In this insightful discussion, the Real Science Radio team welcomes Dr. Andrew McIntosh to discuss the intelligence embedded in nature’s designs. Learn about the meticulous process of mimicking the bombardier beetle’s complex spray system, which has potential applications in pharmaceuticals and environmental technologies. This conversation weaves together themes of scientific exploration and intelligent design, underscored by references from ancient scripture, placing the conversation into a broader context of creation versus evolution.
This is Real Science Radio, and I’m Fred Williams, back in our exciting new time slot where we get to enjoy the lunch hour with the brightest audience in the country.
SPEAKER 05 :
And I’m the co-host, Doug McBurney. And this week, we are excited to welcome a brilliant mind in science and design, Dr. Andrew McIntosh. He’s a professor of thermodynamics and combustion theory. And he’s here to help us understand one of the most sophisticated combustion engines ever observed, the Bombardier Beetle.
SPEAKER 04 :
Stay tuned as we continue our discussion on the latest cutting-edge discoveries in science that point to an intelligent creator. We now resume with the rest of the show.
SPEAKER 03 :
Intelligent Design and DNA Can’t explain it all away Get ready to be awed By the handiwork of God Tune in to Real Science Radio Turn up the Real Science Radio Keepin’ it real
SPEAKER 02 :
So what in fact did we copy? That’s what I put here. Well, let me show you what we did copy. We mimicked the valve system and the valve system we modeled first using computers, right? Where we are actually looking at what we call two-phase flow. You’ve just got water in this chamber and… We’ve just taken a circular chamber. We’ve got one eighth of a complete 360 degrees. So it’s not far off. It’s about 45 degrees or a bit less than that, about 40 degrees. So you’ve got here one eighth of a full, full circle. And you’ve got in here water, right, which wants to boil. And we just simply had a little valve at the bottom, which we opened to go into the smaller tube. Red means it’s hot. Brown means that it’s hot. Yellow, it’s medium temperature. And blue is cold. OK, we have to make some assumptions about this little experiment. We have it all water initially, but when it starts boiling, then it’s actually moving into vapor, which, as I say, is red of its pure vapor, brown when it’s perhaps not entirely vapor. And so it goes down to blue when it’s just water. So when I said cold, it’s it’s not purely cold blue. Blue represents that it’s all water. That’s what I should have said. And that red means that it’s all steam. So we assume that you’ve got some pressure which this valve will blow at. We don’t quite know what it is for the beetle, but it could be as much as a tenth of a bar, which is quite a lot, actually. It’s quite a pressure, and it may be less than that for the beetle. We don’t actually know what that pressure is. And we’re going to say that this is 50 microns wide, so it’s 0.05 of a millimetre, and that means that it’s fully open. It would be about a tenth of a millimetre if it was fully open. Got you. So this tube is very small. It’s about 50 microns radius. Now, we assume that there’s laminar flow, And we have to make some assumptions about the boundary conditions, which we then let this go. OK, and we’re going to go in steps of 0.06 of a millisecond. So this is one millisecond, right, would be infinite. If you got it one millisecond, the whole thing was taking place just in one millisecond, then that would be equivalent to about a thousand cycles per second. Actually, it’s going to be more than that. It’s going to be more like two to three milliseconds that the whole cycle takes place. So you’re dealing here. with steps on the computer, which are very, very fast. And we’re just trying to… You see the clock at the top? When we get to a millisecond, that will be the equivalent of one thousandth of a second. Now we’re past that, and we’re seeing that it’s moving up to somewhere in the region of two milliseconds, which would represent a blast, 500 blasts per second. So it’s between two and three milliseconds with this pressure system of two valves, which showed to us that we got everything about right, because the video that I showed you earlier was representing something in the order we reckon of about 400 to 500 blasts per second. Remember that That video I showed you at the beginning, 4,000 frames a second. You’ve got about 10 frames for one blast. So it was about 400 cycles per second. And this little bit of computer work that I’m showing you here shows that we got it about right, that that then meant that we could possibly, as this company invited us to do, Swedish Biomimetics 3000, invited us to build a rig similar to what the beetle was doing, and this was quite some years ago now, at the University of Leeds. We were not building something as small as one millimeter. We were building something of the order of about two centimeters large. And because we were dealing with explosions, there was a lot of safety precautions we had to take, but we wanted to actually see what was going on. So we actually made the first one of Perspex, very, very tough Perspex. And we heated the water, not by chemistry, but we heated it by electrically. So we had a coil heater inside, which we had to make sure that we covered. We had an inlet valve, which is the one at the bottom. We had an exhaust valve, which is the one on the left. And we also had a safety return valve at the top. And we were actively controlling these valves. And this is the result of the experimental rig. Now, that really showed that was a very early experiment that really showed that we could mimic what the beetle was doing. Remember, we had a chamber which was two centimetres long as against one millimetre for the beetle. We were only using water, no chemistry, we were heating with electricity and we had valves which we controlled, so they’re not passive as in the Beetle, these valves opened when we said they should open, these valves closed when we said they should close, so we had a program which was controlling the valves, and out came steam and droplets of water, and that red thing going across the stream of vapour is what we call a Malvern laser, which is measuring the size of the droplets, okay? So you understand me, Doug, what I’m doing there?
