[00:00:04] Speaker A: Id the future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: Welcome to id the future. I am your host, Andrew McDermott. Well, today im happy to welcome back to the show Forrest Mims to discuss his work in Twilight photometry and about the hidden information waiting to be discovered and every sunset and sunrise. Now, if you're not familiar with forest yet, let me tell you, you're in for a treat. 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, Mims is an instrument designer, science writer, and independent science consultant. He has published over 60 books with publishers that include McGraw Hill, Apprentice Hall, RadioShack, and others. His RadioShack books alone have sold over 7.5 million copies and counting. His latest book, the memoir Maverick Scientist, was the subject of our last conversations together.
Mimss scientific publications have appeared in Nature science, photochemistry and Photobiology, the Journal of Molecular Evolution, the Journal of Geophysical Research, Applied Optics, the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, and other peer reviewed research journals. His columns have been published in Scientific American, popular electronics, modern electronics, the citizen scientist, and elsewhere.
Mims has also consulted for NASA and NOAA and is recipient of the Rolex award for Enterprise. Forrest, welcome back to id the future.
[00:01:41] Speaker A: Glad to see you so in your.
[00:01:44] Speaker B: Recently published memoir, Maverick Scientist, which here's my copy, and listeners and viewers, I'll tell you how to get your copy soon. You write, no time of day is more visually appealing than twilight, especially when the glow is enhanced by a semi permanent mist of sulfuric acid droplets in the lower stratosphere. Around ten to 15 miles high, this aerosol layer is created and refreshed by volcanic eruptions and emissions from major forest fires. Major volcano eruptions can greatly inflate the stratospheric aerosol layer, and this leads to extended, colorful twilights.
Now for as many of us have enjoyed a beautiful twilight experience or a memorable sunset. And before we get into why you started studying and measuring twilights, let's quickly review the basics about Earth's atmosphere. All that stuff we learned in school that's a little bit behind us, it's been likened to a protective bubble that allows life to exist. It allows for the air we breathe and protects us from those harmful uv rays from the sun. It also balances out our temperatures. So we're not like the moon, you know, ranging from negative 208 degrees fahrenheit all the way to 250 degrees.
That's because there's no atmosphere there. So tell us briefly about the five main layers of our awesome atmosphere.
[00:03:05] Speaker A: What's amazing is when you just described the atmosphere, I was sitting here thinking about an onion. And a layer of film on an onion is similar to the thickness of the atmosphere to the size of the earth. It's absolutely amazing how the atmosphere protects us, provides weather, provides drinking water, irrigates our fields. It's just absolutely amazing. There's five main layers of the atmosphere. There's the troposphere. That's where we live. That's where weather occurs. And it's from the ground up to around seven or 8 miles elevation. And that elevation can change slightly from day to day.
But what's interesting about it is the weather that's formed by that atmosphere actually can alter the height of the atmosphere slightly. And then above the troposphere is the stratosphere. And between these two layers is a thin layer called the tropopause, or as my wife and I like to say, tropopo popause. And that layer is. It's very thin. It's a few hundred meters thick. A few hundred football feels thick. But it does wonderful things. It traps water vapor, for example. So if you're in the troposphere, down at the surface, and you see a very large cloud, a thunderstorm cloud, it will have a flat top. It's called an anvil cloud because of the flat top. The top is flat because the cloud has reached the stratosphere, the tropopause between the stratosphere and the strobeosphere, that's fascinating. That means that you're AcTuallY looking into the stratosphere, which is the next layer of the atmosphere. And that's typically eight to around 31 miles in elevation.
