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Interviews: Forrest Mims Answers Your Questions
A while ago you had the chance to ask amateur scientist, and author of the Getting Started in Electronics and the Engineer's Mini-Notebook series, Forrest Mims, a number of questions about science, engineering, and a lifetime of educating and experimenting. Below you'll find his detailed answers to those questions.
inspirations
by lyapunov
You are the quintessential tinkerer with a non-standard education. What was the key inspiration that started you on this path? What do you feel provides the most inspiration in others, in particular kids, to learn and do hands on tasks?
Mims: Give kids a lab or robotics kit and watch their curiosity and creativity explode. Glue them to chairs in a classroom and watch them grow bored and disillusioned as their curiosity dissipates.
My dad was a US Air Force pilot as well as an artist and architect. He definitely encouraged curiosity, especially when he built a beautiful crystal radio set for my brother and me. During two 6th grade assemblies a visiting physicist and an Air Force meteorologist conducted fascinating demonstrations of cryogenics and weather balloons. As a teenager I read everything I could about transistor circuits in Popular Mechanics and Popular Electronics and “The Amateur Scientist” column in Scientific American. I even dreamed of someday writing for those magazines. An article in the July 1954 issue of National Geographic (“New Miracles of the Telephone Age”) included absolutely mesmerizing photos of transistors and silicon solar cells. Over the years hundreds of emails and letters have arrived from readers of my books who reported they were inspired as teenagers or young adults to enter electronics or science because of them. That was completely unexpected, for writing those books was just a part of my electronics hobby. So it seems that inspiration often begins at a very early age.
But young people don’t have an exclusive monopoly on exciting discoveries and projects. What can be more amazing than the molecular motors that walk along microtubules in our cells while towing huge loads? Then there’s my new project of using ultra-sensitive, homemade photometers to measure the brightness of the zenith sky during twilight to extract the altitude of atmospheric dust layers and the ozone layer. This is the most exciting science I’ve done in 20 years!
Re:No Question
by B1ackDragon
...I also have "Getting Started in Electronics" and a couple of "Engineer's Mini-Notebooks" still on my shelf, with the intention of giving them to my kids one day. Question for Mr. Mims: what was it like getting a completely handwritten book published? Did you approach RadioShack with the idea? Given all the modern publication options (self-pub, iBooks, etc.) and software to help, how would you go about it today? (I know, that's three questions...)
Mims: Interesting question. David Gunzel was Radio Shack’s technical editor back in 1978. Back then he sometimes agreed to witness pages in my lab notebooks, which were all hand printed and illustrated. One day Dave said that I should do a hand-lettered book for Radio Shack, so it was his idea. The result was Engineer’s Notebook, which sold more than 600,000 copies. This book was printed on toothed (roughened) Mylar with India ink—which meant entire pages had to be redone when a mistake was made. The middle finger of my right hand bled while printing this book. All 15 or so subsequent hand-lettered books were printed with a 0.7-mm mechanical pencil on stiff stock. This allowed errors to be easily erased and corrected. The Mini-Notebook series (all 16 volumes now merged into four) was prepared on paper, as was Getting Started in Electronics, which was completely planned, printed and drawn in 54 days, including rebuilding and testing every one of the 100 circuits four times to make sure there were zero errors. (It’s essential to rebuild circuits from the circuit drawings and not from memory!) Getting Started in Electronics has sold 1.3+ million copies and is still in print.
What book are you most proud of?
by TheBrez
What single book are you the most proud of, and see as your best work? Or which one have you had the most people tell you was the book they use/recommend the most?
Mims: Getting Started in Electronics remains my favorite book and still brings in many comments online and in emails. Science Projects, a Mini-Notebook, is a close second. From a scholarly perspective, Hawaii’s Mauna Loa Observatory: Fifty Years of Monitoring the Atmosphere was by far my most ambitious work. This book was four years in the making and was based on my many stays at Mauna Loa Observatory (1992 to present) to calibrate my atmospheric monitoring instruments.
Model Rocketry
by Anonymous Coward
Please retell the story of how you got started in Model Rocketry and some of your earlier projects, successes, and of course failures. Be sure to name names and clubs!
Mims: Great question! I’ve devoted space to this topic in a new memoir now being written. It all began way back in 1967 in Colorado Springs when my dad took me to a model rocket meeting staged by what became Estes Industries. For Christmas that year I received an Aerobee-Hi rocket kit. The rocket was quickly built and reached an altitude of 671 feet on its first flight. Before we moved to Colorado, where my dad was assigned as project officer for the Air Force Academy Chapel, I was seated in a hot seventh-grade classroom at Hamilton Junior High School watching a big fan by the door when the idea of a ram-air controlled rocket popped into my mind. The idea was a rocket that was steered not by fins but by air entering the open nose of a rocket and then jetted out ports in the nose cone. This project dominated my experimenting for several years, and its successes and failures will be covered in detail in the new memoir. The major success was confirmation that the ram air principle actually worked during test flights. The biggest failure was that the best made sun-homing test rocket control section worked great—but failed miserably during ground tests (suspended from a string looking at a flashlight) when the ram air scanner rapidly stopped during a course change and its inertia caused the entire rocket to spin.
The ram air project involved many test flights, and night flights were best since the rocket path could be easily recorded on film. To recover these rockets, I built a very small 2-transistor light flasher (which I still have). When I demonstrated the flasher during a night launch at a model rocket meeting in Portales, New Mexico, in 1969, George Flynn, editor of Model Rocketry magazine, asked me to write an article about its construction. I build a new flasher for the article, which was published in September 1969. I was very surprised when Flynn sent a check for $93.50 for the article. I told my wife Minnie that I wanted to become a freelance writer and showed my friend Ed Roberts the article. Ed and I were both assigned to the Air Force Weapons Laboratory in Albuquerque, NM, at the time, and we often discussed forming a company to sell electronic kits through Popular Electronics and Radio-Electronics magazines. When Ed saw the article in Model Rocketry, he agreed it was time to start a company. We invited Stan Cagle and Bob Zaller to join us in a meeting at Ed’s house, where we decided to call the company Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS). You can read the details on my web site. Our first product was my light flasher circuit. I left both MITS and the Air Force after a year or so to become a freelance writer but stayed connected by writing manuals for various MITS products. I also arranged a meeting with Ed and Les Solomon of Popular Electronics when Les came to visit my wife Minnie and me. That meeting led to the Opticom article (a MITS light-wave communication system), various calculator articles and finally a cover story in January 1975 on the MITS Altair 8800, a microcomputer designed by Ed. The Altair was featured on the cover, which attracted Paul Allen’s attention. He bought the magazine in a Harvard Square news store and immediately took it to his high school friend Bill Gates. Within months, Paul was working at MITS, and Bill followed later. They organized Microsoft shortly thereafter. Paul Allen planned a great exhibit on the early days of microcomputing, which began in Albuquerque, not the West Coast. The exhibit is called STARTUP. It occupies an entire gallery at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science in Albuquerque. On display are the first BASIC tape, early computer stuff, and the light flasher (and rocket) I built for Model Rocketry magazine.
projects
by Anonymous Coward
Of all the projects you have worked on, what has been your favorite? Personal or professional. (I would like to express my gratitude, getting started with electronics, got me started in electronics and I am now an engineer. I also have a "non-standard" education as they say, having mostly taught myself from reading and taking online free courses.
Mims: First, I’m glad you are largely self-taught. That’s often the best way.
Favorite Projects:
1. 1966-72: Various electronic travel aids for the blind, a project inspired by my blind great grandfather. The 2-transistor pulse generator for the LED was based on a $0.99 code practice oscillator board from a radio/TV repair shop when I was in college (spring 1966). That oscillator circuit dominated my learning curve for several years and evolved into the rocket light flasher that led to the founding of MITS.
2. 1990-Present: First sun photometers to use LEDs as spectrally selective photodiodes (still very involved with this after 25 years of near daily measurements).
3. 1990-Present: Compact 2-channel UV-B photometer for measuring the ozone layer to within 1-2% accuracy. The original two instruments (TOPS-1 and 2) found an error in NASA’s Nimbus 7 ozone instrument and led to my first publication in Nature. This work led to a 1993 Rolex Award. TOPS evolved into Microtops II, a sophisticated instrument engineered by Solar Light that’s used around the world to monitor the ozone layer, total water vapor and haze.