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah, it’s really cool. I really like it.
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, you used the word cool. Interestingly, it was literally cool. Oh. Now, you could put your hand over that spray, and you wouldn’t feel the heat. Now, that’s an interesting point, because although it came out from the exhaust valve, roughly at 100 degrees centigrade. Because you’ve got tiny little droplets and the surface area is so large when you add up all the droplets, which run obviously into thousands, tens of thousands of droplets, And it’s mainly droplets, not an awful lot of steam. And by the time you get to where the laser is, you’re actually, you could put your hand there and you wouldn’t feel much of the heat, even though you would think that it’s all steam. It’s not. It’s a mixture of droplets which are cooling down and the steam itself is condensing to more droplets. So it’s a very interesting point because some of the applications you want cold steam. liquid droplets, if you’re using it for pharmaceuticals, for taking some sort of injection of a drug which is carried by water, you wouldn’t want to be burning the tongue of the person who is perhaps going to take this in. So some of the applications are for pharmaceuticals. You don’t want it to be too hot. Then this was for a fuel injector, for an injector for an additive into a diesel engine. We got it working such that the much larger device, which is, remember, is about two centimeters or so for this is a much later rig. And this was running at a very high speed. You can see it here on the last video. So that showed that we had very tight control of what was going on and that we could actually spray very, very fast indeed. Now, that has been used for additives to be put into diesel engines to take out the nasties that diesel engines produce. So that actually has been used not for water, but for injecting an additive called AdBlue into diesel engines. So that has been used.
SPEAKER 05 :
Oh, interesting. I’ve seen bottles of that at the gas station.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yes, you can. And in Sweden, remember it was Swedish biomimetics, which actually, let me just show you this. We got a prize with Swedish biomimetics. You can see it written down there at the bottom. And sorry, that’s the company which sponsored the work. And I’m very grateful to them for sponsoring the work that we did at the University of Leeds. And it’s in Sweden that they’ve now used the additive application for diesel engines to clean them up and to inject the AdBlue into diesel engines. That was as a result of the Bombardier Beetle work.
SPEAKER 05 :
that’s to help reduce like the smog in the city with all the trucks and all the diesel engines. If you can take out, that’s awesome. That’s great work.
SPEAKER 02 :
Now, let me just give you a summary then of what the beetle can do. The major features of the beetle. I won’t, I won’t speak to all these headings. I’ll just put it there for people to read, but I will just point out one or two of them. The Beetle has amazing catalytic chemistry. It has precise control of the exhaust system and also of the turret which is actually directing this spray. And remember, it produces hydrogen peroxide and hydroquinone, and it can maintain a birth for about two or three seconds, then do it again, then again, then again, then again, then again, at a spider or a frog or an ant, which is trying to attack the beetle. So I think we must give some credit to the creator here, should we not? for designing a very clever system that the Beetle uses. In fact, one of the attorneys, the patent attorneys, which we were discussing all this with, said, why don’t we patent the Beetle? And I said at the time, I don’t think you can do that. The inventor has already got the patent on it and it’s in heaven. Ha ha! I love it.
SPEAKER 05 :
I love it. Hey, Dr. McIntosh, that might be what one of the figures in the Bible is referring to when it says, thy word is settled in heaven forever. Part of that might be the patent office where the creator keeps all of his patents in case anyone asks later, he’ll say, oh yeah, I have that.
