That's So Second Millennium

0:00 Experience as a Christian scientist 1:00 The billion year contact; awe 2:00 Awe and the vast scale of Earth science 3:00 Discoveries never shake faith 4:00 Evolution, randomness, the shortage of provable things 6:00 The bureaucratic mindset: certainty and judgment 7:00 Yucca Mountain, studtite, and uranyl peroxides (Peter Burns, Karrie-Ann Hughes) 8:00 Uranyl chemistry 9:00 Guy Consolmagno's...

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 Wa...

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 o...

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 m...

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 pa...

~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 t...

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 th...

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 messa...

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...

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 textboo...

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...

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...

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 mana...

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. Bio...

- 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...

- 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 geolo...

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...

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 churchme...

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 ti...

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 nation...

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 beg...

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 lar...

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 tha...

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 awf...

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...