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[00:00:44] Speaker B: So my first advice is don't borrow money to go to college. My second advice is do you really need to go to college to do science? Maybe practicing in a labor even temporarily for a year or two will give you some of the background information you need in order to pass some of those difficult science courses.
ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent Design.
[00:01:11] Speaker A: Welcome to ID the Future. I'm your host Andrew McDermott. Today I conclude my conversation with engineer, inventories 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 ID the Future, we've discussed highlights of his career as a writer and a scientist, including his time writing books on electronics for Radio Shack, how he used his own homemade instruments to point out errors in NASA's own atmospheric data, his dust up with Scientific American magazine, his experience winning a Rolex Award, his work in Twilight photometry, his adventures at the world famous Mauna Loa Observatory. The list goes on. Our topic today though, is Integrity in Science. Now in part one of this conversation, we discussed the role of skepticism in science as well as the role of method in scientific research.
Forrest shared personal stories and examples from his career in science.
In part two, we discussed the role of values in science and the role of the scientist in society.
Forrest will also share some of his own advice to young scientists based on what he has learned through decades of work as a scientist.
Now, if you're not yet familiar with Forrest, here are a few things you should know about him.
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, Oxford, Applied Optics, and others.
His columns have been published for popular readers in Scientific American, Popular Electronics, Modern Electronics, the Citizen Scientist, make magazine and other outlets. He has also consulted for a number of official scientific bodies, including NASA, NOAA and the Environmental Protection Agency.
All right, it's time. Let's jump back into my conversation with Forrest now.
And even kids in high school can make important scientific discoveries and maybe at first rebuffed by the pros, you know, the professional scientists. But if you're persistent and you have good data, even high school kids can do this. Tell us about your daughter Sarah and what she discovered.
[00:03:52] Speaker B: Sarah has a professionally peer reviewed paper from the 11th grade. In the 10th grade, she did a science project every year.
Her 10th grade project was based on Sahara dust. And it's more commonly known now than it was back then when she was in the 10th grade. We're talking about 15 or 20 years ago.
But she was measuring the dust coming from Africa in our field, using microscope slides. And she would get a microscope and she'd count the particles and everything. And Charlotte changed during August and September. There's a lot more dust. Then I drove her to the science fair.
She got to the International Science Fair in Dallas Fort Worth. And we were driving back, she said she wondered what she could do for the next year. And I said, you know, I've heard that there could be living microorganisms in dust, but I've never heard of anybody detecting it coming from Africa. So then she got petrifils, which are little culture things that they use in restaurants and in kitchens to look for E. Coli and other bacteria. It's just, you peel back a layer and you've got a film of material that's sensitive to these bacteria. So she bought some of those, and she bought some that work for yeast.
Set those outside.
Bingo. On the day with the most haze, which was smoke from Yucatan, she was getting bacteria and fungal particles on these films.
And we did an experiment.
I said, why don't you build a fire in that trash can and put some dried grass in there. So she did that. Put her films, her biofilms on a stick, put it over the smoke, not the fire, but when it was over the smoke, it got all kinds of hits from bacteria and fungi, whereas in the clear air next to the smoke, it got hardly any. So, bingo. And so she was onto something really, really important because nobody discovered this, so we took her to these back. These were coming, these were in smoke from fires in Yucatan. And that smoke drifts across the Gulf of America, comes to Texas and that's what she was detecting. Well, to avoid being told that the bacteria were coming from Texas instead of the Gulf, we drove her to the, to Padre island. And she flew a kite with an air sampler made for, you know, with a paper cup and a glass microscope slide, 25 cent air sampler. She got numerous of these spores from that microscope flown from a kite. So we drive her back when there's no smoke in the fall and she got almost zero particles on her plate. So bingo. That proved that the air from Yucatan contains these microorganisms. That was their science project. It became the lead paper in the journal American in the major leading atmospheric science journal. I've forgotten the name of it. It became the lead paper, the very first paper in the journal and it's now been referenced over 50 times in the scientific literature. And it started a new field of science.
The new field of science is called pyro aerobiology. Pyro meaning fire, Pyro aerobiology. And a scientist at the University of Utah started this and has followed in Sarah's footsteps and referencing her paper in her papers.
