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 19:0...
Dec 10, 2018•28 min•Ep. 40
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. ...
Dec 05, 2018•4 min•Ep. 44
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 Gravit...
Dec 03, 2018•25 min•Ep. 43
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...
Nov 26, 2018•29 min•Ep. 42
~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 re...
Nov 19, 2018•21 min•Ep. 39
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...
Nov 12, 2018•24 min•Ep. 38
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)...
Nov 05, 2018•40 min•Ep. 37
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 en...
Oct 29, 2018•1 min•Ep. 35
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 hig...
Oct 29, 2018•29 min•Ep. 34
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 rom...
Oct 22, 2018•29 min•Ep. 33
For a change of pace, we discuss emotions and aesthetics and the sense of awe at the scale of the universe and the planet that we inhabit. Paul discusses the "billion year contacts" at his old stomping grounds in the St Francois Mountains of southeast Missouri and the lost world of the earliest visible life in the Burgess Shale. Paul and Bill close with a reflection on how the awe that we feel at comtemplating the enormous scale of space and time of the created world ought to make us better appr...
Oct 15, 2018•29 min•Ep. 32
In this episode we continue into the next logical topic, absolute dating, which is done via measurement of radioactive parent and daughter isotopes. Thus we move from the 19th century and classical physics into yet another way in which 20th century physics has revolutionized science. Paul gives a rundown, with many apologies for the exact data of isotope numbers and half-life lengths he has managed to forget, of the theory of radioactive decay. Bill, our proxy for the man on the street, starts u...
Oct 08, 2018•31 min•Ep. 31
In this episode Paul lays out in a more systematic way the methods used in geology since the late 18th century to erect the detailed stratigraphic history of the Earth. Lithostratigraphy, which works via Steno's Laws, can be used on all the rocks in any outcrop. Its shortcoming is that it cannot be extended beyond a regional scale, at best--say, the state of Wyoming, or Wales and Corwall, etc. Biostratigraphy, the use of fossils, which includes the selection of specially suitable index fossils, ...
Oct 01, 2018•34 min•Ep. 30
- Decay and refutation of the Genesis minimalist paradigm for interpreting geology. - What do contemporary young Earth creationists think happened during this epoch of human history (c. 1700-1830)? - Do they think about it at all? - Do they think that it was a conspiracy or open rebellion, a force of will to reject the Bible? - Late 18th / early 19th century debate over the age of the Earth - Change in status of fossils of extinct species from a doubted claim to a means of dating strata - In Ste...
Sep 24, 2018•36 min•Ep. 27
- Competitor paradigms in early geology, their conceptual and thematic relationships to Noah's Flood. - Catastrophism and its inverse, uniformitarianism Hutton, in some circles (especially Anglo-American ones) considered the father of geology, was a curious hybrid (from our point of view, anyway) of philosophical convictions. On the one hand, and what makes him famous and venerated among geologists today, is his methodology and core assumption that processes happening on the contemporary Earth a...
Sep 17, 2018•24 min•Ep. 29
With acknowledgments to A. Hallam and his Great Geological Controversies 18th century: it becomes more and more possible and even fashionable to discard the minimalist Scriptural timescale Nevertheless, Western thought is so thoroughly steeped in Christianity that every major development is either an extension (subconscious or not) of a Christian theme or a deliberate rejection of one. - Decay and refutation of the Genesis minimalist paradigm for interpreting geology. - "Diluvialism", the theory...
Sep 10, 2018•24 min•Ep. 28
Discussion notes: We start to discuss what everyone in the Catholic Church has been discussing for over a month now, which is the new storm of revelations about sexual abuse of children, youths, and seminarians by priests and bishops. Parallels between modern day and the 17th century. Nicolaus Steno (the subject of our last podcast) lived in a tumultuous time, and many of his contemporary churchmen, Protestant and Catholic both, do not cut an inspiring figure on the stage of history. Steno tried...
Sep 03, 2018•52 min•Ep. 26
In this episode we discuss the life and times of one Blessed Niels Stensen (Latinized as Nicolaus Steno), a Dane who laid down the basic principles that undergird the whole science of geology, from paleontology to stratigraphy to mineralogy and crystallography. Our discussion in the podcast is indebted to The Seashell on the Mountaintop by Alan Cutler. To better understand the impact of Steno's times on his thought and vice versa, we have to discuss extensively the intellectual world of the seve...
Aug 27, 2018•28 min•Ep. 25
Bill and I start off by discussing some of the reasons why there is such animosity against faith and such a tendency to credit the claim that science and religion are mutually incompatible. I think we miss a great deal of the point if we do not take into account the relentless critique Christianity has mounted OF ITSELF over the past half millennium. The Reformation splintered the Christian nations and sparked unprecedented bloodshed between Christians. There had been terrible episodes before, b...