4. 2013-Present: Miniature photometers that measure twilight glows and enable the detection and elevation of stratospheric dust layers and the ozone layer. This is really exciting work and I will soon be comparing results from my homemade instruments with two lidars at the Mauna Loa Observatory.
a distinguished tinkerer, indeed
by swschrad
I grew up on your Popular Electronics crew, all those soldering wizards who educated us all. I'd like to hear the back-story of how you and AT&T got into a cage battle over optoelectronics
Mims: The Bell Labs story is told in Siliconnections and will be retold with new info in the new memoir. During my senior year in high school I reasoned that a solid state light detector should also function as a light source, much as an electromagnetic earphone could double as a microphone. Briefly, I connected an automobile spark coil to a CdS photocell—which emitted flashes of green light when stimulated by 12,000 volts from the coil. In 1972 I experimented with LEDs as photodiodes and described this in a book (Light Emitting Diodes, pp. 118-119). In the early 1980s I sent Bell Labs an invention disclosure for how an LED can be used as 2-way emitter/detector at either end of an optical fiber. They agreed in writing to contact me if they wanted to pursue my disclosure, but they never did. A few years later, Dave Gunzel, Radio Shack’s tech editor, sent me a Business Week article that announced Bell Labs had discovered what I submitted to them. I made 2 trips to New York to negotiate with them, but they wanted me to do work for them in return for me canceling my claim. In the end, I visited a sharp patent lawyer, and we sued. After a series of funny depositions and other adventures, the well-known Texas trial lawyer Bell Labs had hired told them they needed to settle the case. They did. They also abandoned a patent application they had filed (after I complained to a Federal judge).
Re:Ask him about Darwin
by femtobyte
Why do you trust science when it comes to electronics, but not when it comes to biology?
Mims: I trusted biology in the 6th grade when our science book showed a photo of Piltdown Man and explained how he was the missing link between apes and people. This book persuaded me to accept evolution and to almost reject Christianity. However, while researching Piltdown Man at an Air Force Academy library when I was in the 11th grade, I learned that the 1912 discovery was actually one of science’s biggest hoaxes. Even though some scientists never accepted Piltdown as authentic, the scientific consensus was that it was real, and this admission was not formalized for 40 years. That was three years before my sixth grade science book was handed to us gullible students and presented as scientific fact. While working with scientists at the Air Force Weapons Lab on a variety of sophisticated experiments involving rhesus monkeys, I decided to look more into evolution. I began collecting fossils and have since accumulated a fair number of insects encapsulated in ancient amber. By my mid-twenties, I made the conscious decision to reject Darwinian evolution in favor of what is now called intelligent design. (I prefer Superintelligent Design. ID is a misnomer, since no one has proposed the details of exactly how life has been intelligently designed ex nihilo.) The bottom line for me was that Piltdown taught me to be skeptical of scientific paradigms. Of course, that’s what science in general once taught. But these days we are supposed to accept anything that’s claimed to be the product of “scientific consensus.”
Back to your question, yes, I certainly trust science when it comes to electronics and biology. In fact, I’ve merged electronics and biology in a long term and ongoing study of daily photosynthetic radiation. I published a paper on 5-years of data using a homemade instrument in Photochemistry and Photobiology. Evolutionary science offers no viable explanation for the evolution of photosynthesis. I’ve also merged electronics and biology in an ongoing study of selective tannin deposition in the annual growth rings of various trees, especially two distinctive varieties of baldcypress (Taxodium distichum).
But I question paradigms and never trust pseudoscience, like the idea that life arose on its own through purely random processes. Occam’s razor recommends the simplest solution to a problem as being the best. Intentional design of living systems—the God hypothesis in my view, others have different ideas--is a far simpler explanation than random natural processes that have never been observed to create molecular motors and other absolutely indispensable elements of living cells. Back to electronics, it’s easy to conceive of an application, but implementing a circuit to implement the application is not a random process. I’ve built thousands of circuits, none of which were made by randomly wiring together components. The same applies to code. No one I know has ever randomly poked keys on a keyboard in an effort to create a new routine. In medicine, random events like this are called mutations, the vast majority of which are non-beneficial. When I designed the PIP processor from discrete TTL chips, it was necessary to design both the circuit and the microinstructions. PIP was built on our kitchen table, and was a bird’s nest of wires. Remove or replace a single wire or randomly change a microinstruction, and it would not work. But I was careful, and it worked. I published a book and 4 articles based on PIP, not one connection of which was random. In fact, as the designer of that rather difficult project, I might have been somewhat offended had someone suggested I relied on random processes for any aspect of its design and/or assembly. ; )
I apply these same standards to all science, so let’s briefly examine evolution.
1. RANDOM EVOLUTION. The random processes thought to underlie evolution occur throughout nature. I’ve built a Geiger counter to record the random arrival of subatomic particles, and I once wrote a program to quickly evaluate “random number generators” by plotting them as x,y coordinates. Imperfect generators were quickly revealed when their numbers formed streaks and bands across the screen. But I am unaware of how naturally random processes could have led to the first life forms, much less the information encoded within them. Consider the earliest cyanobacteria from the Precambrian. These ancient life forms were capable of cell division, and they included complex information that controlled their structure, metabolism and reproduction. Modern single-celled organisms multiply by various forms of division. In all cases, various molecular motors physically split and move the internal structures of the dividing cell, sometimes under great pressure. Consider kinesin motors that literally walk along internal microtubules towing huge loads. These motors are too small to image (they walk 8 nm per step at up to 100 steps/second), but Ron Vale’s team at the University of California at San Francisco has managed to affix glowing quantum dots to them so their movements can be observed in real time. There are many other kinds of molecular motors, including the sliders in muscle tissue and the rotary motors that drive flagella and perform amazing internal functions much like machines in a factory.
The evolution of these complex molecules, which had to exist in the earliest cells, is so improbable that the evolutionary literature is being increasingly criticized for failing to include evolutionary explanations for them. That’s a huge problem for evolutionary molecular biologists, some of whom I know. Do they really believe that a rotary nanomotor that spins an axle at a thousand or so rpm and can stop in only a revolution—all at an efficiency approaching 100 percent—somehow randomly arose from a cluster of molecules hanging out in a protocell? Do they really believe these motors can walk, slide and rotate while performing many functions absolutely essential to the life of a cell—all without a nervous system, brain, eyes or muscles? Ron Vale’s team, Harvard, the Discovery Institute and others have produced remarkable videos that show animations of molecular motors. Before committing yourself to the notion these highly complex machines evolved, have a look at some of their videos on YouTube and start asking questions. You will immediately realize why molecular biologists avoid discussing the supposed evolution of these nanomachines.
2. DARWIN. Moving on to higher forms of life, all of which rely on molecular motors, Darwin knew nothing about DNA, molecular motors and the self-assembling microtubules that support cell structures and serve as tracks for walking kinesin motors when he proposed his hypothesis of natural selection. Natural selection works great at macro levels. That’s why people have been able to select special characteristics of plants and animals to develop new varieties. But even dogs (Canis familiaris) can reproduce with their key predecessors (Canis lupis). Dogs have never evolved into anything other than dogs.
3. DARWIN’S ESCAPE CLAUSE. Charles Darwin injected a vital escape clause into his famous The Origin of Species when he recognized the absence of any fossils that transitioned into the remarkably diverse and complex creatures found in the Cambrian. Darwin wrote, “There is another and allied difficulty, which is much more serious. I allude to the manner in which species belonging to several of the main divisions of the animal kingdom suddenly appear in the lowest known fossiliferous rocks.To the question why we do not find rich fossiliferous deposits belonging to these assumed earliest periods prior to the Cambrian system, I can give no satisfactory answer.The case at present must remain inexplicable; and may be truly urged as a valid argument against the views here entertained.”