[00:07:04] Speaker A: Wow. Well, and what a cool father daughter experience to have.
[00:07:07] Speaker B: Oh, absolutely. I mean, that's probably.
That paper is extremely important because it proves that you can transport these microbes considerable distances where they can do harm when they land on plants or people a thousand miles away.
[00:07:22] Speaker A: Right, yeah. And so a new, a new, a new field has opened up to pursue this more.
[00:07:29] Speaker B: Huh? Yes.
Wow.
[00:07:32] Speaker A: Well, there's another section in the booklet on being a scientist called Values in Science. I appreciated this statement in there. It said many of the intangible influences on scientific discovery, curiosity, intuition, creativity, largely defy rational analysis. Yet they're among the tools that scientists bring to their work. It goes on to say that values cannot be separated from science. And even notes that the value of religious convictions about the nature of the universe have also led to important scientific insights.
So should scientists be trying to separate their science from their values or should they simply be honest about how their values impact their science?
[00:08:13] Speaker B: Well, I had to be honest about that in my first memoir and my second memoir, Maverick Scientist. Listen, when I reach a big problem in my science work, I go to the ultimate source of help. God. I simply pray for help. And that began when I was building transistorized radars for the blind that you hold in your hand. They're very Very small. My great grandfather was blind, and that's what interested me in that project. And I was trying to build one of these on eyeglasses when we lived in New Mexico. I could not build a circuit that small, and I could today by using surface mount components. But back then, there was no way I could do that.
I gave up and I finally just prayed to the Lord and said, I cannot do this on my own. Please help me build this. I'd never prayed about my science. Never.
Two days later, my eyeglass aid for the blind was built and being tested with a blind student at the University of New Mexico. Thanks to God's answer to my prayer, I don't know how it happened, but I was able to build that very tiny circuit very quickly after that prayer.
[00:09:18] Speaker A: So scientists don't need to necessarily separate their science from their values. They just need to be candid and honest about how their values impact things.
[00:09:28] Speaker B: Then precisely remember that the most famous amateur scientist of all time was Michael Faraday. We would not be having this discussion if it were not for Faraday's inventions of various forms of light and transmission of light, so forth. He even came up with the various laws of radio communications. He didn't have the mathematics ability, but he had the novelty ability in his mind. He went to church every Sunday.
In fact, he got kicked out of a leadership of his very conservative church when he went to see the Queen. Queen Victoria wanted an audience with this famous scientist. And so he went on a Sunday morning, got in big trouble, and they put him on the back bench of his church for a couple years, then they put him back up front. He became the head of various scientific societies worldwide. Scientific societies. The man was a total genius. And he built his, his science on his faith.
[00:10:18] Speaker A: So, yeah, and you can, you can look back through the history of modern science and see, see that same approach. You know, scientists, you know, doing good science not in spite of their faith, but because of it, inspired by it, you know, fueled by, by a desire to study what they considered to be an intelligible universe. You know, we see that all the way through the history of modern science.
[00:10:44] Speaker B: Yep, you're right.
By the way, Faraday also invented the precursor of the electric motor. So he was a very dive. And he was also a great chemist.
He did. And he also, every year, he did what was called a Christmas lecture to children just before Christmas.
These are very famous lectures, I will tell you. I can assure you that it's difficult to understand some of these lectures because they were so sophisticated, yet there's children in the audience rapidly listening to every word he said.
[00:11:13] Speaker A: So he could relate to people and was a good teacher then, too.
[00:11:17] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:11:19] Speaker A: That's awesome. Well, let's talk about respect between scientists, as in that famous Aretha Franklin song, R E S P E C T.
One way scientists respect each other is by giving credit where it's due. Now, why do you think this is important to science? And what have you learned about this personally in your career?
[00:11:38] Speaker B: Well, there are some scientists who plagiarize their research. That's a minority. But some who do that. I've had some of my things. I've had entire articles in Scientific American plagiarized by a writer who put them in a book. And he simply changed my hometown from Texas down to some other town. He didn't. Everything else is identical, word for word. McGraw Hill was the publisher. They pulled the book after they found out about that. But you want some basic integrity between scientists.