Aug 20, 2018•37 min•Ep. 24
Today was just one of those days where I needed a script to get through a three minute intro. I summarize the interview afterward. Paul: "Welcome to Episode 20 of That's So Second Millennium. "I'm Paul Giesting, a geologist, researcher, consultant, writer, and your co-host on this journey through the beautiful frontier country between science, philosophy, and religion as they stand here at the beginning of the third millennium. My opposite number is Bill Schmitt, a journalist, radio personality,...
Aug 13, 2018•39 min•Ep. 23
We pick up from last week's episode with the next speaker. Kara Lamb followed Andrew Sicree; her research is about the atmosphere and climate. She mostly talked about climate, and got a ways into specifics about her research on black carbon soot in the atmosphere. She did stop to draw a parallel between Laudato Si and Pacem in Terris, that in both cases the Popes stopped to address humanity at large and not just the Church. Juan Martin Maldacena was after her, and was presented the St. Albert Aw...
Aug 06, 2018•48 min•Ep. 22
As I've mentioned, we batch recorded the last four episodes about a month ago, and so we opened with a retrospective on the conference as a whole and its significance. We moved on to discuss Peter Koellner. Koellner was the next talk and probably deserves his own podcast. I have gotten his lecture slides from him but won't have time to analyze them for a few weeks. The short version for now is that he gave us some perspective on Godel's theorem, a result in mathematical logic that many (includin...
Jul 30, 2018•46 min•Ep. 21
It's a short one this week. We discuss the talk at the Society of Catholic Scientists Conference by Aaron Schurger with the delightfully provocative title "Fifty Years Without Free Will." (Those of you who are similiarly obsessive about grammar will appreciate my deep feeling of conflict about capitalizing the preposition "without"...one is not supposed to capitalize prepositions, yet it looks awful to have a seven letter word not capitalized. It's not capitalized in my notes, but it was in the ...
Jul 23, 2018•13 min•Ep. 20
Dr. Scarani opened the talk by noting a paper he placed on arxiv.org about Aquinas and the sense that the universe would not be perfect without randomness. He moved on to discuss randomness in two senses: Process Randomness, which implies that there is an observer unable to predict the output of the process; and Product Randomness, the lack of structure of a product, which turns out to equate with the need for a very long algorithm to replicate the product. Products are tested for randomness by ...
Jul 16, 2018•19 min•Ep. 18
In today's episode we discuss Stephen Barr's talk at the SCS conference on June 9. His topic was the observer question in quantum mechanics. The observer problem is closely tied to the issue of probability and wavefunctions. We spend quite a while discussing what this problem is and how the question arises in the context of experiments like the famous two-slit experiment. The example of "Schrodinger's Cat" is an attempt to make this problem more understandable to the non-quantum mechanic. The ca...
Jul 09, 2018•19 min•Ep. 17
In this episode we begin a series of recaps and discussions of the issues brought up by individual lecturers at the Society of Catholic Scientists conference on June 9 and 10. We start with Ed Feser's keynote, "The Immateriality of the Mind." Feser's objective was to highlight how our ability to be rational, and in particular for our thoughts to mean something unambiguous - even in the face of our inability to express ourselves in a completely unambiguous way in our spoken or written words - mak...
Jul 02, 2018•29 min•Ep. 16
Intro Overview of the conference - schedule Talks Edward Feser & connections to Bishop Barron Theme: Human Mind & Physicalism Development of the problem and the amazing change in intellectual climate since the 19th century Laplace and absolute determinism - 19th century consensus Quantum mechanics demolished this intellectual basis for determinism, although it is clung to fiercely down to the present day, including the profoundly horrifying "many worlds" hypothesis Bell inequality and th...
Jun 25, 2018•37 min•Ep. 15
Not to be confused with the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, although one would understand the mistake. Bill interviews Paul about his experience and observations at the Society of Catholic Scientists conference that took place June 8-10 at the campus of Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. The SCS is a very young organization. Its first president is Stephen Barr, a physicist at the University of Delaware. Its first conference was in April 2017 in Chicago. The theme of the 2018 c...
Jun 18, 2018•32 min•Ep. 14
We start off unpacking the climate change example further and provide some additional context from political science and seismology. The point is to use climate change as an object lesson in how to break down a big issue at least a little bit, which is what a good intellectual citizen needs to do. That still leaves us with a picture of intellectual citizenship as a really, frighteningly large responsibility for all of us to try to bear. We spend some time discussing the other side of the issue: ...
Jun 11, 2018•30 min•Ep. 13
Bill and Paul dive into a very simple question posed by Bill over email: "Please describe more what is intellectual citizenship?" That of course opens up a question that lurks behind every issue we discuss, and any philosophical or religious question touches upon, which is what we owe the universe, its Creator if it has one, and each other. We can't learn everything about everything, and we must make choices what to spend our time on. In the political system we inhabit, in the U.S. and other con...
Jun 04, 2018•32 min•Ep. 12