Today’s strict evolutionists are unhappy about Darwin’s views, for even today he would be unable to provide a satisfactory explanation. Thanks to Darwin for advocating the skeptical side of science, a side that is too often ignored or even banished when philosophical matters intervene. And that’s the final line. Ever since I was banished from Scientific American magazine after the editors asked if I believe in Darwinian evolution (no) or the sanctity of life (yes), a small number of dedicated atheists have attempted to discredit both me and my science. I know Christians who accept Darwinian evolution and those who do not. But hardline atheists have no choice but to resist any alternatives to evolution. This hasn’t impressed my editors, publishers, science colleagues and, yes, the atheist friends and colleagues with whom I have done considerable science. There just happen to be some determined atheists out there who seem to have a calling to flame anyone who rejects their philosophy in favor of a higher power or, more perhaps more appropriately in my case, a Creator. Your question doesn’t use that approach, and I appreciate that.
Makerspaces
by cowtamer
What do you feel about the Maker movement and Makerspaces in general?It seems to me as the Maker/tinkerer is the new equivalent to the electronics hobbyist. Do you believe new project designs need to keep this in mind? (i.e, present the design of an entire gadget instead of just the electronics)?
Mims: Fantastic question! Hobby electronics experienced a sharp reversal when it worked its way out of a hobby by evolving (under the lead of designers, of course) into commercially available computers. This was a major concern to many of us who judged science fairs. Physics and engineering experiments nearly disappeared while soft projects in environmental science multiplied.
Two developments have reversed the decline of hobby electronics:
1. ROBOTICS: The robotics movement has transformed many students from passive learners to active experimenters and designers. My current column in MAKE magazine proposes a new kind of robotics competition in which “Marsbots” slip behind a curtain to a scene visible only to spectators and perform a variety of tests of a simulated Martian environment and atmosphere. If this becomes a competition someday, students will learn many new concepts in math, electronics, mechanics, environmental sensing and monitoring, data analysis, and, of course, robotics. They will do all this in one major project while having loads of fun!
2. MAKER MOVEMENT: There’s always been a maker movement. It began with hand-woven baskets and hand-chipped flints. Today’s maker movement really took off when MAKE magazine arrived and began publishing projects that people were doing all along in private. Thanks to the highly creative team at MAKE, the movement has expanded well beyond what it once was.
You asked a key question: [Should we] present the design of an entire gadget instead of just the electronics? I think of it this way:
a. Present any circuit that does something useful, whether or not you have found what that use might be.
b. Present complete circuits that do something useful whenever possible.
c. Share your talents and aspirations by merging them into practical, useful projects.
d. Publish your projects! Nuts&Volts is a fantastic electronics magazine. MAKE is the ultimate maker’s magazine. If you make a scientific discovery submit your work to a scientific journal. If it’s published, you will have more credibility than ever before.
Doing electronics alone is fun, but it’s not always creative. I found my niche by using electronics to develop entirely new kinds of gadgets and instruments—like an oscilloscope the size of a postage stamp, a surface-mount organ assembled with conductive paint on a business card, and a stepped-tone generator that was renamed the “Atari Punk Console.” (I had no idea how much influence the latter circuit had until being asked to give a talk at Moogfest 2014. Search Google for more.)
Then there’s added value, as I’m trying to do with a range of compact, inexpensive instruments designed to monitor the atmosphere’s ozone layer, water vapor layer, haze and so forth. Some of these instruments use ordinary LEDs as spectrally-selective photodiodes instead of expensive filters.
Challenges faced by computer-aided learning
by LordMyren
You've written hobbyist-targetting books with Radio Shack that work through hands on projects hobbyists can do themselves. My question is, for those seeking to carry your mission in writing those books over to computer-aided or simulation based learning, what things of value did you create that will be the hardest to carry forwards and what are the greatest things of value that computer-assistance will uniquely be able to take & make it's own & go furthest with?
Mims: This is a tough questions. The Radio Shack books are really best for hands-on learning. I saw this firsthand while teaching basic electronics and experimental science to humanities majors at the University of the Nations in Hawaii and Switzerland. The students are from all over the world, and they all exhibited the same response, viz., lectures about science and electronics are boring at best, even when supplemented with cool videos and PowerPoints. But hands on learning is exciting and contagious. When students were given my Electronics Learning Lab one never knew what to expect. They were at first timid. But after 5 minutes they were building their first circuits. One class became so excited—and loud--while building light-sensitive tone generators that the classes on either side of mine gave up and walked in my class to see what was happening. Check out my YouTube video of a typical reaction of two students building a tone generator.
I will think more about your question, for there’s certainly a role for computer assisted learning. But based on many years of experience, I’m biased toward the hands-on approach.
Past vs present
by ArcadeMan
What's your opinion on the old ways, i.e. buying parts locally from Radio Shack and meeting people in local clubs compared to the new online way of buying parts and kits, publishing tutorials and forums full of people helping each other?More to the point, what do you think has been lost from the old way and what has been gained from the new way?
Mims: This is an intriguing question. While I was never a member of an electronics club, I know some people who were. I also spent time showing friends how to build circuits. I doubt if there’s a better way to learn to solder than watching an experienced person solder a connection. That’s how I taught my son Eric to solder when he was only four years old. About that time I organized the Albuquerque Academy Model Rocket and taught teens how to make rockets, design experiments and build instruments. Yes, maybe some of this firsthand instruction has been lost these days. But maybe robotics clubs and groups have brought back much of it. If asked to trade, I would take today’s approach of do-it-yourself electronics over the old days. Moving on to science, I really think the old method was better. Science today is dominated by labs filled with teams, often working with very costly equipment. Today’s amateur scientists have access to highly sophisticated equipment on the surplus market, so that’s a major advance. But it’s often difficult for even highly creative amateur scientists to win the recognition they deserve unless they publish in leading journals of science, the most difficult kind of publishing on the planet.
by lyapunov
You are the quintessential tinkerer with a non-standard education. What was the key inspiration that started you on this path? What do you feel provides the most inspiration in others, in particular kids, to learn and do hands on tasks?
Mims: Give kids a lab or robotics kit and watch their curiosity and creativity explode. Glue them to chairs in a classroom and watch them grow bored and disillusioned as their curiosity dissipates.
My dad was a US Air Force pilot as well as an artist and architect. He definitely encouraged curiosity, especially when he built a beautiful crystal radio set for my brother and me. During two 6th grade assemblies a visiting physicist and an Air Force meteorologist conducted fascinating demonstrations of cryogenics and weather balloons. As a teenager I read everything I could about transistor circuits in Popular Mechanics and Popular Electronics and “The Amateur Scientist” column in Scientific American. I even dreamed of someday writing for those magazines. An article in the July 1954 issue of National Geographic (“New Miracles of the Telephone Age”) included absolutely mesmerizing photos of transistors and silicon solar cells. Over the years hundreds of emails and letters have arrived from readers of my books who reported they were inspired as teenagers or young adults to enter electronics or science because of them. That was completely unexpected, for writing those books was just a part of my electronics hobby. So it seems that inspiration often begins at a very early age.
But young people don’t have an exclusive monopoly on exciting discoveries and projects. What can be more amazing than the molecular motors that walk along microtubules in our cells while towing huge loads? Then there’s my new project of using ultra-sensitive, homemade photometers to measure the brightness of the zenith sky during twilight to extract the altitude of atmospheric dust layers and the ozone layer. This is the most exciting science I’ve done in 20 years!
Re:No Question
by B1ackDragon
...I also have "Getting Started in Electronics" and a couple of "Engineer's Mini-Notebooks" still on my shelf, with the intention of giving them to my kids one day. Question for Mr. Mims: what was it like getting a completely handwritten book published? Did you approach RadioShack with the idea? Given all the modern publication options (self-pub, iBooks, etc.) and software to help, how would you go about it today? (I know, that's three questions...)
Mims: Interesting question. David Gunzel was Radio Shack’s technical editor back in 1978. Back then he sometimes agreed to witness pages in my lab notebooks, which were all hand printed and illustrated. One day Dave said that I should do a hand-lettered book for Radio Shack, so it was his idea. The result was Engineer’s Notebook, which sold more than 600,000 copies. This book was printed on toothed (roughened) Mylar with India ink—which meant entire pages had to be redone when a mistake was made. The middle finger of my right hand bled while printing this book. All 15 or so subsequent hand-lettered books were printed with a 0.7-mm mechanical pencil on stiff stock. This allowed errors to be easily erased and corrected. The Mini-Notebook series (all 16 volumes now merged into four) was prepared on paper, as was Getting Started in Electronics, which was completely planned, printed and drawn in 54 days, including rebuilding and testing every one of the 100 circuits four times to make sure there were zero errors. (It’s essential to rebuild circuits from the circuit drawings and not from memory!) Getting Started in Electronics has sold 1.3+ million copies and is still in print.
