Science, Evolution and Religion

I get mixed reactions from people when they find out I am a scientist AND a Christian. This seems quite normal to me. Here is a link to a great talk on NPR (National Public Radio) by Francis Collins from the Human Genome Project. I find his views, expressed here, very similar to mine.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9207913

Another famous Geneticist is Richard Dawkins. He is British and an Atheist, who is quite hostile towards those that believe in God. Here is an interview with him also on NPR the day before.

http://www.npr.org/templates/rundowns/
rundown.php?prgId=13&prgDate=28-Mar-07

St. Patty's Day

This is what happens when you put too much green food dye in your beer. They shouldn't have let me do it myself!

Driving through Maryville to the Smoky Mountains

River in the Smokies

Uprooted tree exposing shale rock

Feels like Canada

Nice lookout towards South Carlina

Yes, I'm a mountain man!

Driving back into Knoxville

Canadian visitors at the Tomato Head

Stream development behind my house

3rd Creek

The University of Tennessee

Follow up on the Dog Situation

The peace was short lived. Last night when I walked by again, they barked and growled at me again. I feel so used! (sigh)

The Enemy of my Enemy

This morning the dogs up the road in the wealthy neighbourhood I live in and I found peace. What was it that stopped them from barking and lumbering towards me aggresively? The crows were making them furious, eating the grass seed from their owner's lawn. As I moved towards the lawn his time, they didn't bark at me. They actually looked releaved that I had scared off the crows for them, and they walked back to the house with the solid Oak doors, slowly to lie down at the foot of the front steps. In this way I found peace with the dogs. Will this peace last? I don't know. I will be walking by again tonight though as I often do, and I expect I will find out then.

The Southernization of a Canadian

I forget what I ever said before y'all's for the plural form of yours. Yankee English is inadequate I think. Because "you" and "yours" apply the same whether I am talking to one person or 100. Now whenever I talk to more than one person I have this overwhelming urge to say or "y'all's" when I'm refering to something that each of them posess. For example "y'all's assignments are outside my office". Ahh, music to my ears!

Does this mean that I'm becoming American? No. I'm just a Canadian becoming southern, if you can accept it.

My doctor assures me that this accent will wear off 6 months after leaving the south. "Just don't eat any grits, southern BBQ, or drink any Sweet Tea during that recovery time" he said. "And whatever you do DON'T say 'I'm fixin to'!"

I think after that 6 months I may be able to watch "The Beverly Hillbillies" again and get their jokes. Right now it just sounds normal to me. I don't understand why everyone is laughing on Jay Leno when they interview a southerner. My adaptable ears have cut me off from the rest of society of which I once partook. I am now, in some ways at least, becoming southern.

I gotta go, I'm fixin to get me some vittles!

Christmas in Canada 2006 and Time Relativity

Everybody was Kung-fu fighting

I made my little sister wait 10 minutes for this picture

Yes great science can be done in an everyday kitchen. But of course my sister's kitchen isn't an everyday kitchen, more like a space ship headed to Mars for 2 years, everything you could possibly imagine you would ever need.

To the Lighthouse. Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf?

This Christmas I went home to Ontario and flew out to the east coast (Halifax) to visit my sister and her (ever growing) family. We did the obligatory trip to Peggy's Cove and got some nice pictures. I also did an extremely succesful science experiment with my nephew Caleb. We looked at the effect that temperature has on the solubility of salt in water, and boy was I surprised by the outcome! It was a linear relationship!

Incidentally I found out that kids growing up is not a linear relationship. About as much happens in my life in a decade as happens in theirs in a week. I think this is because their experience of time is small. Therefore a week to a baby is like half their life! That's a lot of time! But for me a week doesn't even register anymore. I need a decade to feel like I've accomplished something. It's like Zeno's parardox in reverse. If I approach a wall by going half the distance and then half the distance again I will never get there. Well if my experience of time slows evermore as I get older then as I approach infinity in age, time will stop for me. Likewise for a newborn baby, a minute may "feel" like infinity to them. When explaining time relativity Einstein said something like: when you are with a pretty girl, an hour may seem like a minute, but when you are waiting for something like a train and you are late, then a minute may seem like an eternity!

Earthquake Post for my nephew Caleb

This is for all my friends and family that think Earthquakes are cool but especially for my nephew Caleb who will take some interest in this I think.

http://earthqake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/recenteqsww/

You can see where the most earth quakes were in the world, how big they were, and maps showing the seismic history of the area.

Uncle Peter

Winter begins at the University of Tennessee

I love the end of the fall term here at UT. The libraries are all full of students cramming for their final exams. The University actually starts to feel like a University, as its members wake up from the football season and remember that they are here to study, not just be a Vols fan. It's a time when geeks like me, graduate students high up on "the hill", feel that the tables are turning once again in our favor. Students in the class we teach actually start to show us respect, even sucking up to us for hints on the final, instead of asking to get out early for "the big game". You see as educators/researchers we must share the stage at big American Universities with all the other departments and interest groups. But the most prominent attention getter on campus is football. This has its advantages. It creates a climate of enormous energy and enthusiasm. All the girls tend to look like cheerleaders. The guys are real guys able to throw a football, not weak, socially inept nerds like at Waterloo. The last comment might sound a little gay, but I'm just including my female readers (of which I hope there are many!).

