[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent Design.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: Welcome to ID the Future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott. Well, today I get to spend more time with engineer, inventor, writer and self taught scientist Forrest Mims. In his recent memoir, Maverick Scientist, Mims recounts his many adventures as an amateur scientist. In previous episodes, we've discussed highlights of his career as a writer and 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, which we'll definitely review on this episode, his experience winning a Rolex award and everything that came out of that, as well as his work in twilight photometry and other types of measuring. Well, today Forest will talk to us about the history and significance of the world famous Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. It's one of the world's leading stations for monitoring the atmosphere. And he also shares some of his own experiences there over the last 25 years. It's a fascinating chapter of Forrest's career as a scientist. Hey, Forrest, welcome back to the show.
[00:01:20] Speaker A: Thank you.
[00:01:23] Speaker B: Well, if you're not familiar viewers and listeners with Forrest yet, we need to change that. Let me give you a few basics. He was named by Discover magazine as one of the 50 best brains in science. And he's forged a distinguished scientific career despite having no academic training in science. He's 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 peer reviewed journals such as Nature Science, Photochemistry and Photobiology, the Journal of Molecular Evolution, the Journal of Geophysical Research, Applied Optics, and the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. And his columns for Everyday Folks have been published in lots of Scientific American, Popular Electronics, Modern Electronics, the Citizen Scientist and elsewhere. MEMS has also consulted for a number of official scientific bodies including NASA, NOAA and the Environmental Protection Agency.
So Forrest, you've said that to be a scientist you just have to do science. And I'm curious, where, where did you write that at first and how long did it take you to realize that? Was that a eureka moment for you? A sudden moment that you realize that, or did it occur over time?
[00:02:45] Speaker A: A good question, and I really, I don't really have a good answer for that. I know that's what I told my children when they did science fair projects. And all three of my children, some of their projects were criticized for accuracy or their findings. And in all cases they were correct and the critic was wrong. And so I began telling that, telling my children, if the data are good and you know they're good and you know they're correct, ignore critics who say they aren't correct. And my whole career has been a problem with that, where people would question now, not so much lately, but earlier, earlier would question my ability to do science because I lack a science degree, but I was able to do publishable science and came to think the way you just explained it.
[00:03:32] Speaker B: Okay, yeah, I think it's just a great piece of advice, you know, that can guide folks. You don't necessarily need the fancy degree or the, you know, the, the institution where you're working.
You just got to be doing it, you know, doing it day in and day out. And on this episode, we're going to talk about some of the qualities that help someone do that science on a regular basis. You know, doing science can be arduous. It can be challenging, and oftentimes a thankful task. But as I look at your career and your accomplishments, I see you espouse some of the qualities I think are necessary to succeeding as a scientist. One of those qualities is grit, resilience, you know, don't give up attitude. And your experiences at the Mauna Loa Observatory were prefaced by a difficult chapter in your career. Your brief association with Scientific American magazine and the resulting controversy. Now, if that hadn't happened, you may never have been invited to Hawaii and your multi decade association with the observatory may not have materialized. So in a nutshell, how did the Scientific American affair lead to your appointment as an instructor at Hawaii's University of the Nations?
[00:04:45] Speaker A: Well, I applied to take over the amateur scientist column and the editor was very pleased with what I submitted, several pounds of articles and books and so forth. After a year, they invited me to New York and I met with them and the editor was very pleased. I brought along my camera kite that you could fly from kites and take aerial photographs and some of my other instruments. And he was very excited. But when we were having an interview, he said at one point, what other magazines have you written for? And I wanted to appeal. I wanted him to realize that I'm not just a scientist, I do lots of other things. So I. Popular photography magazine, Texas Parks and Wildlife, Christian magazines. He immediately interrupted, what have you written for Christian magazines? I said, how to take teenagers from a church on a 1000 mile bicycle trip. And by the way, we just had our 50th reunion for that, where those kids, they're now 65 years old. We met on the beach at the. Near Corpus Christi. We started in Albuquerque. But anyway, when I said that, he immediately said, hold it. Wait right there. I've got to talk to the staff. And he was obviously very angry. And to make a long story short, in spite of the fact he really liked my writing ability and my columns, and the staff wanted me. They only allowed me to publish three columns in Scientific American before I lost my position.
