Equinox

Rob and Joseph discuss SpaceX’s big launch, getting our podcast on Spotify, podcasting apart from each other, Rob’s one-page sci-fi, and for the main topic, Dr. Carter goes through the science of atomic theory. It’s a vast realm of the universe at a molecule’s scale, where there’s more empty space than matter!

What makes a good sci-fi movie? How much fiction can we mix with fact before the science part begins to fall apart? Using the movie Interstellar as a focus of attention, Joe and Rob discuss movie making, how this one genre attempts to blend storytelling with reality, and how it sometimes succeeds and sometimes does not.

Rob and Joseph revisit some of the previous topics and bring them together with an unexpected twist. You will learn what the moon, Earth’s gravity, the Ice Age, and extinct corals all have to do with each other.

Joseph grills Rob some more about his past, specifically about how he got to where he is today. The discussion ranges from corals, to computer programming, to genetics, to Covid-19. Meanwhile, Joseph waxes eloquent on some interesting philosophical ideas.

Joseph decided it was time to ask the question, “Who is Dr. Carter.” The two laugh their way through the life of Rob: from bad grades to a love of learning, Georgia Tech to teaching high school, scuba diving to cloning DNA from corals.

In honor of the 50th Earth Day, Joe and Rob talk about...the earth! That is, the rock we call planet earth. They discuss some amazing experiments, done in the 1700s, that told us the mass of the earth and that calculated the gravitational constant. This is a big deal for us today, because there would be no space travel without these foundational experiments.

Joe and Rob review the documentary films The Riot and the Dance and discuss various environmental issues and how the Christian is supposed to approach these things.

Joe and Rob go on a world tour, trying to explain where all the peoples of the world came from, including Eskimos, Polynesians, Native Americans, Asians, and Europeans. They ran out of time before they got to Africa, but this episode should keep you busy enough. They also deal with the issue of ‘race’ and many of the surprising new facts that are coming out of laboratories across the world.

Rob and Joe, surprisingly, discuss beekeeping, unsurprisingly talk about the coronavirus, then move onto the main topic: ancestry and genetics. They cover a lot of ground, including making transgenic organisms, the differences between the three main ancestry testing companies, whole-genome sequencing, the erosion of privacy as more and more people take those tests, Nanopore sequencing, the Golden State Killer case and how genetics allowed it to be cracked, the very complicated human genome, and the fun math behind genealogy and genetics.

In this second episode on the life of Charles Darwin, Rob and Joe discuss multiple myths about Darwin’s life, including the false ideas that he first thought of evolution while on the Galapagos and that he recanted his views on evolution on his deathbed. Other topics include finch beaks and Darwin’s rewriting the story of their discovery, his (abhorrent) views on race, and the fact that he died believing in the Lamarckian “inheritance of acquired characteristics” view.