It includes the ozone layer. And that's very unique, because when ozone is produced by sunlight, ultraviolet sunlight, it warms the air. So down below, in the troposphere, where we live, the air gets colder and colder as you go up. And so if you're climbing a mountain, you experience that firsthand. But at the beginning of the stratosphere, where the tropopause occurs, the temperature reverses. It starts going back down again because the sky is warming up. And then there's that layer you mentioned that's full of volcanic materials and sulfur compounds and particles of smoke and volcano emissions. That's a permanent layer up there. The fellow who discovered that his last name was Jung, j u n g E. It's called the jung layer, or the stratospheric aerosol layer. So it's a pretty permanent part of the sky. It can be much thicker some days than other days, but it's always up there. Then above the stratosphere you've got the mesosphere and that's from 30 to 50 miles high. And what's interesting about that is people can see the effect of the mesosphere when a meteor travels through it because the air is sufficiently dense to cause meteors to burn up. And that glow in the sky is occurring at the mesosphere. The air is extremely dry. Only a certain kind of cloud can occasionally form up there. It's called the noctilucent cloud. I've only seen those once. In the northern hemisphere where we live, you can see noctilucent clouds during typically August, maybe late July, early September, especially if you live in a place like northern Canada or Alaska. And then above the mesosphere you've got the thermosphere and that's 50 to 440 miles high. And the northern lights occur in the mesosphere. The international space station is orbiting just at the bottom of the top of the thermosphere around 400 miles high. And then finally there's the exosphere. That's 440 to 6000 miles high and there's very few molecules of air up there. And the meso and the exosphere is where most Earth satellites are in orbit around on the planet. So there you have your five main layers of Earth's atmosphere.
[00:06:56] Speaker B: Excellent. Yeah, that's a good bit of review just going into this because, you know, there are different layers and different heights. And as we talk, you're going to be able to tell us what you found in some of these layers. Now, your fascination with twilights can be traced back to a 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines. Tell us about the brilliant twilight that you experienced at the Gulf of California and how that inspired your work in atmospheric science.
[00:07:23] Speaker A: Well, my wife and I were on a cruise ship to watch the solar eclipse of that year. That was the longest eclipse of the 20th century. And there are a lot of other people on the ship. And I heard about a thing called the green flash, that when the sun is setting, sometimes it makes a bright green flash. I'd never seen that before. So we were having dinner on the cruise ship and the sun was getting ready to set. So I told the, my wife and the other couple at the table, let's watch for the green flash. And suddenly there was a brilliant flash, as bright as a strobe light on the horizon as the last part of the sun sank below the horizon.
And everybody just cheered. But the other 150 people on the ship had no idea what we were cheering about because they didn't know about it. Well, that interested me in the twilight globe, because after that bright flash, the sky became very, very orange over where the sun had set. What I didn't realize was opposite where the sun was setting, the sky was also a brilliant orange. I learned that later when I got back to Texas, and that's how I began studying twilight glows. Why is the sky that color?
Does it always turn that color when there's a volcano eruption, or can it be a bright orange without a volcano eruption?
[00:08:36] Speaker B: Right now, I wonder if you could tell us, how do scientists typically measure atmospheric aerosol layers, and how is twilight photometry different?
[00:08:44] Speaker A: Okay, first of all, let's say that you're with your wife or whatever family, you're watching a twilight glow. So, I mean, you're watching a sunset. So you see the sun as it sets behind the horizon. There's a nice, pretty glow there. What you need to do immediately is turn around and look in the opposite direction. Then you will see the twilight arch across the sky, and that's sometimes called Venus, the Venus's archite. And what you will see is a pink glowing band across the horizon. Under that, it's kind of a dark color. Above that, it's also dark. The dark below is the shadow of the earth as the sun is now below the horizon. So it's casting the earth's shadow into the sky, into the twilight sky. So if you have an instrument that can look straight up at the sky as earth's shadow passes by at higher and higher altitudes, as the sun is going lower and lower below the horizon, you can measure remnants of the twilight glow. And so a very sensitive instrument, and I can show you one here in a minute, can measure that glow. And by knowing how long it took before the glow began, you know the altitude of the glow. So you can. You can actually calculate the altitude of the aerosols in the sky that are causing the glow. There's two ways to do that. One is with a lidar. That's a laser instrument that sends bursts of light up, up into the high sky, up into the stratosphere, and then detects the light reflected from those particles up there. The other way is twilight photometry. The advantage of twilight photometry is it's very inexpensive, and there is only right now, there are only three working lidars in the entire United States that can do what I just described. There's one in Hawaii that can do that. But it's shut down by the lava across the access road. And the one in Boulder, Colorado, has been shut down for 15 years. So there are very few lidars left around the world that can do what a twilight photometer can do for a lot less money.
