okay, science is it, and I'm going to go into it?
[00:12:57] Speaker A: Well, you've actually raised two questions that are very interesting. Number one, I didn't really learn anything in school that motivated me to become interested in serious science. I learned the basic science, but nothing that really motivated me in college. I was majoring in physics, I thought, for the first semester, but at Texas A and M back then, everybody took the same courses for the first one year. And I realized right away, when I nearly failed algebra one, my average was 69 and two thirds, and the professor was kind enough to round that off to 70 so I could pass with a D minus. I realized that I did not have the mathematical skills to major in physics. And so I told my dad that government needs people who understand science. I'm going to major in government. And he approved that. And so I majored in government. While in the corps of cadets, I worked on various committees that the college sponsored. Back then, I met a lot of famous people. I met an astronaut rode with him from Houston, Texas, late one night after he gave a talk at the college. And my senior year, I was finishing up most of these government courses, and I turned back to science and started doing scientific projects in my dormitory room.
[00:14:10] Speaker B: And in your senior year at Texas A. M. You experimented with a two transistor module that you turned into an audible light sensor, and that led to your travel aid for the blind, as well as your co founding of myths the company know would go on to make history. Now, before we talk about myths and beyond, what did you learn about science and technology while serving in the Air Force and in Vietnam?
[00:14:31] Speaker A: Well, in Vietnam, I also used my aid for the. So in my senior year in college, I built this. This is a electronic travel aid for blind people. My great grandfather was totally blind. He had been blinded in a black powder explosion in 19 six while building the. Helping build a track bed for a railroad near Sweetwater, Texas. And the fact that he could actually count utility poles as we walked along a country road fascinated me. How could he do that? And he tried to explain that he could hear these poles. I didn't understand that until years later, when a blind friend at the University of New Mexico took me on a walk at night with me blindfolded. And he was totally blind. And I learned how to hear utility poles by the echoes from the cane striking the pavement. And I learned all sorts of other things about navigating as a blind person. And that's what had motivated me in college to design this device here, which I called a seeing aid. Up on top is an infrared light emitting diode that Texas instruments gave me in 1966, in March of 66. And these back then were $365. They gave me three of them after I showed them the circuit I was going to build. And the circuit, there's a hearing aid amplifier in here. And so the infrared beam would come out of the device, strike an object, be reflected back, and then there's a solar cell in the front, and that was connected to the hearing aid amplifier. And then that went to an earphone, so you could put the earphone here, and when you pointed it around different directions, you would hear a signal. And the louder the signal, the closer the object. When I went to Vietnam, I took this device, and I worked with blind children at the Saigon school for blind boys and the Saigon school for blind girls. And that just convinced me that somebody's got to manufacture these. If I could just find a manufacturer.
[00:16:22] Speaker B: Yeah. And at this time, were hearing aids getting more popular? Were other people putting these together, commercially.
[00:16:29] Speaker A: There were no aids for the blind. Of course, hearing aids had been around for a long, long time, but nobody had built an aid for the blind that could hold in your hand.
The problem was liability. The companies were fascinated by the device, but their concern was if somebody using this device fell into a hole or tripped over a curb, they might be held liable because the device didn't detect the hole or the curb. And so that's why nobody wanted to manufacture it. The serious liability concern, if I go blind someday I will build one of these myself and use it. Because you supplement that with a cane to make sure you don't fall into holes.
[00:17:12] Speaker B: Yeah. Now, did your work on this lead to opening doors that would ultimately lead to mitts, or was there a clear path there?
[00:17:22] Speaker A: There a very clear path. You've asked a very interesting question. The electronic circuit in the 8th of the blind that pulsed this infrared light emitting diode, that circuit is, you can't see it, but it's on a little circuit board inside here.
That circuit could also flash a light bulb. And I was working on a guided rocket project at the same time. So I needed to photograph the smoke trail of these rockets as they flew into the sky to see about the guidance signals being sent to the rocket. And so the problem was the clouds were in, the haze was interfering with the photographs. So I started launching them at night, and then I could photograph the flame trail of the rocket as the rocket went through the sky. But I needed a way to safely recover the rocket when it's coming back down to the ground. So I realized that the 8th of the blind circuit could flash a light bulb. So I built a light flasher. This little circuit here, it's the exact same circuit as in the 8th of the blind. And this sits inside the rocket with a flashing, and it flashes a little light bulb. So when the rocket's coming down on a parachute, I could actually capture it in my hand. This one has flown 17 times, and every time I could capture it in my hand. And when the editor of Model rocketry magazine saw this, he was fascinated. And I ended up writing my first magazine article for that magazine. I didn't know they were going to pay me money. They paid me 93 dollarsfifty cents. And that's when I told my wife, I'm going to become a full time rider. I was still a captain in the Air force at the time.