What book are you most proud of?
by TheBrez
What single book are you the most proud of, and see as your best work? Or which one have you had the most people tell you was the book they use/recommend the most?
Mims: Getting Started in Electronics remains my favorite book and still brings in many comments online and in emails. Science Projects, a Mini-Notebook, is a close second. From a scholarly perspective, Hawaii’s Mauna Loa Observatory: Fifty Years of Monitoring the Atmosphere was by far my most ambitious work. This book was four years in the making and was based on my many stays at Mauna Loa Observatory (1992 to present) to calibrate my atmospheric monitoring instruments.
Model Rocketry
by Anonymous Coward
Please retell the story of how you got started in Model Rocketry and some of your earlier projects, successes, and of course failures. Be sure to name names and clubs!
Mims: Great question! I’ve devoted space to this topic in a new memoir now being written. It all began way back in 1967 in Colorado Springs when my dad took me to a model rocket meeting staged by what became Estes Industries. For Christmas that year I received an Aerobee-Hi rocket kit. The rocket was quickly built and reached an altitude of 671 feet on its first flight. Before we moved to Colorado, where my dad was assigned as project officer for the Air Force Academy Chapel, I was seated in a hot seventh-grade classroom at Hamilton Junior High School watching a big fan by the door when the idea of a ram-air controlled rocket popped into my mind. The idea was a rocket that was steered not by fins but by air entering the open nose of a rocket and then jetted out ports in the nose cone. This project dominated my experimenting for several years, and its successes and failures will be covered in detail in the new memoir. The major success was confirmation that the ram air principle actually worked during test flights. The biggest failure was that the best made sun-homing test rocket control section worked great—but failed miserably during ground tests (suspended from a string looking at a flashlight) when the ram air scanner rapidly stopped during a course change and its inertia caused the entire rocket to spin.
The ram air project involved many test flights, and night flights were best since the rocket path could be easily recorded on film. To recover these rockets, I built a very small 2-transistor light flasher (which I still have). When I demonstrated the flasher during a night launch at a model rocket meeting in Portales, New Mexico, in 1969, George Flynn, editor of Model Rocketry magazine, asked me to write an article about its construction. I build a new flasher for the article, which was published in September 1969. I was very surprised when Flynn sent a check for $93.50 for the article. I told my wife Minnie that I wanted to become a freelance writer and showed my friend Ed Roberts the article. Ed and I were both assigned to the Air Force Weapons Laboratory in Albuquerque, NM, at the time, and we often discussed forming a company to sell electronic kits through Popular Electronics and Radio-Electronics magazines. When Ed saw the article in Model Rocketry, he agreed it was time to start a company. We invited Stan Cagle and Bob Zaller to join us in a meeting at Ed’s house, where we decided to call the company Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS). You can read the details on my web site. Our first product was my light flasher circuit. I left both MITS and the Air Force after a year or so to become a freelance writer but stayed connected by writing manuals for various MITS products. I also arranged a meeting with Ed and Les Solomon of Popular Electronics when Les came to visit my wife Minnie and me. That meeting led to the Opticom article (a MITS light-wave communication system), various calculator articles and finally a cover story in January 1975 on the MITS Altair 8800, a microcomputer designed by Ed. The Altair was featured on the cover, which attracted Paul Allen’s attention. He bought the magazine in a Harvard Square news store and immediately took it to his high school friend Bill Gates. Within months, Paul was working at MITS, and Bill followed later. They organized Microsoft shortly thereafter. Paul Allen planned a great exhibit on the early days of microcomputing, which began in Albuquerque, not the West Coast. The exhibit is called STARTUP. It occupies an entire gallery at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science in Albuquerque. On display are the first BASIC tape, early computer stuff, and the light flasher (and rocket) I built for Model Rocketry magazine.
projects
by Anonymous Coward
Of all the projects you have worked on, what has been your favorite? Personal or professional. (I would like to express my gratitude, getting started with electronics, got me started in electronics and I am now an engineer. I also have a "non-standard" education as they say, having mostly taught myself from reading and taking online free courses.
Mims: First, I’m glad you are largely self-taught. That’s often the best way.
Favorite Projects:
1. 1966-72: Various electronic travel aids for the blind, a project inspired by my blind great grandfather. The 2-transistor pulse generator for the LED was based on a $0.99 code practice oscillator board from a radio/TV repair shop when I was in college (spring 1966). That oscillator circuit dominated my learning curve for several years and evolved into the rocket light flasher that led to the founding of MITS.
2. 1990-Present: First sun photometers to use LEDs as spectrally selective photodiodes (still very involved with this after 25 years of near daily measurements).
3. 1990-Present: Compact 2-channel UV-B photometer for measuring the ozone layer to within 1-2% accuracy. The original two instruments (TOPS-1 and 2) found an error in NASA’s Nimbus 7 ozone instrument and led to my first publication in Nature. This work led to a 1993 Rolex Award. TOPS evolved into Microtops II, a sophisticated instrument engineered by Solar Light that’s used around the world to monitor the ozone layer, total water vapor and haze.
4. 2013-Present: Miniature photometers that measure twilight glows and enable the detection and elevation of stratospheric dust layers and the ozone layer. This is really exciting work and I will soon be comparing results from my homemade instruments with two lidars at the Mauna Loa Observatory.
a distinguished tinkerer, indeed
by swschrad
I grew up on your Popular Electronics crew, all those soldering wizards who educated us all. I'd like to hear the back-story of how you and AT&T got into a cage battle over optoelectronics
Mims: The Bell Labs story is told in Siliconnections and will be retold with new info in the new memoir. During my senior year in high school I reasoned that a solid state light detector should also function as a light source, much as an electromagnetic earphone could double as a microphone. Briefly, I connected an automobile spark coil to a CdS photocell—which emitted flashes of green light when stimulated by 12,000 volts from the coil. In 1972 I experimented with LEDs as photodiodes and described this in a book (Light Emitting Diodes, pp. 118-119). In the early 1980s I sent Bell Labs an invention disclosure for how an LED can be used as 2-way emitter/detector at either end of an optical fiber. They agreed in writing to contact me if they wanted to pursue my disclosure, but they never did. A few years later, Dave Gunzel, Radio Shack’s tech editor, sent me a Business Week article that announced Bell Labs had discovered what I submitted to them. I made 2 trips to New York to negotiate with them, but they wanted me to do work for them in return for me canceling my claim. In the end, I visited a sharp patent lawyer, and we sued. After a series of funny depositions and other adventures, the well-known Texas trial lawyer Bell Labs had hired told them they needed to settle the case. They did. They also abandoned a patent application they had filed (after I complained to a Federal judge).
Re:Ask him about Darwin
by femtobyte
Why do you trust science when it comes to electronics, but not when it comes to biology?
Mims: I trusted biology in the 6th grade when our science book showed a photo of Piltdown Man and explained how he was the missing link between apes and people. This book persuaded me to accept evolution and to almost reject Christianity. However, while researching Piltdown Man at an Air Force Academy library when I was in the 11th grade, I learned that the 1912 discovery was actually one of science’s biggest hoaxes. Even though some scientists never accepted Piltdown as authentic, the scientific consensus was that it was real, and this admission was not formalized for 40 years. That was three years before my sixth grade science book was handed to us gullible students and presented as scientific fact. While working with scientists at the Air Force Weapons Lab on a variety of sophisticated experiments involving rhesus monkeys, I decided to look more into evolution. I began collecting fossils and have since accumulated a fair number of insects encapsulated in ancient amber. By my mid-twenties, I made the conscious decision to reject Darwinian evolution in favor of what is now called intelligent design. (I prefer Superintelligent Design. ID is a misnomer, since no one has proposed the details of exactly how life has been intelligently designed ex nihilo.) The bottom line for me was that Piltdown taught me to be skeptical of scientific paradigms. Of course, that’s what science in general once taught. But these days we are supposed to accept anything that’s claimed to be the product of “scientific consensus.”