[00:10:42] Speaker B: Okay. And when you began experimenting with this, it's not like you went to a store to buy your own photometer. You actually made the devices that you started measuring with. So tell us about that, your homemade twilight photometers.
[00:10:55] Speaker A: That was quite an adventure, actually, in some cases, a misadventure. I tried very hard to build a light meter that would be sufficiently sensitive to detect the twilight glow over my head, straight over my head. And I'd read books about twilight photometry. The fellow who first did that was an australian scientist. His last name was Big Bigg. And he used a searchlight mirror as a big reflector to detect the light being scattered down from the twilight glow into his detector. Well, I couldn't afford a five foot diameter searchlight mirror. I wanted something that would be quite small. So for several years, I conducted many, many experiments until I finally arrived at a solution which detects the twilight glow up to up into the. Up. Well, up into the mesosphere. In other words, 130 km or even higher.
[00:11:50] Speaker B: Okay, now, what kind of things can your Twili photometer detect?
[00:11:55] Speaker A: Well, you can detect dust layers near the surface in the troposphere. So if there's smoke pollution from a forest fire, it would make a bulge in your data. If there's air pollution from, say, coal burning power plants and make little bulges in your data. And those would be from like five or 6 km or several miles high. But then you can also detect the dust particles in the stratosphere that we talked about a moment ago. This is that permanent layer of aerosols or dust and volcanic debris that's always up there. And so when you graph the data, it's going up like this and you're getting a little air pollution, then boom, you get this big bulge and that's that permanent stratospheric layer. And then you can keep going up to the top of the stratosphere. And if there's been a recent meteor shower and you're now looking up into the mesosphere, you will see little spikes. And those are the meteor, that's meteor smoke.
That's the remains of burnt up meteors in the mesosphere.
[00:12:58] Speaker B: Wow. Yeah, I was going to ask that. It's pretty cool that you can detect meteor smoke and dust from way higher in the atmosphere. That's pretty awesome. And I read in your book that you could also, at least down in Texas, where you are, detect saharan dust coming over from Africa.
[00:13:17] Speaker A: Oh, that's fascinating. I'm glad you mentioned that.
My daughter Sarah did a science fair project on that, won a lot of awards.
But every July and August, the driest part of the Sahara desert, portions of it end up over the Atlantic Ocean, and they're blown toward the United States, and they eventually go through the Caribbean, they go through all those islands, they cause lots of asthma and other problems. And then frequently it goes all the way to Texas. I just finished co authoring a scientific paper for a medical journal about that dust, and we had quite an adventure going through the data and looking at the imagery of that dust. I measure the dust, and there's two ways to do it. You can use electronics, but anybody can use a camera to do it. And so I've published an article on how to do that and make magazine. But to make it simple, picture your cell phone camera, and there's big white glow around the sun caused by Sahara dust. All you have to do is put your finger over the lens, maybe a foot away, and block the direct sun. Take a picture, and you'll have a recording of that big glow around the sun. If you want to get more sophisticated, put a dime or a penny on the end of a little wooden straw or something and let that block the sun. Then the picture looks a lot nicer. So anybody can record these saharan dust events using that simple method.
[00:14:38] Speaker B: Wow, that's fascinating. I never would have thought that saharan dust would be coming that far away. And it really is cool that we look up. We can't see any of this, but it's all there in these layers, right?