[00:06:12] Speaker B: And of course, they. They told you, well, that's it. You're not going to be in the pages of this magazine again. And that turned out not to be true either, thanks to the Rolex Award. Well, Walter Hearn, former news editor of the American Scientific Affiliation, once said you had more empirical spirit than many academic scientists he knew. He also said your unbounded enthusiasm for scientific experimentation proved infectious. And this is the guy that invited you over to Hawaii to let you speak to scientists and scholars there, the University of the Nations. And of course, you got to visit something that was a big goal of yours, the Mauna Loa Observatory. But what I want to know is, where did you get the empirical spirit? He's talking about, that unbounded enthusiasm.
[00:07:02] Speaker A: That's exactly what Dr. Hearn was asking me after he read about what had happened at Scientific American. He drove all the way from Houston, where he lives, to my place in Seguin, Texas, and talked about this, and he asked that question. And I can't really tell you where I began building electronic things when I was 11 years old, just out of curiosity.
My father assisted in that by encouraging me to pursue these things. So I collected fossils, I collected insects, collected butterflies, studied wildflowers. It's just a natural thing that the Lord gave me was to be able to look into different aspects of his creation.
[00:07:41] Speaker B: Okay. And so you. You kick this off at 11. And I mean, all that practice of building, and, you know, you also see this idea that I think is valuable, that failing is part of succeeding, right? That's doing something the wrong way is actually part of the lesson in doing it the right way. Did you come across that as a youth?
[00:08:04] Speaker A: I don't know if I put this in my. In my book, but I was building a model airplane when I was 11 years old. My father was in the Air Force. He was stationed at Eglin Air for Space. And we lived in Fort Walton beach. And I was building it. He. He built model airplanes. So I was building one of these with these real thin strips of balsa wood. And it was very, very frustrating. And so finally, I Just crushed the thing on the floor and stomped on it because I couldn't go any farther. After that, I learned a very valuable lesson. That was ridiculous. Stick with it. Don't give up. What kind of a person are you to, you know, to, to destroy what you're trying to create? And I've never destroyed any of my instruments since. And I've been able to use them to make all kinds of measurements.
[00:08:45] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a good story. Good example. Well, we'll get to your personal experiences at Mauna Loa Observatory shortly. But first, let's set the scene for our audience by touching on some of the history of this storied facility and location. Mauna Loa, as many of you may know, is one of five volcanoes that form the island of Hawaii in the Pacific Ocean. It's Earth's largest active volcano by both mass and volume and the single largest mountain in the world at 13,679ft. It's also one of the highest points in the entire Pacific basin, second only to its neighbor in Hawaii, Mauna Kea. It has been described as an incomparable natural laboratory, an unparalleled location for studying the structure of the atmosphere and of weather processes. Now still, it is an active volcano. So some might wonder, well, why was this place chosen for a world class atmospheric and meteorological observatory?
What makes Mauna Loa a better place than other mountains and locations in the continental US to set up such a place?
[00:09:50] Speaker A: One of the first things I did when NOAA asked me to write this book about the history of Mauna Loa was I wanted to know, were they just looking for a place in Hawaii so they could kind of couple vacations with science? And I actually thought that was a possibility. So I drove to Colorado and I drove up Pikes Peak, I drove up Mount Evans. Why didn't they use these mountains? They're just unusable. Mount Evans has so much snow in the winter, you can't even get to the summit. Pikes Peak has so much dust and debris blowing up the mountain from the wind that you could not make the kind of measurements that you can make at Mauna Loa. There is no dust from Mauna Loa. It's solid lava. The only dust you get is brought in from China and it's high above the mountain. So that's why. That's why Mauna Loa was such an important place to visit and do some of my own research.
When I heard about this, that became my total goal in science. I just couldn't afford to Fly to Hawaii and go to Mauna Loa.
[00:10:46] Speaker B: Yeah. So obviously no place is going to be perfect, but this, it sounds like it's an optimal location for sure to measure these types of things. Now, when it comes to the history and significance of the Mauna Loa Observatory, you, like you're saying, wrote the book. I mean, you literally wrote the book.
How long did you spend on this book? Did it seem like it was about five or six years?
[00:11:10] Speaker A: It was a four year project.
This is not my biggest book, but actually it's probably, I think it's my most important book.
