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[00:00:43] Speaker B: If we're not skeptical of our results, our results are highly skeptical. That's the problem. And unfortunately I've known a few scientists who were not skeptical of their results. They'd already made up their mind before they even began their research.
And I've there's only a few I've met like that. But that's very disturbing in my opinion, because it blocks out other results that they may have had that are very different from the previously thought out results that were just simply guesses.
ID the Future a podcast about evolution and Intelligent Design.
[00:01:20] Speaker A: Well, welcome to ID the Future. I'm your host Andrew McDermott and today I welcome back to the show engineer, inventor, writer and self taught scientist Forrest mims. In his 2024 memoir, Maverick Scientist, Mims recounts his many adventures as an amateur scientist. In previous episodes of the podcast, we've discussed highlights of his career as a writer and scientist, including his time writing books on electronics for RadioShack, how he used his own homemade instruments to point out errors in NASA's own atmospheric data, his dust up with Scientific American magazine, and his experience winning a Rolex Award along with his work on Twilight photometry, his adventures at the world famous Mauna Loa Observatory. The list goes on. He's had so many adventures in his career and it's not over yet. Well, today our topic is Integrity in Science. I'm going to ask Forrest what he's learned over decades in science about how scientists are demonstrate good character and camaraderie as they pursue their scientific research.
Now, if you're not familiar with Forrest yet, let me touch on the basics for you. Named by Discover Magazine as one of the 50 best brains in science, Mims has forged a distinguished scientific career despite having no academic training in science. He has published over 60 books with publishers that include McGraw Hill, Prentice Hall, Radio Shack and others.
His Radio Shack books alone have sold over 7.5 million copies.
Mims scientific papers have appeared in a number of peer reviewed journals including Nature Science, the Journal of Molecular Evolution, Applied Optics and others.
His columns have been published in Scientific American, Popular Electronics, Modern Electronics, the Citizen Scientist and other outlets. He's also consulted for a number of official scientific bodies, including NASA, NOAA and the Environmental Protection Agency. Hey, Forrest. Welcome back.
[00:03:20] Speaker B: Thank you. I'm glad to be back.
[00:03:22] Speaker A: Yeah, it's great to have you. Well, our topic today is integrity, and I'd like to start by just getting a good sense of what that is to you and why it's important in science. How would you define it and why it matters?
[00:03:36] Speaker B: Integrity is key to doing science.
Fortunately, the vast majority of scientists with whom I have worked have high levels of integrity. But I've seen examples in the literature of people, especially people from some other countries, who plagiarize data, who falsify data, and that does nothing but harm science and it makes science indefensible for the population. That does not do science. So integrity is super important.
Yeah.
[00:04:05] Speaker A: And you told me recently about a booklet called On Being a Scientist, published by the National Academies of Science. Now, the first edition of this booklet came out in 1989 and it's now in its third edition. And you mentioned there's a fourth edition, possibly in the works. Now, the second edition added a subtitle which hints at the purpose of the book. Responsible Conduct in Research On Being a Scientist was written for young researchers and aims to describe the ethical foundations of scientific practices and and some of the personal and professional issues the researchers encounter in their work. In the preface to the second edition, the writers speak about the future of science depending on not only people of enormous energy and talent, but also people of strong character who will be tomorrow's leaders.
Now, this booklet resonates with you and you actually taught from it in your science classes. Tell us why you found it valuable and why you used it as a teaching tool.
[00:05:04] Speaker B: I use it as a teaching tool because it has excellent comments about skepticism.
One should never do science thinking that the outcome is already known.
When we do science, we're not supposed to know the outcome. And for example, my atmospheric science, every day that I measure the altitude of aerosols, the ozone layer, and so forth, I know approximately what I'm going to see. But I never know exactly.
Some people, unfortunately, might falsify that data. It's like when I teased Noah once, because on weekends they showed no ozone measurements were being made at the headquarters in Colorado, in Boulder, Colorado. I said, so there's. When I sent them a list of ozone values that they made during the week, and I put zero ozone on Saturday and Sunday.
They started measuring the ozone layer on Saturday and Sunday after I did that.
[00:05:56] Speaker A: Ah, that's funny now. Yeah. So basically you're saying that skepticism is an integral part of the scientific pursuit. Right.