I can't really think of a situation where I was at war with a scientist. I've disagreed with them on various things, but we've never gotten into a big argument or anything like that.
I've done all this work for NASA. I've got a $20,000 instrument in my field that NASA sent here. Been using it for, like, almost a decade now, measuring the atmosphere every.
We may differ on various things. I know that one scientist at NASA had big political posters in his office that I totally disagreed with. But we were best friends. We were best friends. We never argued about politics.
[00:12:42] Speaker A: Yeah, respect is key, isn't it, when you're trying to get to the bottom of things and study phenomena in nature?
Very important. Now, you mentioned something about giving honorary bylines with science papers. You know, what's that about?
[00:13:01] Speaker B: That's a toughie. Oh, gosh.
I've faced that problem several times. Like, for example, Dong Wu. Dong Wu is his name. He and I are co authors on that paper about the trophopause. But that's because he headed the NASA, the Goddard Space Flight center that gave me the grant to do that work. They hired me for two years. And so he was an integral part of that. He provided the equations that I needed that I couldn't provide on measuring the height of the atmosphere and so forth. So that was legitimate.
One paper I wrote had five co authors, and I was the second author on that paper, not the lead author. And some of the co authors, I wasn't directly with them when they did their contribution, but I do know they did their contribution. So whether or not. They should have been co authors. I'm not sure, but I didn't argue about it. And then I'm going to have my friend in California, Dr. Steve Davis. He used one of the instruments I built for NASA, or had arranged to be built for NASA 20 some odd times near Santa Barbara, California or Southern California, and then 20 or so evenings near Los Angeles. So beautiful data from a dry, clear area and a very, very polluted area. That's very important. He's going to be a co author of. On my paper about my twilight research.
So will a fellow who lives in Alabama.
His name is Don Wilcher. He's got an honorary doctorate. He built the.
He designed the printed circuit boards for this little circuit here. This is a complete twilight photometer right there. It's all the electronics. The LED is on the, the LED is on this side.
And this here comprises a complete twilight photometer. If you add a 1 inch telescope tube and the lens.
This, this here has this inside two, there's two of these inside with batteries and switches and all.
So Don designed this board. He's going to be a co author.
I'll be the lead author because I invented the board and I do all the, I mean the circuitry and I'll do, I'll do all these measurements. So I have two really legitimate co authors and then I'll be the lead author.
[00:15:18] Speaker A: Okay. And that reminds me of the fact that, you know, you can work as an individual doing science, but the importance of collaboration is there too, because, you know, you're not an isolated island. You do have to collaborate, you have to share data, you have to work together to make something bigger. And you're sort of illustrating the importance of that.
[00:15:43] Speaker B: And when the potential collaborator tells you something won't work, in my experience, that means it will work.
Sarah was told her project was not valid because the fungal spores and the bacteria were being burned up in the fires, the biomass fires. He didn't realize that if you make a fire, yes, there's a fire in the middle and everything above it is burned up, but there's smoke and hot air coming up along the side transporting all those things that Sarah was detecting. So he was wrong. Yet He's a leading PhD in the field of atmospheric pollution of these particles. And then I've been, I've had a lot of experiences like that where people told me something wouldn't work.
I wrote an article for a magazine called Outlook for the Blind, New Outlook for the Blind. And it was about the aid. My little aids for the blind and the editor of this MA of this magazine had a brother who was a PhD physicist. He said, they sent him my article. He said, there's no way this works. This guy's not on the level with you.
And I wrote back and I said, he may think that, but he hasn't seen the device and he doesn't know that I actually invented it and built it and have been recognized for building it and that 20 some odd blind people have used it. They accepted my side of the story and published my article. So sometimes you run into people who are skeptical of your science because you don't have the degree, but that's very, very rare.
That hasn't happened to me in many years. Now it may happen to me when I'm claiming I can measure water vapor in the atmosphere.
Weather balloons only go up to 30 kilometers, 120,000ft or so and so above that they don't know what the water vapor is. There's a microwave method and there's a satellite method of looking at water vapor above that. My Twilight instruments measure water vapor up to 70 kilometers in the mesosphere.