And so. Well, except some of the radio shank books. But this book is. Will be out there until we're no longer around and people can then research why Mauna Loa is so important. I also visit the place where Mauna Loa was inspired and that Sunspot Observatory at 9,200ft in the Sacramento Mountains of southern New Mexico. And one day, Ralph Stair was a scientist with the National Bureau of Standards. He was measuring the atmosphere. He's trying to measure the sun's constant, how much irradiance light is coming from the sun. And he was troubled by all the dust from white sands blowing over the mountain, and it was ruining his measurements. And so he was visited by a fellow who wrote the preface to this book and who was the Robert Simpson who had a Ph.D. he was on the way to head the National Hurricane center, became its first director. And his boss asked him, look, stop by Sunspot Observatory and find out what they're doing.
Well, so Simpson meets Stair and finds out about the dust, the problem. And he says to Stair, you know, there's a place in Hawaii that just might work a whole lot better than this place because he had set up a very tiny observatory, like, you know, 8ft by 6ft at the summit, the very top of Mauna Loa when he was a meteorologist for the military in Hawaii. And after three or four years, that wonderful little place, they had to quit using it. Nobody could get there to check the data. It was too difficult to drive the road and so forth. And so that ended. So here we have an opportunity where we could restart the observatory from a lower location.
But Ralph Stair would need the money to do it. And so Simpson said, I can give you money out of the hurricane center budget if they will allow me. They did. He got, stair got $25,000 and they built the first building at 11,200ft on the summit, on the north summit of Mauna Loa Mountain.
[00:13:17] Speaker B: Wow. And you trace all of this, of course, in your book. I have my copy here that I've been enjoying diving into. It was published by University of Hawaii Press in 2011. Where did you turn for your research? You've mentioned going to Colorado. That's where, you know, some of the important documents are kept. Did you do interviews? You know, how did you go about it?
[00:13:42] Speaker A: I did numerous interviews in person and by telephone.
Simpson himself, I interviewed extensively by telephone. Now, he was in his 90s. In fact, he was, I think, 96. He wrote the preface to the book, and he became a major source and turned me on to other people.
The observatory itself. We did a video series of, I think, 40 interviews. We bring in people who had worked at Mauna Loa, and we did. I would ask them, you know, like 20 minutes worth of questions, and we did a lot of. That's quoted in the book. So they were very interested in a serious history. They wanted this to come out, you know, right at the anniversary. But the project became so big that we didn't come. We didn't meet. Exactly. The 50th anniversary. We were a little bit late on that.
[00:14:28] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. But it sounds like the. The wait was worth it. At the beginning of the book, you trace some of the history of scientific measurement and exploration on Mauna Loa. I was pleased to discover some fellow Scotsman contributed to that history. Archibald Menzies is one of those men. He's credited as the first to trek the mountain to make scientific measurements from the summit in 1794. He was a surgeon and a naturalist. Tell us briefly about his contribution.
[00:14:58] Speaker A: Well, he wanted to climb the mountain, and he was on this British expedition around the world, and they're in Hawaii, and here's this big, giant mountain. How do I get up there? So the native Hawaiians gave him a crew, and they tried to go straight from the Kona coast up to Mauna Loa. It was totally impossible. The vegetation was just way too thick. So the chief says, okay, I'll loan you two canoes and rowers. So they gave him a. I don't. I don't know how many men were involved in that, but at least 20. And they went around this all the way around the southern coast of Hawaii to the eastern coast, where there was a.
I'm sorry, the western coast, where there was a trail to the summit of Mauna Loa. But it was a difficult trail, and nobody had heavy boots and, you know, climbing equipment. They were just dressed very casually, considering what they were about to do. But they managed to climb all the way to the summit. When they got to the top, they run out of food. I don't even know if they had water. Oh, they had some water. They made hot chocolate from a chocolate bar that they. And the fire for the hot chocolate was one of, was Menzies walking stick. And they stayed up there overnight I believe and they probably froze halfway to death and then they came down the next day. So the native Hawaiians played a key role in establishing the Mauna Loa Observatory. It wasn't an observatory then, but toward a European presence at the summit of that mountain.
[00:16:21] Speaker B: Okay. Now Menzies was with George Vancouver on the HMS Discovery and the HMS Chatham voyages. He was ship surgeon and naturalist. So that is what gave him the occasion to come to the Sandwich Islands as they were called, and be part of these expeditions. And incidentally, Discovery Institute is named after the HMS Discovery and, and the legacy of George Vancouver and, and the expeditions that he led.
