Forrest Mims on Winning the Rolex Award (And How You Can Too!)

Intelligent Design the Future

Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture

Science, Philosophy, Astronomy, Society & Culture, Life Sciences

4 • 993 Ratings

🗓️ 9 October 2024

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Rolex is well-known the world over for crafting high-quality, innovative time-pieces. But did you know they also award funds to people with innovative ideas in science and technology? On this ID The Future, Texan engineer, writer, and self-taught scientist Forrest M. Mims recounts his experience of winning a Rolex Award for Enterprise in 1993 for his innovative proposal to track the ozone layer through a worldwide ground-based network that utilized his own homemade ozone instruments. Mims discusses the work that led to the honor, the memorable trip to Switzerland to collect the award, and how the Rolex Award propelled his career in science. Source

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	I. D. the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
0:10.0	Welcome to I. D. the Future. I'm your host Andrew McDermott. Well today my guest is Texan
0:18.9	Engineer inventor, writer, and self-taught scientist, Forrest Mims.
0:24.0	Mims recounts his adventures as an amateur scientist in the recent memoir, Maverick Scientist.
0:30.0	One chapter in Maverick Scientist details Mims's experience of winning the 1993 Rolex Award for Enterprise.
0:37.0	And that is the subject of our chat today.
0:40.0	We're going to talk about the work that led to that honor, the memorable trip to Switzerland,
0:45.3	to receive the award and how the Rolex Award furthered Forrest's career as a scientist.
0:51.8	Named by Discover magazine as one of the 50 best brains and science,
0:55.6	Mims has forged a distinguished scientific career despite having no formal academic
1:00.9	training in science. Mims is an instrument designer, science writer, an independent science consultant.
1:07.0	He has published over 60 books with publishers that include McGraw Hill, Prentice Hall,ioshack, and others. His Radial Shack books alone sold 7.5 million copies.
1:18.0	Mims' scientific papers have appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as Nature, Science, Photo Chemistry, and
1:24.8	Photobiology, the Journal of Molecular Evolution, the Journal of Geophysical Research,
1:30.1	Applied Optics, and the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.
1:34.5	His columns have been published in numerous places, Scientific American,
1:39.6	Popular Electronics, Modern Electronics, the citizen scientist, and more. And Mims has also
1:45.6	consulted for a number of official scientific bodies, including NASA, NOAA, and
1:50.4	the Environmental Protection Agency. And I chuckled, Choccled, you sent me a link, Forrest, Dave Jones from the electronics
1:58.0	engineering video blog on YouTube, recently put it this way.
2:02.2	If you don't know Forrest M. Mims the third, I guess you're
2:05.8	well a young whipper snapper. I thought that was funny.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.