Taking science AND faith seriously.
Episodes
Dec 31, 2018
Dec 31, 2018
1 hr 8 min
I had the chance to have an unofficial interview with Kirby Runyon. (Planetary science is a very publicity-heavy field, and planetary scientists often labor under certain constraints regarding their contact with the media. We avoided mentioning his institutional affiliation to emphasize the point that this interview in no way characterizes any official position by his institution. You can find out where he works, and get access to some of his work, via web search if you are curious, and there's a clue around 13:00 as well.)
We opened the interview with a discussion of Kirby's research on surface processes on planets. He works on data returned from the Moon, Mars, and Saturn's moon Titan to evaluate how winds, asteroid impacts, and other forces shape the surfaces of those bodies.
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Dec 24, 2018
Dec 24, 2018
52 min
In this episode we try to give a little workshop on thinking for yourself about a thorny passage in the Bible, specifically what we are to make of this star that supposedly influenced the Magi (wizards? astrologers?) from "the east" to come to Jerusalem looking for Jesus.
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Dec 17, 2018
Dec 17, 2018
32 min
0:00 Experience as a Christian scientist
1:00 The billion year contact; awe
2:00 Awe and the vast scale of Earth science
3:00 Discoveries never shake faith
4:00 Evolution, randomness, the shortage of provable things
6:00 The bureaucratic mindset: certainty and judgment
7:00 Yucca Mountain, studtite, and uranyl peroxides (Peter Burns, Karrie-Ann Hughes)
8:00 Uranyl chemistry
9:00 Guy Consolmagno's thought experiment on planetary atmospheres
10:00 Uranyl peroxide buckyballs...
11:00 NOT in the initial fate and transport model for Yucca Mountain
12:00 Real life is lack of certainty
13:00 Where we'd put uranium if we had to...
14:00 Hanford, Washington and uranium migration
15:00 Phosphates as immobilizers
16:00 Humans and squirrels: digging stuff up to bury it again
17:00 Kirby Runyon
18:00 Difficult conversations
20:00 The Bible
21:00 Cyclic nature of human history, scriptural history
22:00 The second millennium history of reaction, after reaction, after reaction against hypocrisy
23:00 Secularism and the irreligious right
24:00 Progressive movement as a para-Christian critique of society
26:00 Modern psychology and spirituality:
Fulton Sheen's image of the psychologist pulling Christian truths out of the garbage can
and passing them off as discoveries
29:00 The need for God
30:00 Companions on the way
31:00 Providence
Dec 10, 2018
Dec 10, 2018
27 min
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
Dec 5, 2018
Dec 5, 2018
4 min
Dec 3, 2018
Dec 3, 2018
24 min
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