[00:18:55] Speaker B: Wow. And $93 back then was quite considerable for some words put together more like.
[00:19:01] Speaker A: Almost $300 in today's money.
[00:19:04] Speaker B: Yeah, a lot when you didn't expect any. Well, tell me how Mitts came about and how it made computer history.
[00:19:13] Speaker A: My partner at the weapons lab, he was a little younger than me.
He was a second lieutenant, a brand new lieutenant. And he had been an enlisted person in the air force. And he was so good at electronics, they sent him to college. And when he graduated, they made him a lieutenant. And he came to the Air Force weapons laboratory, which is where I was assigned after Vietnam. It's where I met my wife. And his name was Ed Roberts. And Ed and I became very close friends, and he was a hobbyist, just as I was on the side. We both built electronic gadgets and devices. And when he saw the article in the magazine, he said, that's it. We've got to start a company. And I said, I agree, we've got to start a company. So we had a meeting at Ed's house in the kitchen, and Stan Kegel and Bob Zeller, two guys that we knew at the weapons lab, joined us. And so the four of us started a company to build model rocket light flashers.
And we named it micro instrumentation and telemetry systems, which is MITs.
The reason for that name is MIT. The university was very popular for its advanced model rocket work, and we wanted to use our company name, use a name like that. Mitt, MIT. Ed objected. He said, people will call us Mitts. And I said, no, they won't. They call mit the college Mit. They'll call us mits. Well, no, Ed was right. Two weeks later, we were calling ourselves Mitts. And eventually, after several years, I left the company to become a writer. But I wrote the instruction manuals for the products. And so Ed would give me the product that I wrote the manual for rather than money. So I ended up with very early calculators and things like that. And then eventually Ed built a computer, designed a computer based on an early microprocessor from intel. He called me over to the office one night and I went in, I rode my bicycle over there. And he said, what do you think? And he showed me this blue box sitting on a table. I said, well, what is it? He said, it's a microcomputer. How many do you think we'll sell? I said, well, based on our previous articles and projects, maybe a few hundred. And he looked so sad when I said that because he was nearly bankrupt, he ended up selling 5000 of those Altair computers. It was featured on the COVID of the January 1975 popular electronics magazine and a couple of guys who became very, very famous saw that magazine and moved to Albuquerque to work for MITs, developing software. One of them was named Paul Allen. He was the first one to move. And then his buddy Bill Gates moved later. And at Mitz, they founded Microsoft.
[00:21:50] Speaker B: Wow. And the rest is history. Now, how did you bow out from mitts? Was that a personal choice or just kind of how it happened?
[00:21:58] Speaker A: Well, I told Ed I wanted to become a full time writer.
It was so busy working for mitts, I mean, just non stop. And I was still in the air force. And so finally, after a year at Mitts, I just told Ed, I'm going to quit. I'll write the manuals for you guys.
You give me the product that I write the manual about, don't have to give me any money, and meanwhile I'm going to try to become a writer. And I told my wife, just give me one year and I'll be a full time freelancer. Well, I'd left the air force as a captain, went to work at the sunport, the Albuquerque airport as a parking attendant at night so I could work at night writing. And after the first year went by, I was still working there. And I'd sold a few articles, but not very much.
In the 13th month I was there, the security guard was an elderly guy with a mental problem. And when I asked him to stop some teenagers from throwing gravel at the cars parked in the parking lot, instead of doing that, he pointed his 45 pistol at me and threatened to kill me.
And so, of course, I ran and hid. But the next day, they fired him. And I told my wife, I think I'm going to quit the parking lot because that guy may come by some night with his gun. And suddenly we just prayed for God's help. And suddenly, every time we needed money to pay the bills, in came a check from a magazine, went and sold another article. That's how the writing career really began.
[00:23:23] Speaker B: Okay, I was going to say around this time your writing career was growing. How did your writing gigs for Radio Shack come about? You had a beautiful relationship with them.
