That's So Second Millennium

Episode 037 - Jill Pasteris: Christian scientist

3:00 Jill's career
5:00 Finding companionship as Christian scientists (not Christian Scientists...that's different...)
7:00 "Spiritual beings having a human experience"
8:00 Bioapatite; clearing up "loose ends" making a 20 year career arc
9:00 Apatite and phosphate: environment
13:00 Flint, Michigan: lead and protective minerals
14:00 Raman spectroscopy
16:00 Raman on the Mars 2020 rover; Alian Wang
17:00 Laser pointers, cat videos [the brave new world we live in]
18:00 The physics of Raman
19:00 Why lasers and Raman went hand in hand
20:00 Rayleigh vs. Raman scattering
21:00 Raman spectra
22:00 Raman: a (usually) nondestructive technique
23:00 The lecture example and the ease of sample prep for Raman
25:00 Raman peak heights and thermodynamics
26:00 Fingerprinting vs. understanding

Bonus Episode - Nicolaus Steno

We talked about Steno quite a bit over the past several months. Briefly, he was a brilliant observational scientist. Brought up in Lutheran Denmark amid the violence of the seventeenth century, he wandered Europe and won fame as possibly the foremost observational scientist of his day, first in anatomy as a tremendously skilled dissectionist and then, via the bridge of biological fossils, as one of the most important precursor figures of what would become geology in the following two centuries. He laid down, if one can forgive the pun, the laws of geological chronology or stratigraphy (superposition, original horizontality, and inclusion) and even the most basic law of crystallography, the law of constant interfacial angles.

 

But Steno placed more importance on his faith. He spent time in both Catholic and Protestant countries and eventually decided to become Catholic. By the end of his life he had forsaken science for the Catholic priesthood, been ordained a bishop, and spent a long lonely time attempting to convince Protestants in Northern Europe to return to the Catholic faith of their ancestors. He lived an austere life that probably killed him relatively young, much as is said of Fr. Michael McGivney of the Knights of Columbus or the African American priest of the same era, Augustus Tolton.

 

I was listening to Bishop Barron's Word on Fire podcast last night about Cardinal Newman's Apologia pro Vita Sua, and I remarked on the similarities between Steno, Newman, Tolton, and other figures of the last few centuries like Isaac Hecker of the Paulists and for that matter even GK Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. These were intelligent men whose virtue and love for others could not be denied, and yet it is easy to look at the aftermath of their lives and conclude that they failed. Was there something they should have done differently? Perhaps it was just that too few people joined them. Perhaps their contributions are still waiting to be gathered up into a new synthesis of faith. There is a great deal more I'd like to say on that subject, but it will have to wait to another day.

Episode 036 - Anne Hofmeister on Galactic Rotation, Math, and Glass

The times below are continuations from the last episode. My opening is about 1:30, and then we start with galaxy motions at "26:00".

26:00 Galaxy motions

27:00 Galaxy rotation curves: do not match Keplerian orbits

28:00 Galaxies spin more like records (laggy soft records); mass distribution is nothing like the Solar System

29:00 Hurricanes as a better analogy for galaxies

30:00 Stars in a galaxy move in local organization

32:00 Nebulas

34:00 The opposite extreme: rigid body rotation

35:00 Gravitational attraction between stars creating coherence

36:00 Curiosity that gravity and electrical forces are both inverse square laws

37:00 Poisson's equation

38:00 Summing densities in Poisson's inhomogeneous term is physically meaningless; intensive quantities can't be summed that way

40:00 Gauss' theorem: flux through a surface and quantity within a volume

41:00 Summing is for extensive variables

42:00 Pressure an ambiguous variable

43:00 Future work

44:00 Thermal expansivity: Giauque

45:00 Problems with the glass transition measurements done in the past: need to completely drive out water from the experimental charges

48:00 Wrapup

Episode 035 - Anne Hofmeister Shakes Up Earth Science

TSSM goes heavy: hard-hitting journalism from one of science's great controversialists, Anne Hofmeister. Intrigued? Disagree? Write me an email (giesting@alumni.nd.edu) or look her up at Washington University in St. Louis' EPS department website.

The times below are keyed to the start of the interview and ignore my opening (just over 2 min).

0:00 Introduction

1:00 Anne's background (sorry, this part Anne was talking so quietly that I can't seem to fix it with Audacity, but bear with us; we moved the microphone and figured some things out and it gets better)

2:00 Spectroscopy and heat transfer

3:00 Thermal conductivity experiments and their pitfalls

5:00 Criticism of the history of thermodynamics and heat transfer; identification of light and heat

6:00 Problems with equilibrium and elastic collisions in theories of thermodynamics

8:00 Criticism of phonon theory

10:00 Electron and vibrational transfer of heat decoupled; metals and heat transfer

13:00 Garnet

14:00 Earth's interior: convection, the Rayleigh number

15:00 Viscosity

16:00 The Earth's mantle: nearly all solid

17:00 Plate tectonics without mantle convection

18:00 An even more radical idea: heat is being trapped inside the solid Earth

19:00 [there was a distortion I had to cut]

20:00 Implications: heat generation is in the crust (this part is widely known!)

