Taxonomy term

As a child, Robert Brinkmann was always curious about rocks. He wondered how they got where they were and why they were different from each other. Brinkmann grew up in the farm country of southeastern Wisconsin, as well as in the woods in the northern part of the state. After one of his first geology classes in college, he went home and finally understood what he was looking at. “It was such an eye-opening experience to be able to read the landscape,” Brinkmann says.

On the evening of Monday, Nov. 18, 1929, a magnitude-7.2 earthquake ruptured off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada. Those living on the Burin Peninsula, a foot of land that reaches into the Atlantic Ocean, reportedly felt five minutes of shaking — a confusing sensation, since no one in the area had experienced an earthquake before. “Suddenly this roar — this loud banging — [occurred] and the kettle and the plates started to dance,” Gus Etchegary, a resident of the Burin Peninsula who had experienced the quake, described in a documentary video produced by The Newfoundland and Labrador Heritage Website.

“Science is not about finding the right answer, it’s finding the least wrong answers,” quips physician and science writer Ben Goldacre, a guest on “The Infinite Monkey Cage,” a BBC radio show and podcast that casts an irreverent eye on big scientific questions. Goldacre was commenting on the definition of science, but this philosophy — that science is a constantly evolving pursuit, in which all ideas are valid until data and time prove them wrong — is also the refreshing and approachable premise of this witty show.