So the latest news is that I have been taken off a project that was to form my dissertation here. I had been working on it for about 6 months when, over time, it became clear that my funding supervisor (I had two) really wanted a lab technician, not to supervise a PhD student. He had this "if anyone is to do the thinking around here, it'll be me!" attitude. Of course a PhD is suppose to be primarly about developing critical thinking, experiment planning and writing skills in the student. After working in several labs over the last 5 years, I was suppose to be moving on to these more philisophical aspirations. The truth is though, I have never been much for hands on things, unless it involves playing with chemicals in the lab under minimal supervision. And the American government gave me a visa!.

So now I have realigned my supervisors and dissertation project, going off in a new, but related direction. It was not all lost I think. I still got to try a path that had a definate dead end. That's useful information. See my July, 2006 blog post for some more background on this type of trial and error thinking. Coming to the University of Tennessee may have been the biggest experiment I've done yet, and the outcome of that experiment will only become clear many years from now. Someone once said "we must live forward, but we must understand backwards", and I don't care who said it because I experienced it myself when I lived in Leipzig for a year.

Maybe I will discover some really useful and exciting equation here and have my name on it, like the "Knappster Equation" describing time dialiation in groundwater flow under ultra-high gravity conditions. Or maybe I will end up working for the Canadian government, if nothing else works out. Whatever happens, I'm sure I will end up doing what it was that I was suppose to do. A pastor at a church in Virginia last weekend said "the very breath you take at this moment was given to you because God has a purpose for your life". It's nice to remember that when everything seems like it's going wrong.

Trips Around Tennessee

In mid September a visit from Carine was all the excuse needed to do some exploring around Tennessee. We visited Burgess Falls on our way to Nashville, country music capital of the world. We did some line dancing at the Wild Horse Saloon, listened to a lot of live music and while shoping for Cowboy hats I met a die-hard country music fan from Bergen, Norway (i.e. the most beautiful country in the world!).

Burgess Falls

Nice geologic formations

Nashville Skyline

Pedestrian Bridge

One of the best Ivy League Universities in the Country

Downtown Knoxville viewed from the Hill the historic location of the Original East Tennessee University founded in 1794. The globe is the World's Fair Park

Smoky Mountains

Tree House

Nice shady street

The Fainting Goats of Tennessee

Here is a news clip to let y'all know what's new in Tennessee.

http://www.ebaumsworld.com/faintinggoats.html

Thank you to Jens Hopfer for the tip!

Our Last Moves?

"All past civilizations...have been localized and have had, therefore, the divergent mutative quality to which we have referred. They have offered choices to men. Ideas have been exchanged, along with technological innovations, but never on so vast, overwhelming, and single-directed a scale as in the present. Increasingly, there is but one way into the future: the technological way. The frightening aspect of this situation lies in the consriction of human choice. Western technology has released irrevocable forces, and the "one world" that has been talked about so glibly is frequently a distraught conformity produced by the centripetal forces of Western society. So great is its power over men that any other solution, any other philosophy, is silenced. Men, unknowingly, and whether for good or ill, appear to be making their last decisions about human destiny. To pursue the biological analogy, it is as though, instead of many adaptive organisms, a single gigantic animal embodied the only organic future of the world."
Loren Eisely, The Unexpted Universe, pp. 38

In my narrow world of research and courses, I am not qualified to comment on such a vast intellectual statement as that above. Elsewhere in his book Dr. Eisely says "science has not prevented war it has perfected it". There is so much I could say about this passage, but that might drown out your voice in your head, which is more important to you than mine anyway. All I will say is that I love this Archeologist's writings on natural history and it's implications for humans. It's not all doom and gloom, he also brings out the wonder in fossils, rocks and our humanity.

A Hydrowha?

Picture of a Hydrogeology Field Camp along the Tennessee River

I am a Hydrogeologist. This is what I have worked at and studied for 9 years now. The University I studied at in Canada (U Waterloo) houses the primiere research/teaching groundwater institute in the world. I did not know this when I started at UW in 1996 as a lowly Geophysics undergrad, rejected from my first choice of Civil Engineering. I knew we Earth Science undergrads were outnumbered by the Engineers by about 50:1, but we still had successful, inspiring professors to lead the way into our chosen professions.

Coming to the University of Tennessee has been a big eye opener for me. Most people that I have met since leaving Waterloo don't know what a Hydrogeologist is and can't imagine why we need "experts" in such a field. Isn't it as simple as drilling a hole and installing a pump and there's your groundwater supply? Being part of a smaller research department here at UT, has caused me to evaluate the importance of systematic (e.g. scientific) study of this unseen resource.

I have come up with a few facts to bolster my decision to delve deeper into a subject that few people acknowledge exists.

1) The National Groundwater Association (NGWA) has 14,000 members in the USA and abroad.

