[00:00:04] Speaker A: Id the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:11] Speaker B: Welcome to id the future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott. Well, today I'm excited to continue my conversation with Forrest Mims to discuss his new memoir, Maverick Scientist my adventures as an amateur scientist. Named by Discover magazine as one of the 50 best brains in science, Mims is an instrument designer, science writer, and 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 made a history in the doing of that 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 published over 60 books with publishers, too, 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 and is recipient of the Rolex Award for Enterprise. Forrest, welcome back to id the future.
[00:01:46] Speaker A: Thank you.
[00:01:47] Speaker B: For those who may not have turned into or tuned into our first conversation yet, Forrest forged a distinguished scientific career despite having no academic training in science. He is known for saying, to be a scientist, you just have to do science. And he's written a memoir detailing his fascinating career in technology and science. And as I said, it's called Maverick scientist my adventures as an amateur scientist. It's published by make books. In part one, we covered Forrest's early life and how his parents fostered interest and opportunity in the areas of science and technology. We also looked at some of Forrest's early adventures, some of his first inventions, and how he came to co found Myths, Inc. The small company that would make history. We concluded with our discussion a few minutes worth of the scientific american incident, a brief association that Forrest had with the oldest magazine in America. So, Forrest, why don't we start there? Because it's like a bridge between your earlier technological career and your later scientific career and work. Briefly, what caused the dust stub between you and Scientific American?
[00:02:57] Speaker A: We got along just great until the editor asked me what other magazines for which I'd written, and I wanted to show that I wasn't just a science guy, that I could do other things. So I mentioned I'd written for popular photography magazine, Texas Parks and Wildlife. I listed a few bicycling magazines and then I'd also written for christian magazines and that's where the problem began. He suddenly looked very stunned that I'd said christian magazines. And he said, do you believe in the darwinian theory of evolution? And I said no, and neither does Stephen J. Gould. That didn't make any difference. That did not impress him. He immediately said, wait here, I'll be right back. And he left the office, went to the office of one of the editors and told him, red alert, red alert. Mims is a creationist. I want you to ask him trick questions during lunch. So we went to lunch and that editor, his name is Timothy, tried to ask me the trick questions, but they didn't work. I didn't know they were a trick. And I don't think Timothy was trying to trick me anyway because when he was eleven years old he had been a member of a rocket club I organized in Albuquerque, New Mexico. So I did not get to write for Scientific American beyond the three articles that they did publish.
[00:04:18] Speaker B: Okay. And interestingly, you would end up back in the pages of the magazine later on and we'll talk about how that happened. But soon after this controversy, you were invited to a meeting with some folks in the budding modern intelligent design movement, including Mr. Philip Johnson. Why were they interested in what happened to you with Scientific American?
[00:04:38] Speaker A: Well, the scientific american thing began getting huge publicity. I don't have a press didn't. We had to buy a fax machine just to take care of all the radio people calling in.
It all began with the Houston Chronicle newspaper doing a major story about me losing the position at Scientific American. And then within a few weeks the New York Times was at my house knocking on the door. We had arranged a meeting. The Wall Street Journal was doing a story, the Washington Post. I told the New York Times lady about these other stories and she said that's okay. It's not news until it's been published in the Times. So they all ran newspaper stories. And then I was on hundreds of radio programs.
I was on Voice of America, armed forces radio, the national press club having had me give a talk. The audience for all that was not just a few million, it was apparently over 100 million people heard these talks and they were all based on the fact that Charles Darwin himself, this is kind of worn out copy of his book, he himself had doubts about evolution. And so when I would debate people on the radio and on television, I didn't have a bible sitting next to me. I had Darwin's books. I would simply read his quotations wherein he himself doubted evolutionary theory. And that way I could win all those debates because nobody's read his books.
[00:06:04] Speaker B: Wow. Fascinating story. And also, you were in brief communication with famed evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins about this whole affair. Why did you reach out to him and did you expect him to respond.