Now other 19th century explorers and expeditions would follow including Scottish botanists James McCrae and David Douglas and Charles Wilkes. There was a temporary summit camp set up on Mauna loa by the US Exploring Expedition in 1840. But it wasn't until meteorologist Robert Simpson that a vision of a permanent monitoring station was, was dreamed up. Tell us about his efforts.
[00:17:18] Speaker A: Well, Simpson was the meteorologist I mentioned earlier who had had constructed a very small building at the very top of Mauna Loa right next to the edge of the crater. And unfortunately that only lasted a few years because they didn't have the modern equipment that we have today. For example, all the data was recorded on paper chart recorders. And if it became humid, as it doesn't often become humid up there, but the paper would be ruined. So they might not be able to get up there but once every couple of weeks and they get up there and find out all the, all the data was gone because it had been destroyed by the humidity. So that observatory had to be abandoned, unfortunately. And it was a very difficult project, but it proved that we could indeed make scientific measurements at the very high altitude of Mauna Loa.
[00:18:03] Speaker B: Okay. So you had this first sort of primitive observatory which was the precursor for the one that exists today, which opened its doors in 1956. What sort of hourly and daily measurements.
[00:18:16] Speaker A: Were being recorded there in 1956 when the observatory was dedicated, they had a Hawaiian prayer circle. They had some distinguished people there, two men who are famous astronomers trying to measure water vapor on Mars. They and their wives lived in that building for several weeks with their telescopes trying to measure Water vapor on Mars.
They weren't very successful, but at least they tried. And so starting in June or July, 56 is, our measurements began. And they were fundamentally at first just weather bureau measurements. And. But as time went by, toward the end of 1957, it became obvious this would be a great place to measure carbon dioxide. So that's, that became one of the first major experiments also measuring sunlight. How is the atmosphere changing sunlight at this very clear location, you know, at 11,000ft above sea level?
[00:19:13] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, in 1965, the observatory's reputation did grow with the publication of the first major CO2 paper based on MLO data. This kicked off a major worldwide debate over the impact of CO2 emissions on the temperature of the planet. How did this global story impact this little observatory and its staff?
[00:19:35] Speaker A: Well, what happened next was Scripps Institute was the one sponsoring the CO2 measurements. And so they weren't providing any money for that. So NOAA had to dedicate one or two employees at the Mauna Loa Observatory to take care of the carbon dioxide instrumentation. So that became a little bit of, a little bit of a hassle there. Occasionally when the instrument needed repairs and so forth, the NOAA people had to work full time fixing them. And the script scientist was sometimes rather demanding and authoritarian. And these government Weather bureau people, they didn't, they didn't particularly like that. But in the end, they did end up with an extraordinarily accurate CO2 measurement series, a time series beginning in 1957, 58. The problem is they didn't measure the Chief Greenhouse Gas. CO2 is a greenhouse gas. That's what helps cause warming. But they didn't measure the most important greenhouse gas, water vapor. And they measured it, but they never published the results.
And so to this day I have yet to determine why. There's no emphasis on the results of water vapor at the Monolo Observatory. But I have determined my results, my 30 year measurement series, which is published in Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. Over 30 years that where I'm sitting right now here in Texas, the water vapor has gone up and down, up and down, but the trend is exactly flat. So I did a little research. The Smithsonian set up a station at Table mountain, California in 1924. And from there to 1957, they also measured the total water vapor. And it went up and down and up and down, but the trend is exactly flat. So there we have measurements going back to the early 1920s. In my measurements, if the leading greenhouse gas is flat and the CO2 greenhouse gas is up. How does that affect warming?
[00:21:28] Speaker B: Hmm, I don't know. That's very interesting. That's very interesting.
So you don't see the research out there on water vapor and its impact on global.
[00:21:39] Speaker A: Well, they've met the instruments at Mauna Loa very early on, could measure total water vapor. But they've, they only, only a couple of papers touched on that and they were affected by volcano activity. So the papers were not considered that important. I consider them to be of the highest importance and I'm about to send them an information request if they don't want to provide it on. Please provide all total column water vapor measurements made since 1958 at Mauna Loa Observatory. They've got to be published.