Back to your question, yes, I certainly trust science when it comes to electronics and biology. In fact, I’ve merged electronics and biology in a long term and ongoing study of daily photosynthetic radiation. I published a paper on 5-years of data using a homemade instrument in Photochemistry and Photobiology. Evolutionary science offers no viable explanation for the evolution of photosynthesis. I’ve also merged electronics and biology in an ongoing study of selective tannin deposition in the annual growth rings of various trees, especially two distinctive varieties of baldcypress (Taxodium distichum).
But I question paradigms and never trust pseudoscience, like the idea that life arose on its own through purely random processes. Occam’s razor recommends the simplest solution to a problem as being the best. Intentional design of living systems—the God hypothesis in my view, others have different ideas--is a far simpler explanation than random natural processes that have never been observed to create molecular motors and other absolutely indispensable elements of living cells. Back to electronics, it’s easy to conceive of an application, but implementing a circuit to implement the application is not a random process. I’ve built thousands of circuits, none of which were made by randomly wiring together components. The same applies to code. No one I know has ever randomly poked keys on a keyboard in an effort to create a new routine. In medicine, random events like this are called mutations, the vast majority of which are non-beneficial. When I designed the PIP processor from discrete TTL chips, it was necessary to design both the circuit and the microinstructions. PIP was built on our kitchen table, and was a bird’s nest of wires. Remove or replace a single wire or randomly change a microinstruction, and it would not work. But I was careful, and it worked. I published a book and 4 articles based on PIP, not one connection of which was random. In fact, as the designer of that rather difficult project, I might have been somewhat offended had someone suggested I relied on random processes for any aspect of its design and/or assembly. ; )
I apply these same standards to all science, so let’s briefly examine evolution.
1. RANDOM EVOLUTION. The random processes thought to underlie evolution occur throughout nature. I’ve built a Geiger counter to record the random arrival of subatomic particles, and I once wrote a program to quickly evaluate “random number generators” by plotting them as x,y coordinates. Imperfect generators were quickly revealed when their numbers formed streaks and bands across the screen. But I am unaware of how naturally random processes could have led to the first life forms, much less the information encoded within them. Consider the earliest cyanobacteria from the Precambrian. These ancient life forms were capable of cell division, and they included complex information that controlled their structure, metabolism and reproduction. Modern single-celled organisms multiply by various forms of division. In all cases, various molecular motors physically split and move the internal structures of the dividing cell, sometimes under great pressure. Consider kinesin motors that literally walk along internal microtubules towing huge loads. These motors are too small to image (they walk 8 nm per step at up to 100 steps/second), but Ron Vale’s team at the University of California at San Francisco has managed to affix glowing quantum dots to them so their movements can be observed in real time. There are many other kinds of molecular motors, including the sliders in muscle tissue and the rotary motors that drive flagella and perform amazing internal functions much like machines in a factory.
The evolution of these complex molecules, which had to exist in the earliest cells, is so improbable that the evolutionary literature is being increasingly criticized for failing to include evolutionary explanations for them. That’s a huge problem for evolutionary molecular biologists, some of whom I know. Do they really believe that a rotary nanomotor that spins an axle at a thousand or so rpm and can stop in only a revolution—all at an efficiency approaching 100 percent—somehow randomly arose from a cluster of molecules hanging out in a protocell? Do they really believe these motors can walk, slide and rotate while performing many functions absolutely essential to the life of a cell—all without a nervous system, brain, eyes or muscles? Ron Vale’s team, Harvard, the Discovery Institute and others have produced remarkable videos that show animations of molecular motors. Before committing yourself to the notion these highly complex machines evolved, have a look at some of their videos on YouTube and start asking questions. You will immediately realize why molecular biologists avoid discussing the supposed evolution of these nanomachines.
2. DARWIN. Moving on to higher forms of life, all of which rely on molecular motors, Darwin knew nothing about DNA, molecular motors and the self-assembling microtubules that support cell structures and serve as tracks for walking kinesin motors when he proposed his hypothesis of natural selection. Natural selection works great at macro levels. That’s why people have been able to select special characteristics of plants and animals to develop new varieties. But even dogs (Canis familiaris) can reproduce with their key predecessors (Canis lupis). Dogs have never evolved into anything other than dogs.
3. DARWIN’S ESCAPE CLAUSE. Charles Darwin injected a vital escape clause into his famous The Origin of Species when he recognized the absence of any fossils that transitioned into the remarkably diverse and complex creatures found in the Cambrian. Darwin wrote, “There is another and allied difficulty, which is much more serious. I allude to the manner in which species belonging to several of the main divisions of the animal kingdom suddenly appear in the lowest known fossiliferous rocks.To the question why we do not find rich fossiliferous deposits belonging to these assumed earliest periods prior to the Cambrian system, I can give no satisfactory answer.The case at present must remain inexplicable; and may be truly urged as a valid argument against the views here entertained.”
Today’s strict evolutionists are unhappy about Darwin’s views, for even today he would be unable to provide a satisfactory explanation. Thanks to Darwin for advocating the skeptical side of science, a side that is too often ignored or even banished when philosophical matters intervene. And that’s the final line. Ever since I was banished from Scientific American magazine after the editors asked if I believe in Darwinian evolution (no) or the sanctity of life (yes), a small number of dedicated atheists have attempted to discredit both me and my science. I know Christians who accept Darwinian evolution and those who do not. But hardline atheists have no choice but to resist any alternatives to evolution. This hasn’t impressed my editors, publishers, science colleagues and, yes, the atheist friends and colleagues with whom I have done considerable science. There just happen to be some determined atheists out there who seem to have a calling to flame anyone who rejects their philosophy in favor of a higher power or, more perhaps more appropriately in my case, a Creator. Your question doesn’t use that approach, and I appreciate that.
Makerspaces
by cowtamer
What do you feel about the Maker movement and Makerspaces in general?It seems to me as the Maker/tinkerer is the new equivalent to the electronics hobbyist. Do you believe new project designs need to keep this in mind? (i.e, present the design of an entire gadget instead of just the electronics)?
Mims: Fantastic question! Hobby electronics experienced a sharp reversal when it worked its way out of a hobby by evolving (under the lead of designers, of course) into commercially available computers. This was a major concern to many of us who judged science fairs. Physics and engineering experiments nearly disappeared while soft projects in environmental science multiplied.
Two developments have reversed the decline of hobby electronics:
1. ROBOTICS: The robotics movement has transformed many students from passive learners to active experimenters and designers. My current column in MAKE magazine proposes a new kind of robotics competition in which “Marsbots” slip behind a curtain to a scene visible only to spectators and perform a variety of tests of a simulated Martian environment and atmosphere. If this becomes a competition someday, students will learn many new concepts in math, electronics, mechanics, environmental sensing and monitoring, data analysis, and, of course, robotics. They will do all this in one major project while having loads of fun!
2. MAKER MOVEMENT: There’s always been a maker movement. It began with hand-woven baskets and hand-chipped flints. Today’s maker movement really took off when MAKE magazine arrived and began publishing projects that people were doing all along in private. Thanks to the highly creative team at MAKE, the movement has expanded well beyond what it once was.
You asked a key question: [Should we] present the design of an entire gadget instead of just the electronics? I think of it this way:
a. Present any circuit that does something useful, whether or not you have found what that use might be.
b. Present complete circuits that do something useful whenever possible.
c. Share your talents and aspirations by merging them into practical, useful projects.
d. Publish your projects! Nuts&Volts is a fantastic electronics magazine. MAKE is the ultimate maker’s magazine. If you make a scientific discovery submit your work to a scientific journal. If it’s published, you will have more credibility than ever before.
Doing electronics alone is fun, but it’s not always creative. I found my niche by using electronics to develop entirely new kinds of gadgets and instruments—like an oscilloscope the size of a postage stamp, a surface-mount organ assembled with conductive paint on a business card, and a stepped-tone generator that was renamed the “Atari Punk Console.” (I had no idea how much influence the latter circuit had until being asked to give a talk at Moogfest 2014. Search Google for more.)