That's incredible. And there was none of that when I was using my early instruments. Before that big volcano, there was no water vapor up there. Now after Hunga Tonga, this historic volcano, there's tons of water vapor that were never there before. And most scientists believe it's going to stay there for 10 years where it's going to cause a slight warming increase because water vapor is the most important greenhouse gas, not carbon dioxide.
[00:17:51] Speaker A: Yeah. And that's, that's really important.
Yeah. And your experiences that you're relaying just, just again prove, you know, the importance of pushing past that initial, you know, doubt or close mindedness that some people might have to your work just because they're not familiar with it or, or they don't know enough about it. You know, you've got to have that tenacity to push past that and encourage people into your data and your work.
[00:18:22] Speaker B: You know, it also means that you better, you better do the work before you publish it. You better make sure that you're like, that's what I'm doing right now. I mean, that's what the, my next field trip is going to in this RV that I'm sitting in will be to take these two of these, actually three of these to the Texas Gulf coast where I took them two years ago, and show the greatly improved data that I'm getting with these.
That will make my paper far better than if I was using the older instruments that I had developed for NASA.
Right.
[00:18:53] Speaker A: So the importance of solid data.
[00:18:56] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:18:56] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, at the close of the booklet that we're talking about today is a section on the role of the scientist in society. One part of it caught my attention. I'm reading from the second edition. It says that scientists must take the time to relate scientific knowledge to society in such a way that members of the public can make an informed decision about the relevance of the research.
And then it says sometimes researchers reserve this right to themselves, considering non experts unqualified to make such judgments.
But science offers only one window on human experience.
While upholding the honor of their profession, scientists must seek to avoid putting scientific knowledge on a pedestal above knowledge obtained through other means.
Whoa. I mean, this is the National Academies of science back in 95 writing this. That's a frank acknowledgment of the role of humility in science. Now here we are 30 years later. Do you think that statement still reflects the scientific enterprise today?
[00:19:59] Speaker B: Unfortunately, I think that the.
I hate to say this, but I think the climate change movement has changed that statement so that that statement is not taken nearly as serious as it was back then. That needs to come back. That needs to be present in the new version of their booklet, no matter what they do. And they obviously had some really good scientists back then in order to make that statement.
[00:20:22] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, this, this. So the people know this little booklet, you know, it comes from the National Academies of Science, but there's a committee of scientists from different fields that were called upon to put it together. And. But it just shows you how frank and honest they were being about, you know, the role of, of science and, oh, it's not the only way to knowledge, you know, and understanding of the world. A lot of humility there. And I think we need to come back to that.
Well, we've gotten a glimpse into this training manual for young researchers from the National Academies of Science. But let's give Forrest the last word today. What would your top advice to young people be who are maybe interested in pursuing science as a career?
[00:21:10] Speaker B: Okay, number one, if you go to college, don't borrow money.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of people who graduated from college with $100,000 debts. And if they go for a PhD, it could be a lot more than that.
They're getting enough. Some of these students are getting enough debt to where they could pay off a house they will never pay off in their lifetime. And so what's happening? They want the government to have the population pay them back. I Say no, don't do that. All my kids graduated without any debt whatsoever. All three of them. I didn't have any debt whatsoever. But if we, if, if our kids had had debt, my wife and I would feel obligated to help them be making their monthly payments. So my first advice is don't borrow money to go to college. My second advice is, do you really need to go to college to do science? Maybe practicing in a lab, even temporarily for a year or two, will give you some of the background information you need in order to pass some of those difficult science courses. Now I must ad I could never pass a course in calculus. I barely understood enough calculus to write the equations to calculate the altitude of these aerosols that I measure.
That's just my weakness. When I was a freshman in college, I wanted to major in physics, but my algebra grade was 69 and 2/3, which the professor rounded off to a 70. And I passed algebra, but I quit physics. I decided I can't major in physics because I'm too.
I just simply lack the mathematical expertise. But I do have the ability to build and design electronic circuits. That's all that was necessary. So when the school newspaper at Texas A and M, the battalion did a front page story about my age for the blind that you could hold in your hand and detect objects 10ft away, they called me an Aggie Edison.