[00:06:16] Speaker A: The way he did? I had no idea how he would respond. I know that even people who don't believe what I believe think that Dawkins is too far out on left field. I didn't know what he would say. But we exchanged three or four emails, each of us back and forth, in which he completely, totally insulted me, made me out to be a complete idiot. And I can't tell you the exact words because he said in his last email, he doesn't give me permission to quote anything he wrote except for one sentence. And that sentence was, I congratulate scientific American for firing forest.
I put that in the memoir because I thought that was pretty funny.
[00:06:58] Speaker B: It was very funny. Typical arrogance coming from Mr. Dawkins.
[00:07:01] Speaker A: Mr. Dawkins is pretty arrogant, yeah.
[00:07:04] Speaker B: Well, how did the scientific american incident help you transition to your scientific work?
[00:07:11] Speaker A: First of all, it was a little bit depressing during that time. I mean, I don't get depressed in a clinical sense, but it wasn't very happy. And my wife was not made very happy by this. My dad was a great advisor during all of that. So was my brother Milo. After this was over and they finally agreed to publish the three columns, I told Minnie, my wife, I'm going to stop everything I'm doing. And for one year, instead of writing all these electronics books, for one year, I'm going to do science. And that year has not ended. I've been doing science for 33 years, so I owe that to Scientific American. Had they not fired me, I would be writing those very difficult columns once every month and have no time to do anything else. But now, that left me with plenty of time to do science, and that's what I've been doing. I've written many papers for scientific journals since then that wouldn't have never have been published had I kept the position.
[00:08:03] Speaker B: Yeah. And from a very early age, as you detail in your book, you've been interested in weather, interested in weather and experienced snow in Houston and all of that, and the hurricanes and weather patterns that you've been a part of. What got you into that formal measuring of those things? And how did it take you to Hawai?
[00:08:24] Speaker A: You've asked a very interesting question.
I could build amplifier circuits and light detectors. The aid for the blind I came up with is a good example of that. And I thought maybe there's much more to these many more applications for these things than just simply helping people, but maybe studying the environment. And so I built an instrument that could measure sunlight very easily. This connects to a volt meter, and this is a homemade instrument, and it selects each of one of these four devices on top that is looking at the sun. And you point this at the sun until there's no shadow around it, and then you write down the number, and you do that for each of these two devices here, there's actually four, but I started with just the two. And these are actually light emitting diodes in little phone plugs. And most people don't realize it, but the light emitting diodes in the taillights of your car or your remote control for your television or your computer, those leds will also detect light at the same color they emit light. And so that's why I invented that back in 1972. And so this instrument here, it's all homemade, allowed me to measure the intensity of sunlight at different colors. And those colors allowed me to calculate the amount of water vapor in the air, especially with this diode right here. And so this plug, a voltmeter plugs in here to get the reading. So I was building these instruments, and I started publishing scientific papers about this one and half a dozen others. Some specialize in measuring ultraviolet, and I actually built an instrument that could measure instrument that could measure ultraviolet well enough to detect the ozone layer. If you'd like, we can discuss that.
[00:10:10] Speaker B: Okay, yeah. Well, and is that the instrument that later you would prove NASA wrong with their measurements?
[00:10:18] Speaker A: It certainly, and I've saved it. It still works. I don't use it anymore. But this is my first ozone instrument, and it's based on the ultraviolet instrument that I published in Scientific American magazine. Except not having just one detector, it has two detectors. And with using two detectors, looking at two colors of ultraviolet or wavelengths of ultraviolet, if you know the ratio of the signal at those two wavelengths, you can calculate how much ozone is above you. And these are just homemade instruments.
Those black objects in the middle, you put those on the bottom of chairs so that they don't scratch the floor. These are just hardware store things. And then these are radio shack parts. And then there's some nice, high quality ultraviolet filters that the Smithsonian institution gave me. I didn't have the money to buy those. They're pretty expensive. So, anyway, I use this starting in 1991 and was regularly measuring the ozone layer using NASA's satellite data that they were kind enough to provide. But after a year or so, I noticed that their data was beginning to differ from mine. It wasn't showing as much of a decline in ozone as I was seeing. I was seeing a decline in ozone. And so they said, well, of course, we like what you're doing and all that, but we have this multimillion dollar satellite program that's doing a really good job. And it was doing a really good job. Unfortunately, they didn't know that I had two instruments. I built two. I always build at least two of what I'm doing. They both showed the same error. And eventually NASA found out, yes, there was an error in the ozone measurements, and I published a paper about that in the Journal of Nature.