2) The International Association of Hydrogeologists has 3,700 members in 130 different countries.

3) 50 % of Americans rely on groundwater for their drinking water, a similar number in Canada and Europe. For example 99 % of drinking water in Bavaria comes from groundwater, (after extensive field work studying the social behavior of Bavarians, I believe most of this water is consumed in the form of beer during two weeks in October, refer to blog post September 2005).

4) Although it has long been known that groundwater is more pure than surface water, shallow groundwaters near rivers, lakes and farmer's fields may not in fact be safe to drink at all times. Several disease outbreaks due to groundwater are reported every year, many more are not reported.

5) This shallow groundwater represents the most accessible for small farmers and families throughout the developed and developing world.

6) Government regulations, designed to protect public health, have in recent years required many people to install expensive treatment systems for their drinking water supply wells.

7) Research in understanding how pathogens travel from rivers to groundwater can, on a case by case basis, permit natural filtration processes to remove pathogens, without the addition of expensive/undesireable treatment methods.

This is where my research and my reason for being in Tennessee comes in. I am here to work with leading world experts who study the transport of pathogens and colloids through groundwater aquifers. Truth be told, there is only about 10 places in the world where this kind of research is currently being done. I came to UT because to the best of my wits and knowledge this place was on the cutting edge of experimental research in this field.

My hopes and dreams of the future are still in some flux. The best thing about science is that it is an adventure, a true experiment, once conducted will likely alter your course. If it doesn't then you already knew what the outcome would be, or you didn't ask the right question. I consider every life risk, every friendship made, every trip taken, an experiment. If I get it wrong this time, it is better to have tried and failed rather to have never tried at all. Fellow scientists, more experienced than I, have gone so far to say that "you ONLY learn in failure".

"I have not failed, I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work" - Thomas Edison

Christian visits Tennessee

On the day of my last final exam arrived Christian from Karlsruhe, Germany. After carrying on the tradition of burning the meat on the BBQ with friends, the next day we went to explore a local cave near Tennessee’s northern border with Kentucky. We drove into a dirt road surrounded by sparse forest that had been logged which reminded me of tree planting in the wilderness of northern Ontario. After walking downhill for one hour, past Jimmy Hoffa’s car with bullet holes in the side and through a swamp we reached the base of a large cliff and the entrance to the cave. Unfortunately due to heavy rains, the entrance to the cave was flooded with icy cold water. After considering taking off our clothes to swim through the passage, we decided to first try another entrance, attempting to find the main cave system.
The pictures speak for themselves, but the work was hard crawling on my stomach through passages with sharp rocks on the bottom and spiders falling onto my neck and arms. Like an Indiana Jones movie! As a hydrogeologist I have fair imagination for rock formations, however, within this limestone formation I could not comprehend what I was looking at, there were caves within caves within caves. It was like there were more than 3 dimensions. Terri, our guide, is a local karst hydrogeologist and lifetime caver. She told us amazing stories of cave surveying, people that take off their clothes to fit through the smallest cracks hundreds of feet long, and 18 hour underground expeditions in Alaska!
We had a laugh about measuring the retardation of hydrogeologists traveling through a cave system. Based on size I estimated my retardation at 300 and hers’ at about 20. Retardation is a measure of how well a chemical or colloid is slowed as it moves through groundwater (velocity of water/velocity of particle). This was quite fun, pretending I was a bacteria flowing through a pore space in rock.
After crawling out a hole in the side of a the cliff a few hundred feet above where we entered, I had that familiar feeling of feeling glad to be alive after 5 hours underground feeling completely lost in a three dimensional maze of tunnels and caverns.




Car in the middle of the woods with bullet holes in the side

Entrance to the cave was flooded with icy water

Our fearless leader

Cave "Crickets", looking nothing like crickets I have seen

A sleep snake and a cave salemander

big cavern

Bats!

A Walk through Zinal

This is a village in Valais, one of the french speaking Cantons in Switzerland. I miss it, even though when I was there, I was feeling quite alone. After my friend dropped me off there, I found a bed and breakfast and went to bed early (9 pm) to prepare myself for the climb the next day when I would get up at 7 am. For those of you who know me, this is an ungodly hour for me.

This village and surrounding peaks were incredibly beautiful! After getting up at 7 am and packing my small backpack I walk through the sleep village of Zinal towards the glacier and Besso the main peak in the background of this picture.

The snow had fallen overnight, it was in late September, the low season for this ski/resort town, where hiking is dangerous because of frequent snow storms and skiing isn't yet feasible. I walked along a river for a couple km towards a deep canyon. Beyond that was a glacier and the base of Besso.

There is something about the Swiss culture in the Alps that wraps me up in its hundreds of years of rich tradition. The feeling comes back to me when I see a picture from there. Makes me feel secure and stable. I know that these deep cultural roots will not be so easily altered.

On the other hand, North America has a feeling of searching to me, of a more equal blending of many cultures. Canada's history is short indeed, and the future is wide open and still maleable. It's exciting to be part of a culture where the choice is still in our hands to decide what will be important about our people.