[00:14:52] Speaker A: You're right. You can't see it, but you can see the scattering of the sunlight that it causes. And then sometimes it's so thick that it forms deposits on car windshields and windows.
[00:15:02] Speaker B: Wow.
And all of this contributes to the beautiful twilights and sunsets that we see.
[00:15:08] Speaker A: A saharan dust can do that when it's really, really thick, it can extinguish the twilight, where you just don't see a twilight or the sky just goes dark.
That's not that common, but that does happen.
[00:15:21] Speaker B: Now, your work has recently revealed a very interesting finding related to climate change or the cycle of global warming and cooling. You've been making daily atmospheric measurements with your own homemade led sun photometer since 1990.
That's, incidentally the year I came to America. That's a long time. We're going on 30 years and more. These measurements of total water vapor and aerosol optical depth have actually become the longest running series of such data compiled in the US since the Smithsonian astrophysical observatories. Long term measurements at Table Mountain. That was many decades ago, 1926 to the mid fifties. And your measurements are why the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, has designated you an expert reviewer of some of its recent assessment reports. So tell us a little bit about that long term project and the important insight that it reveals about climate and climate change.
[00:16:18] Speaker A: Well, the first thing I'll mention is that this is not the same as measuring twilight. This is simply pointing an instrument directly at the sun around solar noon during the middle of the day. Or if there's clouds like today, I'll probably go out in an hour or so and try to catch the sun. And you're measuring the intensity of sunlight, and it's blocked by anything that's in the air, any dust or smoke or air pollution. And so you can record those numbers and make graphs.
My 1st 30 years, it was begun on February 4 of 1990. And so after I got 30 years of data, that's considered a climatological mean by the weather service. And so, for example, if, if you're flying to England or anywhere, if you're flying anywhere, you can go on the web and get an estimate of what the temperature is going to be for the place that you're flying to. And that temperature that they estimate is based on a 30 year average or 30 year mean of all the temperatures measured at that place during those 30 years. So a 30 year mean of the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere, or the haze in the atmosphere or the ozone in the atmosphere is really very significant.
I'll have 35 years in another four months.
So I'm way above the Smithsonian. And what bothers me is why aren't more scientists doing this? They do have automated instruments to do that. I have one, NASA put one in my field out here, and it's been out there for four years now, and it's doing the same thing I do.
But they started after I did. So it's always bothered me. Why haven't the professionals kept up with monitoring these things?
[00:17:57] Speaker B: Yeah, that is interesting. They relying more on machines and computers to do that work.
[00:18:04] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, that's true.
[00:18:07] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. Now what about that insight about climate change that your measurements have brought out? The fact that it's regional in nature.
[00:18:16] Speaker A: Yeah. What's really interesting about that is, of course, there's a huge political side to this climate change thing, and that's because, unfortunately, some of the advocates of climate change are exaggerating their studies and leaving out crucial data.
And in my case, I went into this without any agenda. What will I measure by pointing a sun photometer at the sun every day for 30 years? What will happen? Well, I published my 30 years in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, one of the most distinguished atmospheric societies, and had to go through two layers of peer review. And what troubled the scientists who were peer reviewing my paper was why in the world was the water vapor, the average water vapor, perfectly flat, constant? Why didn't it go up or down? See, water vapor is the number one greenhouse gas, not carbon dioxide. Water vapor, it's a big absorber of infrared. And so my data would show during some years, when there's an El Nino or a la Nina, the water vapor would go up or down. Up or down. But overall, my average was. The average trend was 0.00. And so that was quite a puzzle because the carbon dioxide is still going up. But since water vapor is even more important at warming the earth than carbon dioxide, what in the world is going on here? And unfortunately, the societies that study this, the scientists who study this, have not provided, in my opinion, an adequate answer. In fact, the peer reviewers were very concerned about that trend, the absence of a trend. They wanted more data. So I contacted Doctor Brent Holman was the director of NASA's aero Net network, and I have one of their instruments in my field. And he suggested that since my instrument had only been out there briefly, why don't you contact the one in Oklahoma that's been there, like, you know, for 25 years. So I did, and their trend was showing a decline in water vapor. It wasn't flat, it wasn't going up, it was declining. So that really shocked everybody. So then I looked at some of the satellite data over the north central United States and down to Texas. Water vapor going down, not going up, not flat, going down. So I got some data from China, same thing. Some was going up, some was going down, but there was no overall trend either up or down. It was just standard water vapor that I measure here. So I think that's an unanswered question that the climate research community needs to answer.