[00:12:02] Speaker B: Well, the editor at Scientific American vowed that you would never again grace the pages of the magazine. Yet that's exactly what happened in 1993 when your tops ozone instrument and your proposal to create a network of ground stations that would employ them won the Rolex award for enterprise. Tell us a little bit about that and the surprise facts that you got when the Rolex documentary crew were at your office.
[00:12:30] Speaker A: They notify you with a telephone call that you're going to get a telegram that you've won the Rolex award. So I told my wife, they said I was never going to be back in Scientific American, but guess what? I am. I didn't even tell her I'd won the Rolex award. And then I told her that I was going to get the award. And they published a big full page ad in the magazine about the winners of that award. And it turns out later, Tim Appenseller told me there was a debate among the editors and the salespeople at Scientific American. Don't buy that ad or don't sell that ad. We don't want to put his picture in our magazine. But the salespeople won out, and so they put my picture in Scientific American, holding the instrument that I just showed you. The Rolex folks were terrific. They didn't care about any of that, and they knew about it, but they didn't care. They were judging me on the science, not my beliefs. They gave me a beautiful Rolex watch, big certificate written in fancy letters, and $32,000.
I used that money to hire my friend Scott Hagerup to build a microprocessor controlled version of the Tots instrument, which is shown here. This worked extraordinarily well, and it attracted the attention of the solar light company, and they bought the rights from us to develop microtops tops, total ozone portable spectrometer tops. This is microtops two, and these are now used all around the world by scientists and grad students to measure the ozone layer, the haze in the atmosphere, and the total water vapor in the atmosphere. So the scientific american thing did have a good result.
[00:14:08] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. What an awesome chapter there. Well, you were invited to NASA's Goddard space flight center to give a talk on earth science on a shoestring budget. Why did you recommend NASA invest in more amateur scientists?
[00:14:25] Speaker A: Because, first of all, the gentleman who organized that, they put me on a NASA committee. He recognized that what I was doing had potential.
I thought NASA would be really upset with me for publishing that paper about the error in their satellite. Instead, they invited me to go give a talk at NASA, the Goddard Spaceflight center. They paid my airplane ticket. I went out there, they wanted to pay me some money for giving a talk, and we called it doing earth science on a shoestring budget. I did not talk about the ozone error. I didn't want to embarrass them. But before I got there, before I gave the talk, the entire ozone group turned out to be a really neat bunch of guys. These are professional scientists, high quality scientists. They'd published probably over 100 papers between them on the ozone layer. Went to lunch, and I could hardly wait to talk about ozone with these guys, the world's experts. They didn't want to talk about ozone. They wanted to talk about Charles Darwin's theory and why I rejected it. They were fascinated by that. I was stunned. So we didn't talk about ozone, but we talked about Scientific American. And what happened. The Rolex thing came a little bit after that. And by the way, with the Rolex award, they also called by telephone to let me know what had happened. Meanwhile, a film crew is going to come to our house to make a video for the Rolex presentation. And I'm driving them down the street, and I tell the producer that this is the day that NASA might admit whether or not I've really made a finding of an error in their satellite. And he said, okay, that's interesting. So he opened my office door, little 135 year old shack that I have over here, and on the table is a fax all curled up. So I reached over to the fax, and the producer shouts at me, don't touch the fax. I said, why not? He said, for 20 years I've been making these videos for Rolex and the Nobel prize people, but I never see a discovery, they always reenact it.
If you've really found an error in their satellite, I want to film that. I want to get it live. So he said, okay. So it took ten minutes to set up the lights and the microphone and the camera and everything. So then they had me go outside and then walk back in the office.
And the man then says, you may read your fax. The producer said that. So I opened up the fax and yes, it was NASA acknowledging that I had indeed found an error. Then the scientist at NASA called in the middle of all this, and the producer said, can we talk to him on the phone? I said, sure. And so that conversation with the ozone scientist, a very friendly conversation that's in the movie that they made, which is available at the Rolex website even today.