[00:22:11] Speaker B: Yeah, that's, that's definitely an important research project to pursue. Well, you've been taking measurements of the MLO for 25 years and between 1998 and 2018 you spent 235 nights at the observatory to avoid the pre dawn trek up the mountain. Walk us through some of your daily routine during those visits.
[00:22:35] Speaker A: I had to start staying up there because I just simply couldn't drive up there at 3 o'clock in the morning. It's too dangerous. And then I had to be there at sunset as well as sunrise. Sunrise to begin calibrating my optical depth instruments that look at the sun sunset was to do my twilight instruments that measure the aerosols in the atmosphere. And so I've developed a series of instruments that do that. And the best time to do it is from sunset for about two hours. Well, that means if I drove back to the campus of the university where I was teaching, I would get like three hours of sleep plus driving both times at night. So they gave me permission to stay at the observatory. So you're right. I've spent 235 nights up there, the most of anybody.
[00:23:18] Speaker B: Wow. Now give us a, give us a little bit of picture of the nights there. You describe it as one of the loneliest spots on the Big Island. Were you able to sleep around all these instruments? And did you ever get a sighting of Madame Pele, who's Hawaii's volcano goddess?
[00:23:34] Speaker A: It's certainly different. And if you're superstitious or if you're afraid of the dark, you don't want to stay up there. And also the instruments, as I point out my book, they make all these strains, the air instruments, all these rattling and vibrating sounds and sometimes a loud noise. And is somebody inside the building? No, John Chin was the guy, the scientist who did the CO2 measurements for many, many years. And John has passed away recently, so I can tell this story that he was going to have to spend the night by himself one day because he didn't drive his car up the observatory. People drove their car with John and they left John and they were leaving and John was running after them crying. He was not going to stay there alone at night, so they had to stop and pick him up.
I was driving up the observatory one night, and there's a certain turn in the road that I remember very well. And there was a woman wearing a white gown standing by the road. And I went, what is this? I mean, it's ten o'clock at night. This is a very. The most remote road in all of Hawaii. And there's a woman wearing a white gown. What's that all about? And then I realized that there were people growing marijuana on the mountain and she was probably associated with that. So I just kept going. But then I realized later that's kind of high for marijuana. So anyway, I tell people at Mauna Loa about this story and they just. They all say that was Maunampele.
[00:24:55] Speaker B: That's a good one. Well, one of the instruments at the observatory is Dobson 83. It's the world standard ozone instrument. How did this magnificent machine confirm that your own homemade instruments were measuring the ozone layer more accurately than even NASA's ozone satellite?
[00:25:13] Speaker A: That's a fascinating story. The big thing about going to Hawaii was to talk about being fired by Scientific American before that group of Christian Scientists, or there are scientists who are Christians, a large group, by the way, and they've all got PhDs and they're in all different fields. So I told my wife this means I can go to Mauna Loa Observatory, where I just dreamed of going with my instruments, which were only a couple of years old at that point. So I contacted the observatory and the secretary arranged for me to ride with this woman, this college student, who was calibrating Dobson 83, the world's standard ozone instrument, which they calibrate every year for two or three months. And so she picked me up at the hotel. My wife stayed there with one of my two instruments. I built two of these ozone instruments and I took tops one to the mountain and she kept tops two. And we did that to measure how much ozone there was between the mountaintop and sea level. Anyway, I'd been measuring an error in the NASA satellite that nobody believed, and I thought, this Model O is a perfect place to verify that. So she's got World Standard Instrument and bingo. She's also showing a difference in the satellite measurements. The same. She's measuring what I'm measuring. So that became a big deal at NASA. They don't make errors, and if they do, they will be quickly repaired. But they're very slow. I know the ozone the day I measure it. They don't know it for sometimes weeks because they don't look at it every day. They're doing all sorts of science associated with that and they're looking for trends, not daily measurements. But finally they agreed that, yes, I'd found an error in the satellite. And meanwhile, I published my first paper in the journal Nature describing that error. And that really kicked off my ozone research.
[00:26:54] Speaker B: Well, as we wrap up our conversation today, I wanted to come back to the qualities of a successful scientist. In your book on the Mauna Loa Observatory, you draw some parallels between the scientists who have worked at the observatory in the last five decades and their 18th century colleague and forebear, Archibald Menzies, the first person to conduct scientific measurements on Mauna Loa. They lived in very different worlds, to be sure, but there are striking similarities which you do lay out. Let me list a few and have you comment on them. So determination and courage, obviously necessary when you're an explorer, you know, in the 18th century, but definitely necessary too, at such a remote observatory as you've been describing to us, cross disciplinary experience. What did you mean by that?