[00:20:56] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, we hear about these global models that sort of lump all the regions together. But it sounds like some of your research is pointing to how regional in nature the, the climate can be and that varying rate of total water vapor suggests that. Well, that's, that's really interesting.
So you had this published. Now, let me switch gears a little bit to NASA, because I know you've had a relationship with NASA that stretches way back, actually. Perhaps you can mention how that began. And they hired you to make atmospheric measurements in 2022, is that right?
[00:21:34] Speaker A: That's right. That was a contract from 2022 to February of this year.
And what they wanted was they wanted me to measure the altitude of the aerosols from the eruption of the historic volcano hunga, Tonga, on January 15 of 1992. 2022, that's absolutely historic volcano. That's the biggest volcano eruption in over a century. And it injected a huge amount of water vapor into the stratosphere, by the way. So with my twilight instruments, I was easily measuring the bulges in the sky and the stratosphere caused by the debris from that volcano. I'm still doing that, but it's pretty well ended. So now I'll be working with my NASA scientist, doctor Dong Wu. He's at Goddard Space Flight center, and we're going to do a paper on the three years since the volcano erupted. What's important about this is there's hardly any lidar measurements of this, but with my ultra inexpensive instruments, we've got excellent data. NASA provided some money. I was able to hire Scott Haygroup, an engineer friend, and he built for me a far better twilight photometer than any I ever used before. So we're looking at a piece of the sky about the same width as a diameter of half the sun. So it's a very narrow piece of sky, which means that we have much higher quality data.
[00:22:55] Speaker B: Okay. Yeah, that's pretty amazing that they're turning to you to help them get the data they need. How long has your relationship with NASA been going?
[00:23:08] Speaker A: That's an interesting story. In 1992, I started measuring the ozone layer in 1990 with homemade instruments. Tops one and tops two. Total ozone portable spectrometer one and two. And NASA was very helpful. They were giving me the data from their satellite that I couldn't get off the web back then. The web was not that accurate or not that it didn't serve the purpose back then. So they would send me the data and I calibrated my instruments against their satellite data. Well, after two years, there started to become a divergence in the data, whereas theirs was showing higher amounts of ozone and I was showing lower amounts of ozone, up to a couple of percent.
And so I called them and notified them about this, and they said, well, Forrest, we're glad to be helping you and all that. But keep in mind, this is a multi million dollar program. We've got 22 scientists working on it and so on. And I said, yeah, but I've got two instruments, and they're both showing the same thing. You've only got one satellite. And so we kind of joked about that. So anyway, I kept sending them data, and they finally said, we will do a study and send you the results. Meanwhile, I won a Rolex award, and that was going to be presented in the spring. And they announced this secretly in the fall. And they sent a film production company to my house to make a documentary film about receiving the Rolex award. And I told the film producer as we were driving up to my little office, which is over there, I said, there might be a fax from NASA about whether or not I found an error in their satellite. And the guy says, oh, that's interesting. So we walk in the office in Bingo, there's a fax curled up on my desk. So I reached over to it, and he shouted at me, don't touch that fax. And I said, why not? He said, I've been making documentaries of the Rolex awards and the Nobel prizes for 20 years. I've never seen a real discovery. They always fake it for the camera. If that's a real announcement from NASA, I want to get it on camera. So I said, okay. So I had to spend five minutes while they set up their lights and their, you know, their sound recording and all that. And then when they get all done, the producer smiles and says, okay, I want you to go back outside and then walk inside and pick up your fax. So I said, okay. So I did that. And I pick up the fax, and I started to read it. Bingo. They agreed that there was an error in the satellite. And the film producer was so excited. Oh, and then right then, the NASA scientist called me. He didn't know there was going to be a film crew there. I didn't know there was going to be a film crew there documenting this.