[00:17:00] Speaker B: Yeah. People can still watch that. And you peeled the facts out and all of that.
[00:17:05] Speaker A: Yeah. There's another fringe benefit to the Rolex award. My wife and I were in Geneva to get the award, and we're up in our hotel room and we get a notice from down below. The lady says, the Rolex lady says, now we want you to be down here at 09:00, I believe it was 09:00 to meet your escort. So we showed up at 09:00 and there's this lady standing there. I recognized her. There's an elderly gentleman standing next to her. And we walk up to them and she introduces herself and we said, glad to meet you. And she says, we'd like you to meet your escort, Sir Edmund Hillary. And I just almost fell down because Edmund Hillary was my, when I was a child, was my scientific model. He was my hero, first man to climb Mount Everest. And so we spent the rest of the day with Sir Edmund at the award ceremony and then later at a big dinner that they had for us. So that was a big special treat of receiving that award.
[00:17:55] Speaker B: Yeah, what a cool experience. Well, what did you do during your time at the Mona Loa observatory? What took you there?
[00:18:02] Speaker A: When they assigned me to write the columns for Scientific American, I wish so much that I could go to Mona Loa Observatory and calibrate the ultraviolet instrument that I described how to build in the magazine. That's the world's key place for making scientific measurements of the atmosphere. And I couldn't afford to go to Hawaii. Well, one day we got a telephone call from Mark Hartwig, and he was associated with a group of intelligent design advocates in Washington or in the state of Washington. And he asked if I could go out there, if they would pay my airfare to meet with them and discuss what had happened.
And so I did. And that's where I met the gentleman, Phil Johnson, who, this incredible scholar who spent an hour reading emails from his colleagues at the university there in which he mocked them. It was just hilarious to hear his speech. I wondered, who are these guys? I didn't know who they were. So the next morning at breakfast, I wondered, are these guys christians? And so we're just sitting there, everybody's got their food and we're not eating yet, and there's other people at other tables. Suddenly there was a bing, bing, bing, and there's a guy standing up and he's striking a spoon against a glass. That was Johnson. And he says, gentlemen, let's pray to the Lord and thank him for our breakfast. Everybody bowed their heads, not just the people who were there to hear my talk. So that's how I got to know people who became involved in the Discovery Institute early on.
[00:19:31] Speaker B: And you did something notable to mark the 50th anniversary of that observatory in Hawaii in 2006. What was that?
[00:19:40] Speaker A: I did.
I've spent 235 nights at the Monolo Observatory, which is at 11,400ft. That's more than any of the other people who work there. Some of them get altitude sickness, even when they go up there to do their daily chores once a week. Noah hired me to write the book about the 50th anniversary. And what a place that is. The world's most famous atmospheric observatory. They've measured the ozone layer longer than I have, of course, and they've measured optical depth of the sky, in other words, the haze. They've measured all about the gases in the atmosphere. It's where the CO2 thing became a big deal in global warming, because they've been measuring it there since 1958.
CO2 is not the principal greenhouse gases. Everybody tends to think water vapor is. So I don't measure CO2, I measure water vapor. And in my 33 years of measuring water vapor, 30 of which were published in Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, the trend in water vapor is perfectly flat. It goes up and down with El Ninos and La Ninas, but the trend is zero. And the same trend was measured by the Smithsonian Institution from 1926 to 1957 at Table Mountain, California. They had the same ups and downs that I had, but the trend is absolutely flat. And then there's another group that measured 20 years of water vapor. Again, its trend was flat. So that raises interesting questions about global warming models.
How come they don't adequately account for the flatness of the trend in water vapor? When water vapor is the most important greenhouse gas.
[00:21:21] Speaker B: Wow, that's really interesting. Now, do you still go to Mona Loa observatory?