21:00 Implications: the core is melting, not solidifying?

22:00 The geodynamo and magnetic field

23:00 The core: buffered at the temperature of melting high pressure iron

24:00 Magnetic modes diagram for the planets: spin and magnetic field

 

Episode 034 - Stephen Barr on Why to Be a Religious (and Catholic) Scientist

~0:00 Question: advice for students
1:00 Don't be afraid to be a religious scientist
2:00 Particular issues
3:00 Keep awake to the wonder of the world
4:00 Bill: ignorance of the common man about both science and religion
5:00 Modern Physics and Ancient Faith
6:00 Christopher Baglow: science and faith textbook
7:00 Church beginning (at long last?) to address the need to catechize & educate about this
Phone ringing can't be excised without gutting Bill's question!
8:00 Media's portrayal of religion as boring and science as exciting
9:00 Science explores the world as it is, but there must be issues beyond: "why" issues
10:00 Intellectual freedom necessary for science to make any sense
11:00 No reason for Catholics to fear science uncovering fatal problems for faith
12:00 20th century overturn of 19th century mechanistic, unfree universe
13:00 Advent of the big bang theory, verification through microwave radiation
14:00 Bill: "free will on steroids" in uneasy coexistence with materialism
15:00 Barr: inherent conflict there
16:00 Pernicious recurring feature of intellectual history: excuses not to be free
17:00 Bill: does faith make one a better scientist?
18:00 Wonder: "ears to hear and eyes to see"
19:00 Summation: join Society of Catholic Scientists!
20:00 Sign off

Episode 033 - Stephen Barr on Lemaitre-Hubble Law and the Society of Catholic Scientists

Minute Comment

0:00 Paul introduces

1:00 Bill: Lemaitre announcement

2:00 Lemaitre: faith & science not opposed

3:00 Barr: Lemaitre announcement

4:00 Ignorance of Lemaitre

5:00 Ignorance of the Christian, Catholic origin of science & famous Catholic scientists

6:00 Barr: late 19th century critical period for the forging of the myth of Church as anti-science

7:00 Science only professionalized in the late 19th century, looking for influence

8:00 More famous Catholic scientists

9:00 Mission of the Society of Catholic Scientists; religious people looking askance at scientists, 10:00 Scientists timid about showing their faith in the presence of a few loud atheists

11:00 Catholic scientists joining SCS & finding others like themselves

12:00 Witness to the world

13:00 Conferences, past and future: next June at Notre Dame

14:00 2017: origin of universe, life; 2018: mind and matter

15:00 2019 conference: what is it (and has it been) to be human; speakers from outside the faith

16:00 Past non-Catholic conference speakers

17:00 Peter Koellner's talk at 2018 conference

18:00 Koellner and Godel's theorem

19:00 Neaderthals, language, reason

20:00 Godel's beliefs about mind and mathematical truths

21:00 Mathematical truth and religious truth

22:00 Depth & sophistication of the law that governs the universe

 

Episode 032 - Science and Saints

Intro: Nobel Prize announcements

Donna Strickland

Nadia Murad

Segue: Lemaitre press release

Transition: the early 20th century golden age from Chesterton to Fulton Sheen

Theme: All Saints Day

Augustine

Isidore

Albert the Great

Roger Bacon

Nicolaus Steno

Gregor Mendel

Georges Lemaitre

Please leave us feedback here by hitting the "Email Paul" link or using the "Facebook" link and commenting or messaging us there.

Image: Braulio of Saragossa and Isidore of Seville, writing his Origins (Etymologies)

Request for Feedback

We hope you've enjoyed the podcast so far, and in particular our last two episodes with Guy Consolmagno.

TSSM has been running for over six months now, and we would love to get your feedback on how to make it better:

• What topics or approaches have you liked and want more of?
• Whom should we seek out for interviews? We definitely are cooking up our own lists, but you can influence us!
• What should we do less of?
• What about the audio works or bothers you?
  • Volume (too low, too high, not consistent enough?)
  • Quality (noise, voices muffled, other problems)

Feel free to comment at our Facebook page (look at the Links section to the right) or send Paul an email (there is also a link for that). We are really looking forward to hearing from you.

Episode 031 - Br. Guy Consolmagno: Teaching Science and Human Nature

Paul moves from popular books to Br. Guy's 1990s planetary science textbook, Worlds Apart which Paul switched to in 2015, despite its age, precisely because of Br. Guy's explicit acknowledgment that "students want to learn about THE PLANETS." The chapters of the book therefore start with a saga of some planet, and then focus in on some process that is well exemplified on that planet. Other textbooks try to focus on processes and lose ME, let alone my students, most of whom were headed toward high school teaching.