And so the producer said, can I talk to him? So I asked him, I said, there's a documentary guy here filming my research. Can you talk to him? And the scientist was Richard McPeters. And doctor McPeeders said, sure, I'll talk to him. And they did. All of that is in the Rolex documentary. It's on the web. You can find it and watch all of what I just told you.
[00:26:04] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a great story. Keeping NASA honest and in the process earning their respect for many years.
You're still working with them.
[00:26:13] Speaker A: See, that satellite finally died. And in 1995, they were going to Brazil for a big, giant international study of the effects of the burning of the biomass, the burning of the forest down there. So they wanted to measure the ozone layer. The satellite didn't work, so they asked me, the guy with the toy instruments, to go with them, and I did and spent three weeks in the Amazon helping them measure ozone. They did that again.
That was 1995 and 1997. I went again and helped them do the ozone measurements for their study. That was a fascinating experience. I was able to confirm a theory I had that the smoke was so thick that it was blocking ultraviolet from the bacteria floating in the air. That caused people to get respiratory diseases. Well, I did a statistical study. They let me hire a woman who worked, a student who worked with hospitals, and she went out and got all the statistics on influenza, and they matched. There was a good correlation, a 0.8 something correlation, showing that the thicker the smoke, the more the influenza. And that was published. A scientific journal published that finding.
[00:27:24] Speaker B: Wow. Yeah, that's something. And you relay these stories in your book, maverick scientist, do you not?
[00:27:29] Speaker A: Yes, yes.
[00:27:31] Speaker B: Okay. Yeah, some good detail there. Well, back to twilight photometry, just to wrap things up today in an article for make magazine, the magazine and community you've been writing for, for many years. You had a column and make magazine, and you still do, do you? Is it all right for them?
[00:27:49] Speaker A: I'm not as, I'm not as productive as I used to be, but I've published like 70 columns in there so far.
[00:27:56] Speaker B: Yeah. And they are the publishers of your book, maverick scientist. Yes, but in, in the magazine and on their website, you teach people how to tease out the secrets of twilight by making their own homemade twilight photometers.
[00:28:09] Speaker A: Right.
[00:28:10] Speaker B: We're talking real di, diy here. You know, do it yourself.
[00:28:13] Speaker A: Right.
[00:28:13] Speaker B: You lay out the type of housing they would need the resistors to buy the led. You'll, you'll want the whole shebang. Is it really possible to build this at home and take your own measurements of, of the atmosphere at twilight?
[00:28:26] Speaker A: Well, that's what I've done right here.
[00:28:28] Speaker B: Okay, let's see some of it.
[00:28:30] Speaker A: The novelty of my instruments is I don't use a standard light detector to detect the light. I use light emitting diodes which emit light and which nobody realized also detect light. And they detect light of the same color that they emit. So a red led that you see in a car taillight that will detect red light. And the advantage of that is, I don't have to use these expensive filters made from glass. And they're very expensive, a few hundred dollars. And they're fragile, and they don't last forever. My led in the sun photometer has lasted 34 years without deteriorating. So here's the make magazine photometer was simpler than this. This is two photometers at the bottom of this ammo case, and at the top, you'll see two white boxes. Those are called data loggers, and they save the data being measured from these two instruments down here at the bottom. And so I put it in this box so I can easily transport it. My wife didn't want me to put it in an ammo box, and it turned out she was right.