SPEAKER 02 :
It’s true. And it is actually quite amazing that in the Bible it does refer to Solomon speaking about creeping things. Yes, yes. And that’s the closest that it gets to referring directly to the bombardier beetle. But it does refer in the scriptures to creeping things. And Solomon says that, or it said of Solomon, that he spoke about many things. And it speaks of him referring to creeping things. And that’s in 1 Kings chapter 4 verse 33. He spoke of trees from the cedar tree that is in Lebanon unto the hyssop that springs out of the wall. Still speaking of Solomon, he spoke also of beasts and of fowl, that’s birds, and of creeping things and fishes. So I love to be able to say that even in the scriptures, although it’s not a direct reference, there is an indirect reference. To Beatles.
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And, Dr. McIntosh, the way the Scripture presents, when it talks about the cedar in Lebanon and the hyssop that springs out of the wall, So that’s drawing a picture from the greatest, most revered thing to the simplest, smallest, almost incidental thing, which is a description of complexity, sophistication, beauty, functionality. It’s all in such a compact way. number of words, that’s what is being transmitted from the scriptures. Just amazing and beautiful.
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Let me show you something now that Dawkins said of us. When I say us, he’s talking about Stuart Burgess as well. He said way back in 2006. Maybe Burgess and McIntosh are right and all the rest of us biologists, geologists, archaeologists, historians, chemists, physicists, cosmologists, and yes, thermodynamicists, that’s me, and respectable theologians, that’s… that’s the liberal theologians who agree with many millions of years the vast majority of noble prize winners fellows of the royal society and the national academies of the world are wrong not just slightly wrong this is still talking but catastrophically appallingly devastatingly wrong it is possible and then he says if burgess and mackintosh are right The scientific establishment has fallen. That came from The Guardian, December the 26th, 27th, sorry, 2006. Now, when he said that, he was sort of basically gumming, as you can tell, at Stuart Burgess and myself. A few years later, as I mentioned earlier, we had this award, or at least I had this award, with the company Swedish Biomimetics. And it’s the Times Higher Educational Award for Outstanding Contribution to Innovation and Technology. And of course, the University of Leeds was very pleased that they were getting a bit of credit as well, because it’s a consortium of University of Leeds and Swedish Biomimetics 3000. Now, what I wish to say is that I give credit to God who gave me the idea that because clearly the beetle is designed, I was asking the right question as to how the beetle works. And it was because I believed that it is designed I even asked that question. If you believe it evolved, you don’t believe that there is any design features to actually find out. But it’s because I did believe in design. that that led me to actually open up the research and to get funding for it. So this is the lie to those who say that if you believe in design, it closes down research. It’s the opposite, which is true. If you believe in design, it actually opens up new areas of research. Can I close off with just one or two slides talking about the work I’m doing now?
SPEAKER 05 :
Well, you certainly can, but before you do, since you mentioned the award that you received, I just want to nominate Richard Dawkins for an award, and I don’t know if there will be an official board that can make a decision. I’m sorry, I forgot. You’re from England. I don’t know if there’s an official board that can take a decision upon this matter, but… I want to nominate Dr. Dawkins for the longest appeal to authority in the history of oration. The longest appeal to what you just read earlier, the slide, I don’t know if you can go back a few slides. I can. The number of words involved in his appeal to authority, I believe that’s a record. And so we’ll make that nomination, and if there’s someone who can render an appropriate, someone with the proper credentials to render an appropriate decision, perhaps we can present Dr. Dawkins with that award at some point in the not-too-distant future. But… Please, yes. Anything you’d like, Doctor. I’m just intrigued and fascinated and inspired by your work in light of creation. It’s amazing.