Well, when that came out, the vice president for research at Texas A and M had me come to his office and it was in May. We're going to graduate in three weeks. He wants me to quit.
Graduation ceremony. My major was government and minored in English and he wants me to go back to school and get a degree in science. I told him there's no way I would fail all the math. I couldn't do it. He says, well, I want you to go see the electronics building anyway and see what those guys are doing. So I did that. I went to the electronics building, walked up to the second floor, turned left, there was an open door and there were a bunch of cadets. We were cadets back then and they were building electronic circuits while standing up at workbenches and on the blackboard were all these equations I could not begin to understand. They're building vacuum tube circuits. I couldn't believe that. I went to my dormitory just as happy as I could be because I was building transistorized circuits and I was using the very first light emitting diodes ever invented. Texas instruments gave me three of these. $365 infrared emitting diodes and I was transmitting my voice from my dorm room to the Memorial student center parking 1,000ft away. And I was doing all this science. I didn't need all that degree stuff. So that vice President for Research kindly understood that I lacked that mathematical ability. He believed in me enough so that I was going to Vietnam. He wrote a letter to his friend who was a science advisor to General Westmoreland, who was in charge of all the soldiers. Make a long story short, the Air Force ends up assigning me to the Air Force Weapons Laboratory, which required a PhD or master's degree in engineering.
And I worked there for three years. That's where I met my wife. She was a secretary there. So you don't have to have a science degree to do good science, including science published in leading peer reviewed journals.
[00:24:41] Speaker A: Just lean into the talents and the skills that you have already and add to them. But you don't necessarily need the fancy degrees to do, well, what you can do already.
[00:24:55] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:24:56] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, Forest, it's always, always a pleasure to sit down and talk with you and pick your brain about things. And thank you for enlightening us about this booklet that they're giving young scientists from the National Academies of Science just to, to be integrous, you know, in your science. It's a very important component of the scientific pursuit.
[00:25:20] Speaker B: Yep, sure is.
[00:25:22] Speaker A: Well, Forrest, we'll come back to you very soon with, with another helping of your insights from a very long career that is still, still going. Right? You've got goals that are coming up or there's something about 50 years. What was the, what was the thing that you were, you're setting for 50 years of, of study or I've got.
[00:25:45] Speaker B: 30 years of atmospheric data measuring the ozone, the total water vapor and the optical depth of the atmosphere. In other words, how the atmosphere is dimmed by smoke and dust and air pollution. I have published a paper, a 30 year paper and Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. And by the way, all these papers undergo peer review and I pray to God that I'll live to 50 years to have 50 years of data and publish a 50 year paper. I now have 35 years. By the way, that paper was published five years ago and God willing I'll have a 50 year paper and that will include not just the, the daily measurements I make, but also the twilight measurements which are really fascinating.
[00:26:22] Speaker A: Yeah, well, you're an inspiration to me and to many others, not just for your electronics work, but for your dedicated data collection and scientific study that you're still doing.
It's really Amazing. Now folks, if you've not read Forrest's book that he put out, that would be a good place to start. It talks about his many adventures as a self taught scientist. And it's called Maverick Scientist. You can get a copy. Let's see, where's the best place for us for, for people to grab a copy?
[00:26:55] Speaker B: Probably Amazon.
[00:26:56] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:26:57] Speaker B: Yeah. And they can read all. There's a lot of reviews about the book on Amazon that people can read.
[00:27:02] Speaker A: Okay. So available at Amazon and anywhere good books can be ordered. It's called Maverick Scientist. Chock full of insights and stories that are educational as well as well as inspiring. That's the memoir Maverick Scientist. Now you also have a website if people are curious about the data you're collecting. That's forest mims.org right?
[00:27:22] Speaker B: Right.
[00:27:23] Speaker A: Okay. And forest is spelled with two Rs of course, not the, not the forest with all the trees, but forest rr and forest mims.org is your website. Well, thanks again, Forest. Until next time.
[00:27:37] Speaker B: Thank you very much.
Thank you.
[00:27:39] Speaker A: Well, for ID the Future, I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks again for joining us.
[00:27:44] Speaker B: Visit
[email protected] and intelligent design.org this program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