We were in Washington, DC one year, four or five years ago, and I measured twilights both before sunrise and after sunset. And it was in Washington. The sky was clear. Good opportunity to measure the air quality of Washington, DC, because it's a very polluted area. So I go to. There's a restaurant there, right across from an alcove of the Homeland Security office. And we had eaten lunch there. So I thought, this will be a good place. It'll be shut down. The tables will still be there, and the chairs will still be there. So I'll set up my instrument there. And I did that. And then I noticed the policeman in the office of Homeland Security, and he's staring at me. Finally, he comes over and demands to know, what do you have in that ammo box? And I explained, it's a twilight photometer. He didn't know what that was. It took a long time. I persuaded him not to get too close to it, not to shine a flashlight on it, and he agreed. And he then went back and called his superior. And make a long story short, when he went off duty an hour later, his replacement went through the same exercise that he did. So I guess we need to know that the Homeland security people do take care of their home offices.
[00:30:38] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's a relief in some ways. But it was a bit of a problem for you that day. But you did get your data, didn't you?
[00:30:46] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, I did. I did. And what was fascinating about that is I have been measuring the sun photometer data from Washington on every trip for several years, and my wife has even helped me. She's taken pictures of me doing that. There may be a picture in the book of that. And what I found was that the optical depth, in other words, the dirtiness of the air or the cleanliness of the air, whichever you prefer, is pretty much the same today as it was 100 years ago. Well, how can that be? We've got all these big power plants emitting all this sulfur and smoke and everything, but we don't have horses that stir up dust and we don't burn coal in people's houses and make smoke. So it turns out that that air pollution was about equal to today's air pollution.
[00:31:26] Speaker B: Interesting. Yeah, that is a fascinating finding. Wow. Well, a final question for you today, for us, we'll be back to talk about more, but this being id the future where we explore intelligent design and the debate over evolution, some might wonder, well, how does twilight photometry and measuring, you know, sunlight relate to those topics? What would you say to them?
[00:31:49] Speaker A: My answer is very simple, and it's the word simple. In other words, if we approach the origin of life simply without making it complicated and making it do things that it simply can't do, like make mechanical motors that are, thousands of them are in each of our cells, and there's no way that could have been just absolutely created by itself, that had to have a designer. That's a simple approach to evolution. Likewise, my atmospheric measurements. I use a very simple approach, but it provides data suitable for publication in peer reviewed scientific journals. Nothing fancy, no lidars, no $100,000 budgets or anything like that. Just my own out of my back pocket. Money can do something much simpler. And I like to compare that with the study of intelligent design.
[00:32:34] Speaker B: Yeah. And you throw in into that the hypothesis that planet Earth is designed and finely tuned not only for life, but also for scientific discovery, which opens up lots of fruitful research angles and questions, some of which you're pursuing in your everyday science. So anyway, you're an inspiration and so is your work. And I thank you for your example of humility and resilience and excellence when it comes to your scientific work. I'm looking forward to our next conversation. We're actually going to talk about how you won the Rolex Award for enterprise and how, you know, young scientists today can, can win the very same award. They're still at it. They're still giving that out to folks today. So we'll be back to talk about that, folks, to learn more about Mims work and pick up a copy of his latest book, Maverick Scientist my adventures as an amateur scientist, you can go to discovery.org maverick. Easy address. To learn more about it, order a copy discovery.org maverick. The parts of the book that I've read I found educational, inspiring, and just a good reminder of what we can do when we put our minds to it. No university required.
Doesn't mean you can't go learn at university. But Forrest, you are self made and self taught, and this is the result, a distinguished career that is worthy of much respect. Thanks again for joining me today.
[00:34:04] Speaker A: Thank you, Andrew.
[00:34:06] Speaker B: Well, for id the future, I'm Andrew McDermott. Until next time, thanks for listening and watching.
[00:34:14] Speaker A: Visit
[email protected] and intelligentdesign.org dot this program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