[00:06:06] Speaker B: It's key to science. And if we're not skeptical of our results, our results are highly skeptical. That's the problem. And unfortunately, I've known a few scientists who were not skeptical of their results. They'd already made up their mind before they even began their research.
And there's only a few I've met like that. But that's very disturbing, in my opinion, because it blocks out other results that they may have had that are very different from the previously thought out results that were just simply guesses.
[00:06:35] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And it pays to be skeptical yourself of the things that you're finding because eventually with peer review and, and colleagues looking at your work, they're going to be skeptical if they're doing the right thing, too. So you've got to have that in there somewhere. I may as well start with you, right? As a.
[00:06:51] Speaker B: Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.
[00:06:54] Speaker A: Well, back in 2016, you contacted the National Academies of Science with some concerns about the third edition of this booklet on being a scientist. It turned out that almost all mention of the important role of skepticism in scientific research was dropped in the third edition of this booklet. So tell us why you reached out to them and did you get a satisfactory response?
[00:07:17] Speaker B: Well, I reached out to them for the same reason we talked about integrity a few moments ago.
I think there was a serious lapse of integrity at the National Academies of Science by leaving out virtually everything to do with skepticism, which is a key to doing good science.
And so I wrote them a letter. What happened? Why did you drop this? And they actually responded to my letter and said we didn't have room for the new version.
So being a writer, myself and an editor, I looked at their new version and I saw quite a bit of white space. In fact, some pages were almost completely white where there was no text. So I wrote them back and said you had plenty of white space to place the material on skepticism that you purposefully omitted. Well, we'll be sure to put it back in in a future edition. Well, that was, you know, that was years ago and it hasn't come back yet, but they're hopefully planning to do so in their New fourth edition, which is beginning to in works now, and it will also be web pages, it'll be videos, it'll be more than just a printed booklet.
[00:08:17] Speaker A: Yeah, now you, you didn't just tell them this. You actually laid it out and you specified, you know, the quotes that included skepticism in the, the second edition. So I want to just look at that because, you know, this is really worthy of conversation, you know, talking about the role of skepticism. So let's look at a few statements that were dropped.
This is second edition, page two.
Signs has progressed through a uniquely productive marriage, that of human creativity and hard nosed skepticism, of openness to new scientific contributions and persistent questioning of those contributions and the existing scientific consensus.
So, you know, suggesting that you need both there. Now that statement is not in the current edition of this booklet, but it was in the earlier edition.
So do you think it's still a good description of how science should be conducted? That you need both this creativity but also the hard nosed skepticism?
[00:09:15] Speaker B: I think they've made a huge mistake and I have several thoughts on this.
What was going on at the same time as this new edition of the book was being prepared?
A giant movement toward climate change that was using exaggerated statistics to suggest that we're going to kill the earth if we continue emitting carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Very little consideration was given to the fact that we have very little knowledge of how clouds move through the atmosphere and how arctic air moves through the atmosphere.
The temperature of the earth has always changed and yet there's a subset of scientists who believe it's solely due to human activity.
I don't accept that. That's skepticism. Skepticism is essentially disallowed in this new version of Vaughn being a scientist. And, and I think that the global warming, the climate change thing played a role in that change in their booklet.
[00:10:12] Speaker A: Okay, well, let's look at another one. How about this statement? Page six of the second edition, dropped in the third edition said this. The fallibility of methods is a valuable reminder of the importance of skepticism in science. Scientific knowledge and scientific methods, whether old or new, must be continually scrutinized for possible errors. Such skepticism can conflict with other important features of science, such as the need for creativity and for conviction in arguing a given position. But organized and searching skepticism, as well as an openness to new ideas, are essential to guard against the intrusion of dogma or collective bias into scientific results.
Wow. Now, I know that new editions often have new issues to address, and if they want to keep the brevity of the first two editions, that Presents an editing challenge. But why drop these important statements about skepticism?
[00:11:07] Speaker B: I'm very troubled by that myself. I'm going to show you something here that I think can be seen on the screen. The first plot. The first graph here in red shows data from a NASA instrument measuring the atmosphere. And the next three or four curves are my data with my new atmospheric instrument.