[00:23:33] Speaker A: An editor at Howard Sam's and company. His name was Bob Harrington. He was very familiar with my writing for the hobby electronics magazines. And a guy had written a book on diode lasers. It was the first book on diode lasers, but he was not a very good writer.
Mr. Harrington asked if I would like to be his co author and correct the book, fix the book. And I agreed, and it was a bigger project than I thought. I ended up writing half of that book and then rewriting the other half, and then doing lots of photographs, unusual infrared photographs of laser beams and things like that. Anyway, that book became laser diodes, and it sold well for an experiment. It was the first book written about laser diodes. So then Mr. Harrington realized that I knew how to write. So Radio Shack had me write some more books. I wrote the first books on light emitting diodes, two of those books. And then he came to me once, not in person, but over the telephone. He says, they had the radio shack contract for writing do it yourself books for Radio Shack. But they don't have a writer. They have the contract, but they need somebody to write the books. So I began writing books for Radio Shack, and I wrote 20 books, conventional electronic project books. I would dictate them or riding my bicycle, my wife would print them out with a typewriter, and then I would correct it, fix any editorial problems, and send those in. And they would pay me around $1500 to $2,500 per book.
I didn't realize they were selling many hundreds of thousands of copies of those books. I had no idea.
[00:25:07] Speaker B: Wow. And as I look at some of these, I see handwritten. Were all the radio shack kits and books handwritten like this?
[00:25:15] Speaker A: No. The first 16 books were all conventionally printed. But one day, my editor at Radio Shack, his name is Dave Gunzel, and I showed him my laboratory notebook. I'm just going to open it up to a random page here, and I don't know if you can see that or not.
It's all printed by hand.
And Dave looked at this notebook, and he said, we should do a book based on your notebooks. And so I said, okay. So we did. We wrote a 128 page book of electronic circuits using all the different integrated circuits that radio Shack made back then.
It sold 500, or, no, 600,000 copies, which made it bestseller territory. So they had me write a second one, and I did. And then they had me write a third one called getting started in electronics. And that was a complete electronics course. And 128 pages, all hand lettered. The first two books were written with India ink on Mylar, which made my finger bleed. It was so hard to write those books. And if I made a mistake, you don't erase India ink. You have to start a completely new page. So they let me use a number two pencil. In fact, there's a picture of that pencil on the back of my new memoir. And so I wrote this getting started electronics with that pencil, and it became a bestseller. It has now sold over 1.3 million copies, and it's pirated all over the world.
[00:26:45] Speaker B: And it's still available?
[00:26:46] Speaker A: Yes, sir, it's still being sold. And I just got a royalty check this morning.
[00:26:53] Speaker B: That's awesome. Wow, what a story. Well, in a second episode, we're going to dive a little deeper into your scientific career and achievements. But before we close this episode, I wanted to touch on what you call in your book the Scientific American Affair. Your brief but memorable association with America's oldest magazine. The amateur scientist was the longest running and most popular column in Scientific American. And you had been a faithful reader of it all these years. And then they asked you to become, well, I think you had approached them at one point and they had a good writer for it. But did he pass or what happened there? Well, to allow you to come in.
[00:27:34] Speaker A: I sent a proposal to them because the writer that was doing that column, the projects had become very simple compared to what it used to be. It used to have very advanced projects. So I put together a proposal and sent that to a reporter who worked for the magazine who had done a story about me for an electronics publication. And he liked it.
I sent more. I sent a big package that weighed a couple of pounds with 30 proposed column topics. I sent copies of my books and so forth. And after a year or so back and forth negotiations, they had me fly to New York and I was assigned the column tentatively. Unfortunately, in the meeting with the editor, he asked a question, what other magazines have you written for? And I wanted to show that I wasn't just an electronics guy, but I said, popular photography, Texas parks and Wildlife. I named a few other magazine, christian magazines. That was a big mistake. He immediately said, what have you written for christian magazines? And I said, how to take church teenagers on long distance bicycle trips and in particular a 1000 miles bicycle trip that I'd written about extensively. He didn't look very happy. He jumped out of his chair and says, stay there. I will see you in a minute. And he ran out of the office and he went to Tim Appenseller's office. He was an associate editor. I did not know this, but Tim, when he was eleven years old, was a member of my rocket club in Albuquerque. And anyway, Tim, he ran into Tim's office and said, red alert. Red alert. Mims is a creationist. And he wanted Tim to ask me some trick questions during lunch.