[00:21:25] Speaker A: I went there from 1992 to 2018, and then Mona Loa erupted and covered the road with 30 foot thick layer of lava for 1 mile. And even today, that road has not been reopened. And so they send the guy up there once a week on a helicopter. He's installed some new solar panels so they can power some of the instruments. But the power line is all gone. It was knocked down by the lava. So there's a very serious concern about when will Monoloa observatory become active again. Only some of the instruments are being used. And what's interesting about that place is my first visit in 2002, I got to see the world standard ozone instrument. It's called Dobson 83. And the woman operating that drove me to the mountain twice so I could make my very first measurements at the monolith observatory after I gave a talk on what had happened at Scientific American to this big bunch of scientific christians. And what was fascinating is her data was showing the same error I was seeing in the satellite. So that was important. But then I have some cool pictures in my book of me standing next to that instrument. Well, 2016, Noah hired me to calibrate that same instrument, Dobson 83. I spent 64 days and nights at the observatory calibrating that instrument. So that was a very significant part of my research.
[00:22:46] Speaker B: Yeah. And there is a color set of color inserts in the book that detail your whole career. I thought that was pretty cool. Well, back to NASA for a minute. You are still under contract, actually, with them today. But tell us about that trip to Brazil where you went in the name of NASA to participate in a conference there.
[00:23:05] Speaker A: Well, what's interesting is that they were measuring smoke in Brazil, and they had a trip in 1995 called Scar B. Scar meant something about atmospheric research. And the United States was working with brazilian scientists to measure the effects of the smoke. Well, they needed to know the ozone. Well, the ozone satellite, by then, had broken and was no longer providing data. And I had these handheld instruments. So they hired me to go to Brazil, gave me a check for $5,000 to cover all my expenses, airplane fare, and I took a student with me. And so we were there for three weeks. It was just a fascinating learning opportunity. And I saw right away that this thick smoke could be causing everybody's sicknesses. A lot of the citizens were coughing and sneezing, and I was thinking that that smoke is blocking the ultraviolet that normally kills the bacteria and viruses in the air. So I told the NASA guys about this. Meanwhile, they hired me the next year to go to seven forest fires to study the effects of smoke in the United States. And then I went to a conference to give a paper on that, and these same NASA guys were there, and they arranged to hire me for a second trip to Brazil in 1997. And I said, I'll tell you what, I'm going to do some biology work there to find out whether or not the bacteria are being reduced by the smoke. And they said, well, we can't put that in the contract because we're not authorized to study that, but go right ahead. So I did that, and sure enough, I found a significant finding, r square point 78 or whatever, that the bacteria population was definitely being changed by the smoke in the air. And that was published in a couple of scientific journals. I've had, like, ten or twelve projects for NASA. I do not ask for these projects. They are super bunch of people there. And the current project began in May of 2022. That year, January 15, the Hungatanga volcano under the South Pacific Ocean erupted in the largest volcano eruption in over 150 years. It sent the equivalent of 50,000 Olympic sized swimming pools of water into the stratosphere. Unprecedented. We never had a volcano like that because water vapor, as I mentioned earlier, is the principal greenhouse gas. And that's part of why last summer was so warm, because of that Hungatanga water vapor. But I have a way of measuring that. And NASA paid enough, they paid to hire Scott Hagrep to build five of these instruments that we could use to measure the water vapor and the aerosols from that giant Hungatanga volcano. And so what I've also discovered is that using my own instruments, I can measure the height of the troposphere between the stratosphere, which is very dry, where the ozone layer is, and then down here, where we live and where weather happens in the troposphere. My instruments can measure the boundary between those two here to four. That's only been done by weather balloons and specialized lidars. But now you can do it with an instrument that can be built for probably a few hundred dollars. So that contract expires at the end of February, and it'll produce two scientific papers and a ton of data about the atmosphere.
[00:26:17] Speaker B: Okay. I think it's great that you still have a healthy working relationship with NASA today.
[00:26:23] Speaker A: They are some of the world's top scientists.
I'm working with Dong Wu, who, he's a chinese ancestry, a fantastic atmospheric scientist who's been very involved with all kinds of NASA projects, and he's my supervisor on my project. The guy is a genius, and when you work around people like that, it's a big inspiration. And the same with the ozone staff. They're all very bright, very sharp guys.
[00:26:47] Speaker B: I bet. Well, I was just going to mention a little earlier there that in 2000, you gave a talk at Baylor University's rather short lived Michael Polani center about the fine tuning for life of solar ultraviolet radiation. The event was the first major initiative of the center, and, alas, the only one. It was headed up by mathematician and intelligent design advocate William Dempsky. During that conference, though, you had some words with famous Nobel laureate and atheist Dr. Stephen Weinberg. Why didn't he like your presentation on fine tuning?