Then there’s added value, as I’m trying to do with a range of compact, inexpensive instruments designed to monitor the atmosphere’s ozone layer, water vapor layer, haze and so forth. Some of these instruments use ordinary LEDs as spectrally-selective photodiodes instead of expensive filters.
Challenges faced by computer-aided learning
by LordMyren
You've written hobbyist-targetting books with Radio Shack that work through hands on projects hobbyists can do themselves. My question is, for those seeking to carry your mission in writing those books over to computer-aided or simulation based learning, what things of value did you create that will be the hardest to carry forwards and what are the greatest things of value that computer-assistance will uniquely be able to take & make it's own & go furthest with?
Mims: This is a tough questions. The Radio Shack books are really best for hands-on learning. I saw this firsthand while teaching basic electronics and experimental science to humanities majors at the University of the Nations in Hawaii and Switzerland. The students are from all over the world, and they all exhibited the same response, viz., lectures about science and electronics are boring at best, even when supplemented with cool videos and PowerPoints. But hands on learning is exciting and contagious. When students were given my Electronics Learning Lab one never knew what to expect. They were at first timid. But after 5 minutes they were building their first circuits. One class became so excited—and loud--while building light-sensitive tone generators that the classes on either side of mine gave up and walked in my class to see what was happening. Check out my YouTube video of a typical reaction of two students building a tone generator.
I will think more about your question, for there’s certainly a role for computer assisted learning. But based on many years of experience, I’m biased toward the hands-on approach.
Past vs present
by ArcadeMan
What's your opinion on the old ways, i.e. buying parts locally from Radio Shack and meeting people in local clubs compared to the new online way of buying parts and kits, publishing tutorials and forums full of people helping each other?More to the point, what do you think has been lost from the old way and what has been gained from the new way?
Mims: This is an intriguing question. While I was never a member of an electronics club, I know some people who were. I also spent time showing friends how to build circuits. I doubt if there’s a better way to learn to solder than watching an experienced person solder a connection. That’s how I taught my son Eric to solder when he was only four years old. About that time I organized the Albuquerque Academy Model Rocket and taught teens how to make rockets, design experiments and build instruments. Yes, maybe some of this firsthand instruction has been lost these days. But maybe robotics clubs and groups have brought back much of it. If asked to trade, I would take today’s approach of do-it-yourself electronics over the old days. Moving on to science, I really think the old method was better. Science today is dominated by labs filled with teams, often working with very costly equipment. Today’s amateur scientists have access to highly sophisticated equipment on the surplus market, so that’s a major advance. But it’s often difficult for even highly creative amateur scientists to win the recognition they deserve unless they publish in leading journals of science, the most difficult kind of publishing on the planet.
These are thorough, well-thought answers. It's a shame more pop idols can't be more like Mims.
I only knew Mims through his electronics books. I had no idea he was skeptical of evolution. It's interesting to show an example of someone who is clearly scientifically literate, yet still has room in his belief system for God, and also sees cracks in accepted theory. How many "independent" thinkers do we have in my generation? Whenever I say things like Mims said here, I'm mocked (openly or silently). I think something's lost for that.
Ahem. It's Forrest Mims III to you.
Kriston
I'm a retired scientist (Ph.D. in Materials Science, 35 US patents, many publications, etc.). Sure, I've been "trained," but the reason I did better than my colleagues is because of things I learned off-hours, sometimes by trial-and-error, starting with electronics in elementary school, and many science fair projects in high school. I could convert junk items in laboratory drawers into critical experiments while others were waiting for the UPS man. And, yes, I followed Forrest's writings throughout his career.
I really liked Mims's electronics books, but I can't respect him as a scientist when he misrepresents the theory of evolution and proposes (essentially) intelligent design instead. It's a damn shame.
Working through your notebooks series was educational, inspirational and fun. Thanks for many happy memories.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
OK. Evolution is not"random". Evolution happens through natural selection which is about the least random process you can imagine. The mechanism for organisms to change is in fact random mutation, but by far the majority of mutations are either neutral or non-adaptive and die out. So those few random mutations that are adaptive survive and propagate. This may, to people like Mims, make them seem magical, but to most biologists they're just common sense.
Mims writes: "The evolution of these complex molecules, which had to exist in the earliest cells, is so improbable..."
Um, no, it's not. If enough random things happen and the beneficial things survive, then not only is the evolution not improbable, it's almost inevitable given enough time. Mims is intelligent enough to write a simulation tool to prove this for himself.
Sorry for harping on the topic, but pseudo-science is dangerous. It's all the more dangerous when an otherwise intelligent scientist or engineer subscribes to it.
Another idiot talking outside his expertise.
He has no clue about evolution, thinks darwin wrote everything about it, and can not understand new data.
Lets me clue you in:
If we found out, right now, Darwin made the whole thing up, it wouldn't matter because of the amount of other data we have collected, the number of accurate predictions that have been done, and a completely lack of understanding of the second law of thermodynamics.
This guy doesn't belong in any science magazine.
"But I am unaware of how naturally random processes could have led to the first life forms, much less the information encoded within them."
so that means it's not real? Are you aware of how mas bends space? no? well I guess gravity isn't real either.
Darwin escape clause? I guess top someone who is a clueless dolt bent on reading something and not impacting their narrative it would seem that way. IN reality it's nonsense.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
" But hardline atheists have no choice but to resist any alternatives to evolution"
False and backwards.
Bible literalist have no choice then to deny the theory of evolution regardless of evidence.
You supply a better interpretation of the data that can be falsified? then Athiest will drop the modern version of evolution.
And it's not Darwinism, it's the theory of evolution. Only people who are unable to accept the fact that new data can chanfg a theory understand that. ANYONE who calls the theory of evolution 'darwinism' does so solely to create an ad hom attack and show they are unable to look at data.,
You sir, are ignorant of this subject and as such should shut up.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
> A while ago you had the chance to ask amateur scientist...
Awhile ago? You mean, like uhm, six months ago. Glad he's still alive.
Thanks for responding.
Now red my sig and apply it to your incorrect view on evolution.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
If anything, Mims is more open minded than the likes of you
Open-mindedness is often a virtue. It's fine to be open-minded about other people's cultures, what they do for fun, what they enjoy as entertainment, how they choose to organize their cities, etc. It's pretty stupid to be open-minded about trying to decide whether or not 2+2=4 or 2+2=5, or whether the fact of evolution through natural selection is true or false.
We have witnessed natural selection in action even within the lifespan of a human being. Hint: antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
no, he isn't.
Here is what it means to be open minded:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
When it comes to evolution, someone needs a hug and also needs to embrace his inner fish
(which by the way was a fantastic 3 part series, and well worth watching)
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Since no resister in electronics if 100% they vale stated, clearly ohms law is invalid.
How can you have a law when there is any uncertainty?
How can you have a theory of electronics if not all things are known and perfect all the time?
I have built a lot of circuits, and not on every turned into an iPhone, so clearly the theory of electronics is wrong.
herp derp
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
But I am unaware
You said it, Chewie.
I made the conscious decision to reject Darwinian evolution in favor of what is now called intelligent design.
Scientists don't - or ideally shouldn't - make conscious decisions to reject things. They do so when the scientific method leads them to do so, because it's the valid thing to do in face of the evidence.
Do they really believe that a rotary nanomotor that spins an axle at a thousand or so rpm and can stop in only a revolution—all at an efficiency approaching 100 percent—somehow randomly arose from a cluster of molecules hanging out in a protocell?
Yes.
Do they really believe these motors can walk, slide and rotate while performing many functions absolutely essential to the life of a cell—all without a nervous system, brain, eyes or muscles?
Yes.
This guy sure asks a lot of obvious questions.
have a look at some of their videos on YouTube and start asking questions
Yeah, that's the best place to learn the science of evolution...
You will immediately realize why molecular biologists avoid discussing the supposed evolution of these nanomachines.
Before "realizing why," one should first "ascertain if."
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
What cracks? The Piltdown man? It was debunked. Constant review and scrutiny is part of science. You make a name by discovering something new/.show someone else was wrong (with facts, not with assertions). With today's tools (DNA sequencing) etc. it wouldn't have taken 40 years.