It didn't work out that way. They liked me at lunch because I showed them some of my experiments. But I ended up not getting the column. Even though the editor praised the column in writing, they did end up publishing the three of the columns I had written, but only after, and I didn't sue them, but only after I wrote the president of the magazine, which had been bought out by a german company and saying that as walls against freedom are coming down around the world, namely the Berlin Wall, Scientific American has erected a wall of religious discrimination. And the lawyer for the magazine calls me, what can we do to make you happy? I said, publish my three columns and pay for them.
[00:29:56] Speaker B: Wow. And they did. But because of their disapproval of your doubts about evolution and your stance on abortion, they terminated that assignment and off you went. Now, it seemed like this would have been a real setback for your career, but what happened afterwards that actually led to better things.
[00:30:14] Speaker A: I told my wife, Minnie, I said, and by the way, this is a very emotional journey with Scientific American, and many suffered through this with me. My dad gave me lots of good advice during that mess. I told Minnie, I'm going to take off one year just to prove that a Christian without a science education can make real discoveries and invent new kinds of instruments. Just I'm going to take off one year to do that. That year has never ended. I'm still doing that. It transformed my whole career. It transformed my life, my career that being fired from Scientific America, in fact, my last scientific paper on 30 years of atmospheric measurements. I acknowledged a number of people at the end of the paper, and one of them was Jonathan Peele, the editor of Scientific American, who essentially fired me. But frankly, I acknowledged him because if he had not have fired me, I never would have become a full time scientist.
[00:31:07] Speaker B: Yeah, well, I thought the letter you received from the American association for the Advancement of Science, the AAS, was interesting in relation to this. You had contacted them to see if they could intervene in the scientific american situation. They said they weren't in a position to weigh in on the legal questions, but they did take the opportunity to affirm the principle that, quote, articles submitted for publication in journals devoted to science, technology and medicine should be judged exclusively on their scientific merit. A person's private behavior or religious or political beliefs or affiliations should not serve as criteria in the evaluation of articles submitted for publication. And of course they went on, even if a person holds religiously derived beliefs that conflict with views commonly held in the scientific community, those beliefs should not influence decisions about publication of scientific articles unless the beliefs are reflected in the articles, which that last part, you could easily see how people could run with that. But I thought that amounted to some pretty encouraging remarks for you.
[00:32:16] Speaker A: Absolutely. That letter I've safeguarded that letter, I think that letter is historic because that never would have happened today, the way that the culture has transformed itself and is going backwards. In fact, I can prove that because I submitted the manuscript or a proposal for my memoir to Texas A. M. University Press after two years. They rejected the book for the exact same reason that Scientific American rejected me writing their columns. And the reason I know that they rejected for those reasons is Texas A. M. Is a government college. And so I could use the open records act to get their emails. And I read their emails mocking me because of my beliefs. So that AAS letter is, in my opinion, very historic. And we need to return to that era where people are not judged by their personal beliefs but by the content of what they're writing.
[00:33:07] Speaker B: Yeah, I like that. And later, Discover magazine would say something very similar as they defended you as one of their 50 best brains in science. We'll talk about that in part two. Well, the scientific american controversy led to new opportunities for you in science, as well as a meeting with our very own Philip Johnson, one of the pioneering founders of the modern intelligent design movement. You also had some words with famed evolutionary biologist and Darwin champion Richard Dawkins, who had a very uncomplimentary thing or two to say about this whole dustup and your views on darwinian evolution. We'll unpack all of that and more in our next episode together, focusing on the latter half of your career and your achievements in science. Well, Forrest, thanks so much for joining us today.
[00:33:53] Speaker A: Thank you, folks.
[00:33:56] Speaker B: You're going to want to get a copy of Forrest's book, Maverick Scientist, my adventures as an amateur scientist. It's educational and inspiring. It's also a good reminder that we are capable of great things when we put our minds to it. Learn more and order a
[email protected]. Slash maverick that's discovery slash maverick. For idthefuture. I'm andrew Mcdermott. Thanks for joining us.
[00:34:22] Speaker A: Visit
[email protected] and intelligentdesign.org. This program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