And there's a significant difference. Here's Mine has two channels of light that it measures. It's doing this at twilight every day. You'll notice a sharp spike downward in my data at about 10-15 km. That's totally missing from the NASA data. And yet all we had.
I was in charge of building these NASA instruments. So all we had was those instruments. We had five of them.
We didn't know that we were missing this huge area of ultra clear air below the tropopause because the instrument didn't measure it. So sometimes it's important to be skeptical even of the instruments that you're building. If you build a new instrument that shows something new, you have to publish those results. And I will be publishing these results.
Right.
[00:12:12] Speaker A: So creativity to produce new machines that can do the correct measurements, but also the skepticism to challenge, you know, data that's already existing and offering better data.
[00:12:27] Speaker B: Precisely. In other words, how do we know that? What if the NASA. What if I'd never been in charge of building those NASA instruments?
We never would have known about that, the bad data they were showing. But then we build it and we don't realize we've got some bad data. So that's extremely important. It's really haunted me as I'm doing this project. I started this Twilight project in 2014, and only in the last six months I discovered that our NASA instruments were not producing all the proper data.
[00:12:56] Speaker A: I'm really glad that you're raising these issues and I'm glad that you were part of these projects so that you can. But it makes you wonder what gets missing or what goes wrong, you know, in science if these things are not challenged with skepticism. And you know, a healthy second and third look, you know, and who knows, maybe, maybe they'll bring back more talk about skepticism in another edition of this important little booklet that they like to give young scientists.
But the jury's still out on that. Well, let me ask your thoughts on some of the other topics raised in this booklet, just as important to science today as ever.
Let's start with a few words on method in science. We all learned about the general scientific method in science class. Something like observe, question Hypothesize, experiment, and then draw conclusions. Now, the first edition of this booklet has a short section at the beginning called Is there a Scientific Method? It states that in practice, research is as varied as the approaches of individual researchers. Have you found that to be true in your work? Tell us about the method you've used as a scientist.
[00:14:09] Speaker B: Well, that's absolutely true, since. Since I've never taken a science course, it's a lot easier for me to answer your question.
I just follow my instincts.
And if, for example, I was working on an electronic circuit the other day that was clearly showing incorrect data, how did I know that? Well, I knew that you can't have the resistance of a resistor at 10 billion ohms. You can't properly measure that unless you use certain special techniques. So if you have knowledge about a subject, it's much easier to be skeptical of your results.
And every instrument I build, there's a degree of skepticism involved in whether or not the results are proper.
Shall we talk about the Russian ozone instrument and some of the skepticism that belongs there and was never placed there?
[00:14:54] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:14:55] Speaker B: Well, a decade ago, the second most famous journal in the world, science, published by the American Academy of Science.
They published a lengthy paper by many authors from NASA and from Europe and from Russia. It was on the ozone layer, and it was all these ground based measurements of ozone showing whether or not the ozone layer was in trouble.
Well, the American measurements were very good because they were made with an instrument called the Dobson, which is the best instrument by far. I know a lot about that because I calibrated the world standard Dobson instrument at the Mauna loa Observatory for 63 days.
I lived on that mountain the whole time. Well, but unfortunately, the results also included data from one of these.
And these are not one of them, but a series of these. These are Russian ozone instruments. M124.
And when I went to the International Ozone Symposium at the University of Virginia in 1994, I met some of the Russian scientists who use these instruments, and they sold me two of them for $750. I don't know what they did with the money, but I know that at the university they all lived in one dorm room and they spent all their money on vodka and a color television set. But anyway, they shipped me two of these instruments.
I used the one I just showed you for two years, two full years, from New Year's to New Year's to New Year's. So in between two full years, I compared that with my data.
My instrument is quite a bit Smaller, but it works very well. In fact, it worked well enough to have found an error in NASA satellite. And when they were NASA scientists doubted that, saying, you just have that instrument, I said, well, no, I've got two of them. They both found the same error. So knowing that and then knowing that they were using terrible data from Russia in their instrument, and I checked their instrument against mine, and it showed these 10% errors, I called NASA and asked them, why did you allow Russian data in this incredibly important paper?
And there was one word reply. Politics. And that's ever. I'll never forget that as long as I live. That really troubled me that a scientist of that level admitted that politics is why they included questionable data and a major paper on the ozone layer.
[00:17:09] Speaker A: Wow.