Br. Guy goes on from the subject of his books to talk a little about John Scalzi's take on the common advice to authors to "kill your darlings"..."the failure mode of clever is idiot." (I am not unfamiliar with John Scalzi, who is certainly a master of the craft: see my review of Old Man's War on Goodreads.)

Bill references the science & religion initiative at the McGrath Institute at Notre Dame, to which Br. Guy has contributed. The Institute tries to form high school teachers with a sense of the complementary, rather than adversary, nature of science and faith. Br. Guy goes on to talk about how hard a high school teacher's job is, and the need for enthusiasm in presentation. If you are listening to two enthusiastic people talk shop about almost any topic, however little you yourself know about it, you get drawn in. That's the goal, except most high school teachers have to do it by themselves.

A teacher that can maintain enthusiasm and also model comfort with not knowing the answer and intellectual humility..."I don't know; let's go find the answer"...is a great gift to insecure, "self-conscious but not self-aware" teenagers.

Paul probes Br. Guy about the modern attitude of trying to discard as much of the past as possible. Br. Guy comments how living in Italy gives you perspective on how the attitude has shifted from the medieval attitude (discussed in great depth by CS Lewis in The Discarded Image) of reverence for the past, whose achievements we could never match, to the modern one. Rome gives you the perspective that while science and engineering may have advanced, art and architecture have not. Humanity can only progress so far...we can't get away from original sin. We do things we know are wrong, destructive, etc. That's why Twelve Step programs exist. A great 20th century tragedy, as has been noted many times, is the failure of great schemes (like communism) for revising society in some theoretically perfect new form.

A chance reference to Shakespeare, and then to Star Trek VI (of course), leads us off into a discussion of language and the way it shapes our lives, from the fun people have had since Tolkien inventing whole new languages, to the difference in what Sarah cooks for Abraham's visitors in English (yuck) versus Italian. Br. Guy makes the provocative statement that one has to learn more new words in freshman biology than in freshman French. When you learn philosophy, you learn new words, and with those words (if you're really learning them) you learn new ways of thinking.

As a final note, that's why you need others to truly learn and work in a subject...or in a faith. The Ethiopian that Phillip baptized in the Acts of the Apostles had a hard row to hoe.

 

https://vofoundation.org/blog

https://vofoundation.org/faith-and-science

 

Books mentioned in the interview:

Wind, Sand, and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Unapologetic by Francis Spufford

The Rock by T.S. Eliot

Image courtesy Robert Macke (wikimedia Commons)

Episode 030 - Br. Guy Consolmagno: Galileo and Carl Sagan

Br. Guy starts with a brief bio of himself as the meteorite curator and now director of the Vatican Observatory. If you aren't familiar with his life and career, I cannot suggest strongly enough to go find a copy of Brother Astronomer. Paul takes the opportunity to geek out a bit about the VO's collection of Martian meteorites, which includes pieces of varying size of the three flagship members of the three great classes of Martian meteorites: Chassigny, Shergotty, and Nakhla. We discuss the romance and suspense of finding meteorites in the dry deserts.

Paul then poses the question of the recently discovered Galileo letter. Br. Guy defuses a bit of the noise surrounding this letter, likening the situation to scientists down to this very day putting out provocative theses and then pulling them back under criticism from their peers.

(My dog Riley starts barking at UPS personnel sometime between 13:00 and 13:30. This was an eventful session.)

Galileo in his time was rather like Carl Sagan in his time: a popularizer and a controversialist. Br. Guy, who met Carl Sagan a few times, recognizes the value that both of these controversial figures brought to the field. He goes on to discuss the travails that Sagan faced in his own life, dealing with fame and the risks he ran to get his message out (the massive debt he incurred in making Cosmos) and notes his own fraught relationship with his own faith.

Carl Sagan was a serious scientist, in the 1960s one of the first to grapple with the unexpectedly, incredibly hot temperatures the first Venus probes reported and to link it with the very thick carbon dioxide atmosphere Venus has.

Br. Guy talks a little about his experience "coming out" as a religious believer, and the opposition he _didn't_ receive in publicizing his decision to become a Jesuit. He moves on to discuss the romance of science, why we're attracted to it, and why it's important to steer a middle path (that Aristotelian mean again) in both science and faith between "I already know everything worth knowing" and "God / the universe is so big I can never understand it." Of course you won't learn it all, but of course you'll be able to learn and love something. He likens it to a good friendship or romantic relationship, in which you rejoice in both the known and the unknown.

Paul probes Br. Guy on whether Sagan influenced him in his own popular books. Br. Guy professes that not only did Carl Sagan influence his confidence in being able to discuss the wonders of planetary science and astronomy with a popular audience, as well as his colloquial tone, but even his wardrobe served as a good precursor (compare Carl at https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0755981/ with Guy at https://www.radiokerry.ie/portraits-of-gc36-delegates/ and for good measure another great Italian scientist who wore the collar well https://www.torinoscienza.it/personaggi/giuseppe-mercalli).

Image courtesy Robert Macke (wikimedia Commons)