[00:27:19] Speaker A: Oh, you've asked a wonderful question, by the way. Bill Dempsky is, he's probably among, if you were to select five geniuses in the world, Bill Dimsky would be one of them. The guy is brilliant, and he's written a number of books on intelligent design, are highly persuasive. He doesn't use religious arguments to prove that life was designed. He uses statistics and mathematics in very unique ways and very, I mean, when you read his books, you just come away completely convinced. Anyway, he founded this Polanye center at Baylor, which is a christian university.
Unfortunately, the staff at Baylor has very different views than bills, and so he ends up losing his position at Baylor over what happened with this conference. This conference is historic. It didn't invite just christian people. It invited atheists. They invited scientists from various places who gave talks. And as you mentioned, Weinberg was there. A couple of Nobel prize winners were there. My talk was on ultraviolet. You just summarized my talk. And it was standing room only when I gave this talk.
And there's this gentleman on the back row who asked a question at the end of my talk, and he said, well, could you not explain what you're observing by evolutionary means rather than design means? I said, where's the effect that I guess you could. If I had thought about it longer, I would have said no. But anyway, that's what I said. He sat back down. Then my talk was over, and it was time for a lunch break.
Everybody stands up, but that gentleman on the back row just rushed toward me, and I thought, uh oh, what's he going to know? I didn't know who he was. And he rushes up right to my face and says, can you tell me where to get a cup of hot tea? And that was Weinberg. And I didn't know. I said, I have to talk to one of the staff people. Let's go find somebody. But that was my only encounter with him. But he's passed away. I would love to debate with him today if he were still around.
[00:29:15] Speaker B: Yeah, well, it sounds like you made him think that day. Well, despite the official party line on darwinian evolution highlighted by your scientific american chapter, you note in your book that many professional scientists you've come across in your career are not concerned about your beliefs about darwinian evolution. Some even privately agreeing with them. Why weren't they concerned?
[00:29:36] Speaker A: That's fascinating.
I cannot think of a single scientist who's questioned any of my beliefs. On the other hand, I don't want to give their names, but there are a number of very well known professional scientists who totally agree with me, but they don't want to be ridiculed and so they don't say anything about it. Besides, most of these guys are physicists or atmospheric chemists or something like that. They're not into biology, so they're not biological scientists, so they just keep quiet about their beliefs. And I wouldn't say it's the majority of the people I know, but it's certainly a significant minority. Believe just what I believe. We don't make a big deal about it. We just know that it's impossible for the kinesin molecule, for example, a walking molecule, a molecular motor that exists in all of our cells by the thousands per cell, that did not evolve, that was designed.
[00:30:28] Speaker B: Yeah, a bridge too far for a darwinian process.
[00:30:31] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:30:31] Speaker B: And I think it's also telling that the strongest responses to your rejection of the standard darwinian paradigm came from the gatekeepers the officials put in charge, who felt that they had a duty to defend the dogma and maintain a public projection of unity on the topic. It was the case with Scientific american editor Jonathan Peele, as well as M. Patricia Morse of the National Academy of Science, who you had a run in with. You note that some true believers in scientific paradigms resemble devoted religious believers defending their faith. Why were they so.
[00:31:07] Speaker A: You know, that brings up the discovery Institute. Those people there. There's a brilliant bunch of people there, by the way, and Demsky is associated with that.
There's some really brilliant people there, some brilliant minds there, and they're publishing a whole string of books advocating for intelligent design that if only school kids could read these and adults, I think we would have a complete shift in the paradigm to where people would reject evolutionary theory.
[00:31:32] Speaker B: Yeah, I agree. We are putting a lot of content out there, videos, podcasts, like the one we're doing today, lots of books and articles, and we really do see the cultural shift as a result of this conversation. Moving forward, I think we're moving in the right direction. Well, in 2008, Discover magazine named you one of the 50 best brains in science. How do you like that? In defending their selection, after some pushback, the editors were quick to say that they did not endorse the Discovery Institute's views on intelligent design. But at the same time, quote, mim's association with that group does not invalidate his role as a leading figure in the american amateur science community. Unquote. What a nice validation of your work from Discover magazine.