SPEAKER 02 :
Now, let me just close off by saying that I am actually still working on the Beetle and I’m not going to read all this out. People can read it for themselves. And they can go to my website on the Beetle, which is bombardierbeetle.org. You just put bombardierbeetle.org and you’ll find that there is some reference to the number of applications there is for the Beetle spray system. Although we haven’t used it directly for a fuel injector, we have used it, or at least Swedish biomimetics have used it, for a fuel additive injector. I mentioned that earlier for putting AdBlue into a diesel engine. There are pharmaceutical applications. Those have not been picked up. There is also applications for aerosols. Sometimes you go into a very, you know, a first class lounge somewhere where they’re just trying to make the room feel fresh and they just have a squirt now and again. You’ll sometimes see them in very top notch places, not the sort of places that I go to to get my lunch. But you know what I’m talking about. You could get aerosols just being sprayed just gently into the atmosphere. And it could be used for that. As far as I know, that’s not been done. But what I’m working on at the moment is fire suppression. This is not fire extinguishers. This is fire suppression. I don’t think it can be used for an extinguisher. We’ve tried it. You need too much water and the amount of heat that you need to make the spray system work becomes too great. So I’m saying there are limits to what I think this could be used for. But a fire sprinkler is what we call a suppression system. You see sprinklers in industrial places, anywhere where there’s a danger of of a lot of people meeting in a public place. You’ll see them in lecture rooms, in universities. They’re tiny little sprinklers in the ceiling and they would operate if a fire developed or if a very strong heat source developed, then it would douse the whole room with water. If you’ve got a fire sprinkler where you don’t want to douse the whole area with water and damage all your computers and all the rest of the stuff, supposing you were in a… In a space capsule, and Elon Musk was making his long journey to Mars, you know, that he says he wants to do something. You know, supposing somebody’s in that, and there are thoughts about sending people to Mars. It takes a long time. It takes a few months to get there. Personally, I don’t think I want to go, and I’m not volunteering. But supposing you’re in this capsule, and there is a danger of a fire. You’ve got nowhere to go. You can’t open the door and get out, right? So now that you want to be carrying so much water, you want to douse everything with water, you’re going to damage all the equipment. But you want to have the ability, you see something getting hot when it shouldn’t be, you just want to go to a spray and just put it onto the area where it’s likely to get damaged. possibly cause a fire and that’s what i’m thinking of here that you have an infrared camera which directs the nozzle of the spray system that it operates using the bombardier beetle system that i’ve just been describing and it goes sensor spray into the area which is getting hot and dangerously hot. We call that a fire suppression system. And that’s where I think it could be used. So if you see this picture here, I’m thinking and I’m trying at the moment to get some funding. We’ve got a project with Liberty University, and I want to thank the people at Liberty. The engineering department, Dr. Mark Horstermeier, has taken a keen interest in what I’m suggesting. And the Creation Research Society has also said they’ll be able to donate a small amount of money to this. which I’m very grateful for, but they can’t give the whole amount. We’re talking of the order of something like $70,000 over a two year period. It’s of that order. And I want to support a student for two years for a master’s project to work on this and to see whether we can get a system which in principle is working and then we’d have to do a PhD program on top of that to develop the infrared guidance system. So it’s actually going to be quite a long research project which would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to get the whole thing working. So we need industry involved which could support this. but that’s what i’m working on and logos research associates you can look it up online i have been very good to us they are very interested in supporting the work but actually we need other people to support this and so i’m actively looking for funding i’ve had a student project start work on this where we have a heating system. Instead of a capsule heater, we actually have what we call an induction heater. You can see that circular heating system, the brown thing going round, it’s a spiral heating. Well, it’s an electromagnetic heating system where instantaneously you get heat. I won’t go into the whys and wherefores of how that works. But this would be a novel way of doing the heating. And the tube is inside. It’s in between. You can just see a horizontal tube inside that spiral. This, of course, is just a proof of concept at the moment. And you can see here, we call it an induction coil. And the chamber is inside that. And we actually got on quite well with an undergraduate project at Liberty University. But there’s a long way to go yet. And to get this proof of concept working is going to require the two-year program. And that’s what I’m seeking to do. And just one very last thing. If you go to the bombardierbeetle.org website, there’s more information there. But there are four patents that we’ve got on this. Those patents, we can’t keep going forever. And it’s because the patents now are beginning to run out. Swedish Biomimetics have done their initial funding. So actually, it’s an open field again when the patents run out. But there’s very few people working on this. But we’re thinking of… as I say, developing this in the United States at Liberty University. And if we get the Sprinkler system working, then I think we could actually have a patentable device. So if there’s anybody watching this video who is interested, and wants to support the development of a fire sprinkler system and would be prepared to actually invest in it, then that could lead to something which leads to a further US patent, which would be most interesting to get that and then could get industry involved in possibly developing this in a bigger way. So that’s my little story. Thank you for listening, everybody. Thank you for watching this with me.
SPEAKER 05 :
Well, so everything you’ve just described for the last few minutes is far more complex and sophisticated for the average person to comprehend.
SPEAKER 01 :
Stop the tape, stop the tape. Hey, this is Dominic Enyart. We are out of time for today. If you want to hear the rest of this program, go to rsr.org. That’s Real Science Radio, rsr.org.
SPEAKER 03 :
Intelligent Design and DNA Scholars can’t explain it all away. Get ready to be awed by the handiwork of God.
SPEAKER 1 :
Tune into Real Science Radio. Turn up the Real Science Radio. Keeping it real.