Well, and you're. You're. You're illustrating that method is connected with skepticism, you know, because part of a scientist's method is checking what comes out, you know, checking that the data is correct, checking your machines, checking your assumptions twice, three times, four times, you know, so really, it's built into the method of doing science.
[00:17:32] Speaker B: Yep. And when you say checking, that's great. That's a perfect word.
I go to Mauna Lo Observatory every year, and that little ozone instrument I showed you has evolved into microtops. And this measures. It measures the ozone layer, the water vapor layer, and also measures aerosols, the particles of dust and smoke and stuff up in the air. And I calibrate this against the world standard ozone instrument every time I get a chance.
And it's always been within 1% of that. And now that it's over 20 years old now, so it's got a problem. I'm sending it back to the company. They're going to work on it. But you've got to be careful when you make these kinds of measurements, that they're accurate and that you're testing your instrument time after time.
Even the world standard instrument can have problems. When it arrived in Hawaii, I got shocked because there was a bare wire connecting the instrument to the metal stand that it was mounted on. And when I was working on it, boom. I got shocked.
[00:18:29] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:18:29] Speaker B: Some of the. Some of the gear on that instrument had to be updated because it was unreadable. So when an instrument gets old like mine, you better make extra sure that it's working properly.
[00:18:40] Speaker A: And I just want our listeners and viewers to be clear that those instruments that you're holding up, the smaller ones, those are ones you built yourself. Right. The microtops, two. And the original tops. Right.
All instruments you built yourself. And they all compare in how well they collect the data to the big guy's instruments. Right?
[00:19:02] Speaker B: Exactly. This instrument, this is just wood, and these plastic things here are furniture tips from a hardware store. And inside those ultra high quality optical filters.
These are built in liquid crystal displays. So then I built the circuit on the bottom just using standard parts. You could buy a Radio Shack.
So as, as long as you're using good components and you carefully check everything you got, it doesn't, you don't have to use world class equipment. You can use very inexpensive equipment.
[00:19:35] Speaker A: Yeah. That's awesome. The next challenge, of course, connected to that is convincing those scientists in those organizations that they can take your data seriously.
[00:19:44] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:19:44] Speaker A: Right.
[00:19:44] Speaker B: And that's, that's where, that's where publication becomes absolutely essential.
This instrument here is not the same one I used, but I used an instrument like this Twilight instrument to measure the atmosphere, together with Dong Wu, a NOAA expert on measuring atmosphere at Goddard Space Flight center. And he provided me a grant to study the atmosphere after the eruption of the Hunga Tonga volcano, that historic volcano that was the biggest volcano in our lifetimes.
And at any rate, though I was able to use these instruments to measure the altitude of the aerosols from that and knew I was accurate because of the previous test I'd run. And also by comparing it with instruments that are much more expensive, like, well, satellite instruments and so forth.
What if. Here's a good question. We've only got a handful of lidars, laser radars essentially, that can measure these things. And three at Monolo Observatory aren't working because the road's covered by lava. The access road for the past two years, and even when the road is repaired, as it's being worked on now, they don't have electrical power to power these very big LIDARs.
There's two LIDARs into Table Mountain, California, and there's one in Boulder. The one in Boulder hasn't worked for 12 years. There's just a handful of these things. These instruments that I build. I publish how to do this and make magazine how to make instruments like this.
Everybody could build these. So we have simple instruments that could replace the ones that are not working and are far more expensive. And yet our simple little handheld instruments are just as accurate, if not more accurate.
Yeah.
[00:21:22] Speaker A: That's awesome.
Yeah. Well, another part of science that calls for integrity is the sharing and evaluation of data between scientists, even when the data appears to question commonly accepted hypotheses.
Now, we've alluded to this already. You've got a lot of stories about how challenging it is to have your data taken seriously by other scientists. Can you share just one or two additional examples?
[00:21:47] Speaker B: The key is peer review.
In other words, you can do all the science you want. I know some really good amateur scientists who haven't published a single word. So it's really a hobby of theirs. They really ought to share the results with the rest of us. And so I do that. I do that through writing for magazines that pay me money. Make magazine, I have a column in make magazine and I publish my instruments in there. But if I want scientific recognition, I have to publish my results in scientific journals. So, for example, the instrument I've been showing you, one very similar to that, was used to measure the tropopause, the boundary between the stratosphere and the troposphere.