Missing fossils? Missing evidence? WTF. Ask him to produce the arc of the covenant, etc. The important thing about evolution is: There is nothing contradicting it. Every newly found fossil matches the pattern. Never do we find a rabbit with a piece of a T-rex tooth in it . No one is claiming it is complete, that every piece of evidence is there, but there is no evidence against it. EVERYTHING independent line of evidence points to the same thing: geology was used to predict where one of the missing links could be found, and was indeed found (read about it here). Every scientist would love to falsify the theory of evolution. I know I would. What a way to make a name for yourself. But the theory of evolution is bolstered every day.
ERVs show that man and apes share a common ancestor. Learn about it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
Tiktaalik, a transitional fossil was found at the predicted location. Read about it here: http://tiktaalik.uchicago.edu/...
Mims posits a Creator. Not zero creators. Not many creators. A (one) creator. The amount of evidence for that? Zilch. He has no qualms about that. If you want to spot a crack in a line of reasoning, there's one. And why does Mims give himself a free pass on a super powerful creator out of nothing but is stymied by photochemical system?
Every molecule has properties, such as a boiling point, a solubility in water etc. etc. Water vapor can form a variety of ice crystals (snow flakes). None of his electronic components did that (although resistors might self-align a bit).
Complex molecules exhibit more elaborate properties. The molecules he's so amazed about, like molecular motors? They self-assemble upon formation. They arise by transcription from DNA and translation from RNA. Not a single deity involved in that. If these molecules didn't have that property, the molecules wouldn't be there. All those molecular behavior in the end determine what you do. If you think a god is pulling the strings at a molecular level, then he can't hold you responsible for your actions.
Sure, none of Mims' electronic circuits has every self-assembled. But atoms and molecules have different properties than electronic components. They self-solder, i.e. react. And the universe is a gigantically big place (multiply the number of galaxies by the number of stars per galaxy) times a couple of planets. That's a gigantically erlenmeyer flask with a gazilion reactions taking place. Most of them leading to nothing special. I place my bet on a freak chemical event taking place leading to life in that chemical soup than a deity that self-raised himself as a super-von-munchausen.
In his own field/related to his own field of electronics, genetic algorithms have resulted in very strange-looking antennae that are better than human designed ones. Yes, the algorithm was programmed. That is because antennae don't procreate, otherwise they could have evolved to look that strange yet be so efficient.
I liked the Q&A quite a bit. But I don't think he's a man to go to on evolution, as to take him serious there, he either has to present evidence for the creator he posits or provide evidence (like a rabbit bone with a T-rex tooth in it) that falsifies evolution. That's how it works. His work on ozone got accepted not because it was his strong opinion but because it was correct.
Approximate squares and circles exist, from which the qualities of theoretical perfect ones may be extrapolated.
Approximate deities do not, unless you count Eric Clapton.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Forrest Mimms III electronic manuals at Radio Shack for me when I was in Highschool. Excellent resources and I'm sure any modern equivalent are good too. I first got my associates degree in Industrial Electronics (Trade School) and then decided to become an Electrical Engineer (another 4 years) in large part due to Mr. Mimms. No longer an EE (was one for 10 years before Enron/911 got me out of the loop) but enjoyed my career as an EE. Thanks Mr. Mimms. :)
Evolution may have failed to produce advanced life forms, or any life at all, on a million worlds. Only the successful random mutations exist to contemplate it.
Competition Good, Monopoly Bad.
we all could be having, if Mr Mims had simply not answered one of those particular questions.
As someone who doesn't believe in god, and believes evolution explains our current Earthly biosphere, you guys who are hammering Mims for his views on evolution are sounding like school kids mocking the kid who's different. You can't accept that someone that is so close to your accepted template of an educated scientist has this differing viewpoint. You guys are practically frothing at the mouth over this.
Get over yourselves. You don't have to agree with the man on every item of his personal belief system, just as I don't have to agree with every item of yours. That is what discussion of views is about.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Or at least I remember having is "Engineer's Notebook" with all the cool stuff about a whole pile of different ICs (back when I was interested in electronics). I even came up with a few ideas (that never went anywhere) like building a set of "traffic lights" for a really really busy staircase at school using various logic gates and chips and stuff (this was in the days when "adding a microprocessor to a circuit" meant using a 4MHz Z80, some sort of programmable ROM chip and a super-expensive and hard-to-use programmer to program the chip)
Here. Let me help you with that:
Mims cites Piltdown Man (and the acceptance of the scam by scientists of the day, AND their injection of it into science textbooks where it was used to mislead millions of school kids, AND their reluctance to admit it was a fraud) as a cautionary lesson about the nonesense of "consensus science". As Mims rightly (as usual) points out, "Science" USED to be about REJECTING consensus and examining everything (even currently accepted science) logically and critically.
As for your complaint that presuming the existence of some creator (as an Occam-type "simpler") makes no sense because it only postpones the problem, you should turn that around and re-examine your own views; The presumption of an "insert miracle here" event to lightning-strike a large collection of diverse and immensely-complex inter-dependent microcopic living mechanisms into existence in a pool of primordial goo without ANY design at all is a severe case of "postponing the problem". Not only has this never been demonstrated to be possible (using electricity to zap chemicals to derive other chemicals is NOT the same thing at all) but even if it WAS possible there'd still be no proof that this is what actually happened (beyond the very weak "we're all here so it MUST have happened" argument which works equally-well for even the most extreme religious claim). NOBODY has the ability to prove when, where, and how life originated, so ANY presumption of an initial setup (a creator, creators, the "right" raw materials circumstances and events, etc) can be seen as a convenient dodge by others. If you have the PROOF for all the details of what you believe, feel free to report them to the world.
It's amusing to see you attack Mims with the "The rest is a bunch of arguments from incredulity and ignorance ("I don't know how it could have happened, so it didn't happen!")" line, given that you apparently have the nearly identical belief system which hard-core Darwinists have with respect to a huge number of problems with the theory: "I don't know how it could have happened, but it must have happened!". Even Stephen Jay Gould ended-up unable to reconcile the problems with fundamentalist Darwinian thought, and resorted to his "insert miracle here" solution to some of the problems - "punctuated equilibrium" which also has no evidence for plugging the holes but at least plays judo with them by trying to turn the holes into evidence. For those seeking more on this "serious" attempt to reconcile the problems of Darwinian evolution, go see an X-Men movie or pickup some of the associated comic books ;-)
"Science" dies, as anything other than a political propaganda tool, when it switches from a continual critical (and self-critical) exploration and instead becomes an exercise in group-think democracy (where a bunch of like-minded people take a vote on what is declared to be "the truth").
"even if evolution were wrong, filling in the answer by saying a deity did it is just irrational."
I don't agree that it's irrational - just that it's easy and unproven. Consider:
1. Let's assume for a moment that there IS some creator who DID create everything (monotheistic here for simplicity but no other assumptions). In this case, any scientist who could not detect such a creator would be perfectly rational to be critical and spend no time on the subject, deeming it "religion". The scientist would be WRONG however to proclaim the non-existence of said creator. The fact that the scientist could not detect or examine the creator would not make the creator "go away" and if the scientist came up with alternate explanations for how everything could have come into existence sans creator, that would not mean he had proven that this was what actually happened (a historical fallacy in this postulated scenario). It would similarly be a failure to invoke "Occams Razor" and claim that since there was a non-creator explanation, a creator was not necessary and therefore did not exist - this would not make the creator in this scenario magically dissapear with a "poof!" and a flash.
2. Let's assume two detectives arrive at murder scene. The associates go around collecting evidence and cannot find enough to prove what happened. There are simply some very big holes in any scenario either of them can come up with. The first detective finally shrugs and says "I've got it! some intelligent fellow came in here and did the murder, and he did not leave enough evidence behind". The secone detective (preferring to not believe in such obvious nonsense as "murderers") goes in another direction and proclaims "this whole setup came about on its own without cause and by a long complex series of random accidents". Who is being "irrational"? Exactly WHY is either one being more irrational then the other?