[00:27:42] Speaker A: Oh, boy.
When you're doing research at a place like Mauna Loa Observatory, you want to know, you want to be able to do research in as many different fields as you can because you're not going to get a chance to go back necessarily. I was fortunate in being able to go so many times and stay so many times. But most scientists there are measuring one thing and that's it. But I would measure, I'm measuring 15 things. And that really, that really inspired me to continue that research. That's how I got involved in the twilight research. And now that's become the most important science that I've ever done. So I really, I really, I really can thank the people at Mauna Lo Observatory for giving me that opportunity. And they did so under the inspiration of Archibald Menzies.
[00:28:23] Speaker B: Yeah. Other similarities include skill in measuring and analyzing data. You've got to be able to look at data over and over and start to see patterns.
Being an experimentalist, which is relying on physical measurements and observations, which related to that is a bit of skepticism for, for just theory, you know, theorists, ability to maneuver, budgetary constraints I mean, obviously that can come up, you know, when you're, when you're a scientist and, and when you're an explorer, respectful of the approval process. You know, everyone's got a boss, everyone's got to get the necessary permissions. Courteous and kind to locals in the field.
Why is that so important?
[00:29:11] Speaker A: The. Well, first of all, the Hawaiians have a problem with sometimes those of us who are not Hawaiians moving to Hawaii and using their mountain to make our measurements. And so fortunately, the Mauna Lo Observatory has always had a wide variety of Hawaiian citizens who work there. Well, they're all, they're all from Hawaii. People like me were visitors, but we respect that culture and they respect us in turn.
What's interesting about this is, is most of the projects at a place like Mauna Loa are very expensive.
My projects are homemade like this instrument. This is the instrument that found the error in NASA satellite. And these are furniture pegs that mount on bottom of chairs that you're going to put in your, in your kitchen. These parts down here are the electronics I described in my Radio Shack books. And up here are little digital displays, little readouts here that you can buy for 29 each. So it's all homemade. You can build a whole instrument for a few hundred dollars and you have to be willing to do that because when you're at Monolo, if something breaks you, you have to fix it. Nobody's going to come help you fix it.
[00:30:19] Speaker B: Interesting. Wow. Well, and another similarity that you, that you drew out between modern day employees of this observatory and explorers like Archibald Menzies is just knowing how to safeguard scientific records. You know, obviously that was important back then as well. You know, journals were kept and very detailed measurements were, were reported and you know, for the most part they were preserved. Although I did hear stories of George Vancouver's some of his correspondence and recordings not being preserved. But why is it important to really have good ways to effectively safeguard the records you're keeping?
[00:31:01] Speaker A: Well, if you don't do that, you cannot write scientific papers because everything like for example I'll be doing, I did a twilight measurement this morning that took 42 megabytes of data in my computer. And so my computer is full hundreds of these measurement series and I've got to have that data because I'm going to write a scientific paper based on these twilight, the twilight measurements. And if I don't save the data, I don't have the paper. And by the way, that's another point. The fact I don't have a Science degree means absolutely nothing. The people reviewing my paper and the scientists who allow me to stay at Mauna Loa, they've never asked what my degree is. They don't know I have a degree in government. And they say if I. They wouldn't care if I did because it's the science I do that counts. And I think that if more people realize that, I think we'd have more people doing the kind of science I do. MAKE magazine publishes all kinds of incredible articles about people that build all sorts of amazing. That was a bird hitting my window. All sorts of amazing equipment. It's not scientific equipment. And I'm hoping to convert some of these guys into. And there's women, too, that do this, to use some of their skills to build scientific instruments that can do the job that is not being done by professional instruments.
[00:32:18] Speaker B: Wow. Yeah, that's an admirable goal. And I do. I do enjoy seeing what MAKE magazine put out. You, of course, have been writing, writing for them for a while, and they actually published your, your latest book, your memoir. Right? Maverick Scientists. Yeah.
[00:32:35] Speaker A: Yeah. They're very good team there.
[00:32:37] Speaker B: Good team.