It's where airplanes like to fly above. The air is very stable above the tropopause. I used that, compared that with weather balloon data. I was within 1% during 72 different measurements. I even went to Corpus Christi and made measurements when they were launching weather balloons that measured the tropopause. That was published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. That's the flagship for scientific publications about the atmosphere. It had to go through peer review. Four different scientists had to review the paper. I had to make some minor changes, and then, bingo, it was published in one of the world's leading scientific journals. So when I built these handheld instruments, when I found the error in the NASA satellite, I wrote a short paper and submitted it to the journal Nature. Well, the staff didn't think it was worth publishing a homemade instrument, so they rejected it. I wrote back and they said, okay, we'll show it to our boss. The editor of Nature back then was a world famous skeptic, so I wasn't too optimistic. I didn't realize he had great respect for amateur scientists.
He sent the paper for peer review. It was reviewed, it was agreed to, and it was published in journal in Nature, which is the world's most important scientific journal.
I never would have been taken seriously without that paper in Nature.
In fact, NASA had. NASA responded with a letter to the editor.
[00:23:46] Speaker A: Yeah, well, that shows the tenacity that's involved.
And I'm glad that you hit on an editor that was a skeptic.
[00:23:55] Speaker B: Right.
[00:23:55] Speaker A: Speaking of skepticism, now, did you ever come across resistance because you didn't have the word doctor behind your name or in front of your name, or people realized you didn't go to school formally to study science?
[00:24:11] Speaker B: That's a great question.
In my entire Career. I have never once been asked what my degree was. Never.
And one reason for that is they already knew I didn't have a degree. I guess because I write all these. I've written, you know, 60 books. So my Radio Shack books have sold over 8 million copies. So I get emails. I'm getting kind of old now, but I still, I'm getting emails a couple a week from people who say their career was built on those Radio Shack books. That's how they learn their basic electronics. So maybe that's why nobody asked me. But I've never been asked.
I have been asked by professional scientists, will I do some science for them. That includes NASA. NASA hired me three times, twice to go to Brazil during biomass burning time of the year where they're burning down all the, you know, the trees and everything.
The second trip to Brazil was because the NASA people were disallowed by the Brazilian government.
So they sent me instead. Well, I would have been in trouble if I had not written to the University of Sao Paulo and gotten permission from a famous atmospheric scientist. He sent me a letter of permission and that's how I could get through, you know, the imports and all that into the country and do my measurements.
I was the only person and my student, I took a student. We were the only two people in all of Brazil measuring the atmosphere during the worst burning year that's on record.
And so I have no degree in science, but I have excellent data and I published that with NASA. I also made a discovery on that trip. It relates to a discovery my daughter made we can talk about sometime. But I discovered that the incidence of bacteria floating in the air was much greater on smoky days. And the obvious connection is the smoke is blocking the ultraviolet that ordinarily kills the bacteria. So there were a lot more bacteria. And that became of high interest now that I got a paper published on that. And now there are people that reference my paper in their papers.
[00:26:06] Speaker A: Yeah, well, it comes back to that mantra of yours, you know, to be a scientist you just have to do science, you know.
[00:26:12] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:26:13] Speaker A: In the end, it's not about the degree. It's not about the doctor in front of your name. It's the fact that you can do scientists and produce data that other scientists can use and evaluate. And, you know, that's. That's it.
That was engineer, inventor, writer and self taught scientist Forest Mims, discussing the importance of integrity in science.
In a separate episode, we continue this conversation. Forrest explains why even an 11th grader in high school is capable of scientific discoveries that can move science forward.
We also discuss the role of values in science. Is it possible for a scientist to be honest about his or her values and still produce honest science?
And can the public be given the chance to make an informed decision to about the relevance of scientific research?
Find out what Forrest has to say about those things and more in the second half of our conversation.
And don't forget, you can watch this and many other of my interviews with intelligent design scientists on our YouTube channel. That'
[email protected] the future. Go ahead and subscribe and you'll be the first to receive notifications of new video interviews. YouTube.com dthefuture I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks again for joining us.
[00:27:34] Speaker B: Visit us at idthefuture.com and intelligentdesign.org this program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