In a way, you put your finger on precisely the right problem when you typed: "Don't just make things up and claim it's the answer just because you don't know the real answer." No matter what anybody claims, NONE of us can currently PROVE with certainty how everything started. You see, this is where so many religious people got so angry relative to the teaching of evolution in the schools. Kids started coming home from school telling their parents that the teacher said there is no God and that science has proven that everything came about via evolution. It's one thing for schools to (properly) teach evolutionary theory in science and biology classes; as a purely-materialistic theory it's both a good and useful one. But the teaching of it in the K-12 schools (and advocating for it in many places in the general culture) became highly political. The proponents started denying all its flaws and using it as a sledge hammer to attack any critic as "anti-science". I first noticed how bad it was getting when Scientific American kicked Mims to the curb. I dropped the magazine as a propaganda rag and no longer trust them - I saw their action as proof they would put their politics and agendas ahead of serious honest intellectual concerns. Let's face it, they had NO evidence Mr Mim's religious views had EVER led him to produce ANY incorrect or inaccurate information and by their new-found "religious" zeal for all things Darwin, they would have rejected the great religious men of science like Newton and Copernicus.
First: The "God in the gaps" accusation actually applies very well to the Darwinists as well. There are huge glaring holes in the theory (only a few of which were in Mim's response) which proponents of the theory routinely fill with "clearly something happened here, and we'll eventually figure it out" (only substituting long periods of time, flights of fanciful speculation, and the roll-of-the-dice for "God"). This sort of thing is normally not a problem for any theory that attempts to explain a wide variety of things the way Darwininan evolution does, because everybody agrees they are theories and only the narrow parts of such "big" theories that have been truly proven are taught as "fact". With Darwin, however, the belivers demand that the whole over-arching thing is a FACT and that anybody who disagrees is a moron who is too stupid to understand the word "theory". Nope. Sorry, but there are indeed some Darwinian mechanisms and principles that have been proven to be possible. This proven subset of mechanisms and principles are indeed FACTS and stand on their own as such, but they do not eliminate all the gaps and problems in the overall theory nor do they make the overall theory into some sort of super-theory which is immune to the usual rules. There was a time when it was a theory that man could not fly faster than sound, and within that were many theories related to the compressability of air, shock waves, boundary layers, and general fluid dynamics. Along the way, many of the smaller theories were proven right - but alas, the theory that supersonic flight would be impossible fell.
Second: Where did Mims advocate for a "Christian god" in his response? I suspect you are allowing your own personal anti-God "thing" to interfere with your logical reasoning skills. My own views on these matters are complex and not of sufficient interest to others to bother writing here, but I have known a number of people who are into "intelligent design" and while some are indeed classical Christian "creationists", others are not. Some are Jewish and therefore accept the idea of a creator (even believing in the God of Abraham, but you'd be VERY wrong and ignorant to confuse them with people from "The Creation Museum"). Some believe there MUST have been a creator or designer but that he/she/it is unknown and/or unknowable. Some are into the "panspermia" theory (which I personally regard as just re-locating the problem). The most-serious of the ID people I know are ONLY advocating for the idea that many things are simply too complex and too well designed to have come about by accident on their own - and that absent proof to the contary it's wrong and dishonest to publicly proclaim a grand Darwinian solution while quietly hoping various Darwinian explanations will some day be found for every problem. They also tend to be concerned that kids are in fact not being taught in school how incredibly complex life is (at the microscopic scale) and that this may be misleading them into accepting a theory they've been spoon-fed without having the facts that might lead them to doubt its overall claims.
Darwinism is unlike almost all other theories in science - it influences core philosophies and therefore informs how each and every human being lives his or her life and how they influence (and are influenced by) society. As a result, it's far more important to be very precise and very careful in how we teach it (this is why it's so heated in school textbook fights), how we refer to it (the "theory vs fact" fight) and how we use it as a society (it's has a documented history of being seriously abused to support the worst atrocities in human history).
Where to even begin untangling your argument? hmmmm.
You say "Evolution is not"random" and then "If enough random things happen and the beneficial things survive, then not only is the evolution not improbable, it's almost inevitable". That's interesting. You see the problem here is that multiple layers of randomness that Darwinism is both built upon and doomed by. First, Darwinism by admission of its namesake depends upon random mutations. Unfortunately for the theory, the vast majority of mutations are not only not sufficiently beneficial to cause them to be passed-on but are actually a net negative (leading to disability, disease, natural death, or death by hostile rejection from one's un-mutated relatives). A further problem of "randomness" as an evolutionary advancer is the fact that there are many random non-biological influences: vast numbers of creatures die-off or survive either because they arose in hostile places or benign places, or becase of random encounters with other creatures or natural disasters like fires, meteors, droughts, earthquakes, floods, etc (where particular "good" or "bad" mutations have no benefit or penalty in the particular life-threatening encounter).
The argument that "survival of the fittest" intruduces a non-random element to the scheme which rescues it from the muck that is usually created in piles of unguided disorder is a nice distraction. It is, however a logical fallacy and a clever distraction - when the whole situation is random. When many of the events which introduce peril are random encounters with random "enemies" and disasters, the survival tests themselves are effectively random. The result is that any mutation likely to help in one encounter is just as likely to not help (or even hurt) in the next encounter. Indeed, the vast majority of deaths that occur on planet Earth every year are completely uninfluenced by genetic mutation at all (unless you're one of those blind-followers of Darwin who inject his theory as the cause of everything no matter which way it goes, even at the level of human culture ... (ring any "religious" bells?). If you are one of those you should meet the physicists who think everything is determined by protons, neutrons and electrons (including Mr. Darwin who was of course built out of those things and therefore probably wrote his theories because of the relative positions, electrical charges, and spins of the particles from which he was built...)
The statistical model for this would be so mind-blowingly extreme that nobody could truly "run the numbers" on it. First, NOBODY knows all the parameters that go into the survival odds of any creature, nor what values to assign and how to weight them. Second, the numbers are different for every instance of every creature in every circumstance - and since Darwinism (uniquely UNLIKE most other fields) is BUILT on the presumed importance of every tiny random mutation in every single creature, you CANNOT generalize over populations (the generalization would lead to missing the survival or death of the one precise creature that got the one vital mutated gene that changed the world). Third, we cannot accurately simulate the world well enough to properly model the weather for more than a week or two - but the Darwin simulator would need to account for weather events significant enought to cause even a change in the eye color of a fly (which might be VITAL to the survival of an entire vital species a million years later). Fourth, you would need to account for even random or quasi-random events like sunspots, asteroid encounters, changes in the Earth's interior which might affect magnietic fields and so forth.
Your suggestion that "Mims is intelligent enough to write a simulation tool to prove this for himself" is particularly hillarious, given the pure insanity of the very concept that you can prove the possibility of a self-designing system by having a "designer" carefully craft a complex simulation program, which
I'm inspired! Thank you!
I was a big fan for a long time, but while listening to him on a podcast not long ago I realized that he is a climate change denier and is helping to spread doubt about climate science.
Thank you, Forrest Mims, for "Science Probe!".
Frog to Prince with a kiss = fairy tale. Frog to prince in 200,000,000 years = science. Neither of these things has been observed so how could either one be scientific? But in the beginning the little atoms and molecules swam together and and bumped into each other to make medium molecules who also swam together for a very long time and made really big molecules that one day became self reproducing and ALIVE during a reducing atmosphere thunderstorm kind of like Frank-in-Stein. Oh gee that is a restaurant in Michigan so that is what the early ALIVE molecules ate so that they could reproduce. What did they eat without photosynthesis????? Don't know do you? Do you have a better explanation than Frank-in-Stein????
At at least a thousand impossible things had to happen for auto-genesis to take place. I maintain that to be skeptical about evolution and/or auto-genesis is a sign of intelligence. To be non-skeptical is a sign of mind that puts doctrine above reason. Forest was able to see through the deception that is Evolution. The fact that there is life does not prove that evolution is true?
"... if Mr Mims had simply not answered one of those particular questions." I appreciate your open-minded thoughts on this. As for not answering every question, I told Slashdot I would answer every question they forwarded, and I did. I reviewed all the comments and didn't see a single criticism that responded with any science. If a Slashdot reader can provide a logically persuasive scenario for the evolution of the sophisticated molecular motors (rotary, walker, slider, etc.) in plant and animal cells I will reconsider my stand on design.