[00:32:20] Speaker A: Yeah, that was quite a surprise. Number one, that they named me one of their 50 best, and number two, that they defended that. I was very impressed by that.
[00:32:28] Speaker B: Yeah, I bet a nice feather in your cap. Well, Forrest, your career in science and technology serves as an inspiration to amateur scientists everywhere. And it fits right in with what Dr. Douglas Axe writes in his book, undeniable, that all of us can do science. We've been doing science since we were two, looking around and building conceptual models of the world. All of us have what it takes to grapple with important scientific questions about life and the universe, and I think your career illustrates that. What's your message to young people today who may be interested in science and technology, but tempted with so much distraction and doubt swirling around them these days?
[00:33:09] Speaker A: Several points. Be open minded. Don't necessarily believe everything you're taught, not only in science, but in history, because our education system has become highly corrupted by people with agendas. Be your own.
Check out the facts for yourself. Number two, ignore all the garbage on the web. Unfortunately, phones are destroying people's lives.
A girl committed suicide recently that I know about because of the way she was mis portrayed on the web on one of these social pages. Put your phone away. Use it for important purposes. And looking up data about what you're studying in school and correcting people who are wrong about their ideas of the universe. And then, three, do something. Would you believe that a cook is a scientist? My wife is an excellent cook, a preparer of meals. And I tell her every time I have one of her delicious meals that you are a scientist. Because she doesn't necessarily use a menu book. She invents a lot of what she serves me. Therefore, she's doing what a scientist does. She comes up with a theory, she builds it, she tests it, and then she gives it to me to verify. So, those are three things that I would consider important for young people, great advice.
[00:34:20] Speaker B: Well, Forrest, I could talk to you all day about your book and your career, but we'll have to stop there for now. Perhaps we'll pick up the conversation in another episode. It's been a pleasure, though, speaking with you. Thank you for your time today.
[00:34:32] Speaker A: Thank you.
[00:34:33] Speaker B: Well, listeners and viewers, I encourage you to read Forrest's memoir, maverick Scientist, my adventures as an amateur scientist. You can order a
[email protected]. Slash maverick. That's discovery slash maverick. Get a copy, read it. They're really worth your time. And before we close, Forrest, what is the significance of the image on the front there?
[00:34:58] Speaker A: I took a lot of pictures with my camera in Vietnam, and this is a launch of one of my rockets from the roof of the place I stayed in Saigon before I was sent up north. And I wanted to check the, make sure I could capture this properly because I was recovering. These are my guided rocket project that I was doing on the side when I wasn't doing the aid for the blind and doing my work as an intelligence officer. And so one night I launched this rocket, and I had my camera all set up, and I stopped launching at the racetrack because a gunship was going to shoot me because they thought I was an enemy Vietcong or something. But I started launching from my apartment, and after this rocket went off, all of a sudden searchlights were just playing all across my roof and right next door and everything. I knew right away that, oh, there's a problem. So I grabbed my stuff, went down to my room, stashed it under the bed, and I'm just wearing flip flops and a swimsuit. That's it. And I run down to the street because I put a map on the rocket with my address because I wanted people to return it if they found it. I get to the street, here comes a jeep with four military guys, military guards, military police, heavily armed. They stop in front of me. The base is under rocket attack. Get back to your quarters.
Then they kept going. So I realized, oh, I'm in big trouble if anybody finds that rocket. So that's what the COVID of my book is all about. That night launch, which led to the founding of mitts, by the way, a year later or a couple of years later.
[00:36:24] Speaker B: Wow, that's great. So many great stories, and a lot of them are in here, readers and listeners, so please pick it up. Also, Forrest has a website where you can learn more about his work. It's forestmims.org. That's forest mims, forest with two r's, forestms.org well, for idthefuture, I'm Andrew McDermott. Thank you for joining us.
[00:36:48] Speaker A: Visit
[email protected] and intelligentdesign.org. This program is copyright Discovery institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