[00:32:38] Speaker A: Oh, they're, they're fantastic people. The, the publishers, I didn't, I didn't know Texas A and M University rejected the proposal for this book because. For the same reason that Scientific American fired me, because it mentions that I believe in creation and not evolution. And, and then they got in trouble. Their staff got in trouble for that. But that's why. That's where I went to college. They don't have any, any graduates who won a Rolex Award or done the science. I do, but they. That staff, they fired me. So I told them make magazine, fellas. And the, the publisher himself was fascinated by my career, and that's why he decided to publish my book.
[00:33:17] Speaker B: Well, that reminds me of. Of something that I've been teaching. You know, my, my oldest daughter is 15 and part of a local family co op that we do, and, and I'm teaching them, you know, elements of intelligent design, but we're also talking about good reasoning and bad reasoning and looking for fallacies in our reasoning. And one of the things we, we constantly think about is you got to have the ability to separate an idea from the person, you know, and it sounds like some of the teams that you've come up against at Scientific American and some of these established scientific organizations, they lack that ability. They lack the ability to, to set aside you as a person and some of your personal religious beliefs and the good work and the good ideas and the hypotheses that you've come up with as a scientist. And so I think that's, that's yet another hallmark of an honest, successful scientist is the ability to do that.
[00:34:18] Speaker A: If they had kept me on and let me write columns for Scientific American, those columns are, I wrote three, they're very difficult to write and it would have been a full time job. I never would have become the scientist that I am today had they kept me on. But by firing me, I told my wife I'm going to take off one year to prove that a person without a science degree can, can publish papers based on his original research. Well, that was one year, that was 1990. That one year hasn't ended. And I now have 35 years of daily data of the atmosphere since being fired from Scientific American. That's far more important than writing columns for that magazine. Now the magazine's in big trouble because of some of their terrible positions on popular public subjects. They might go out of business. It's the oldest magazine in America. But I thank them for, I thank them for starting my science career.
[00:35:11] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. Well, final question for you. What is going on the Mauna Lo Observatory today? I mean, is the future looking bright? Are they struggling, are they having difficulty or what's going on there today?
[00:35:24] Speaker A: The big problem is the 2000, when it was 2022 when Monolo last erupted, it sent a river of lava that crossed the Monolo road and for one mile. And that lava is 30ft thick. It's still cooling, it's still not cooled down enough to where they can rebuild the road. They're hoping that they can reconstruct the road that get rid of that one mile or put, the road will actually go on top of that one mile. And they're hoping that can be done sometime next year. But then there's a problem of no power because the power lines were burned down by the lava. So the Monolo Observatory right now is operating on a 1/3 basis. About 1 third of the instruments are working and the crew flies up once or twice a week on a helicopter to service those instruments. They've also installed some solar power supplies to help provide power. But the LIDAR, the NASA LIDARs and the NOAA LIDARs are not working. Those are crucial instruments. So hopefully they will have the place back in operation within a year or two. But who knows?
[00:36:26] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, well, it's, you know, they've had 50 years of storied history and you know, you know, world changing measurements and data. So here's, here's hoping they can put in another 50. Well forest details his experiences at the Monolo Observatory in more detail in chapter 16 of Maverick Scientist. And that's just one chapter of dozens. I encourage you to get a copy of the book for yourself or give it to the aspiring inventor or scientist in your life, a young person or an adult who is interested in this stuff. It is very much an inspiration and you don't have to be a full time scientist to to tap into what Forest has done and what it can mean in your own life. So hop over to discovery.org Maverick to learn more about the book and order a copy. That's discovery.org Maverick well Forest. What will we talk about next? I'm looking forward to already.
[00:37:30] Speaker A: We could talk about amber fossil collections, atmospheric research and my Twilight program.
[00:37:36] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, there's lots to talk about. You've, you've had an amazing career. Well, thank you for joining me today. And listen, if you like the conversations that we're having on ID the Future, please share an episode with a friend or two. I appreciate your support. It helps us get the word out and get this amazing evidence and you know, all the things that scientists like forests are doing out to the general public. We can't utilize some of the traditional channels. You know, you're not going to find Forest on NPR or PBS or CBS News necessarily. So we've got to get the word out other ways. So we appreciate your help with that. For ID the Future, I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks for watching and listening.
[00:38:20] Speaker A: Visit
[email protected] and intelligent design.org this program program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
