Special Guest Richard Stead Joins us to discuss his exciting career

Dr. Richard Stead joins Cheryl and Dagny this week. His expertise in geophysics notwithstanding, he is a very interesting person. Our interview runs the gamut from missing Los Alamos scientists to the worst sci-fi movies ever made. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_04 0:08

Welcome to the porch. We're so glad you're here. This podcast comes to you from Virginia's Northern Neck, where life slows down just enough to notice things. Hey, welcome back to the porch. We actually have a special guest today. Who do we have here?

SPEAKER_03 0:23

Cheryl? We have Dr. Richard Stead, who happens to be my husband. And he has generously agreed to let us interview him.

SPEAKER_04 0:34

Yes, and and we're very excited to do that because what what a neat um career it's the little bit that I've heard that it sounds like you've had. So now retired, but for many years you were a geologist, correct?

SPEAKER_00 0:49

A geophysicist, actually.

SPEAKER_04 0:51

Geophysicist. Well, excuse me.

SPEAKER_03 0:56

Most people won't know the nuances of those two terms.

SPEAKER_04 1:00

But so yeah. So um so what uh what first drew you to that um career?

SPEAKER_01 1:07

Well, uh, when I was young, I was always very interested in all of the sciences, but in particular, large and powerful uh uh events in nature fascinate me. So earthquakes, volcanoes, even lightning storms, they're always fascinating. And so that is all geophysics.

SPEAKER_04 1:31

Is it yeah interesting? Okay, I I did not know that that was considered under the umbrella of geophysics.

SPEAKER_03 1:38

Well, geo is the technical term for earth.

SPEAKER_01 1:41

That's a Greek term for earth.

SPEAKER_03 1:42

Right. So it includes the atmosphere as well as everything in the middle.

SPEAKER_01 1:47

There are there are four areas of geophysics. There's a solid earth, there's the oceans, there's the atmosphere, and then there's space.

SPEAKER_03 1:56

How far, how far out in space does geo go?

SPEAKER_01 2:00

Uh within the earth environment. So people have probably heard of things like the Van Allen belts, you've heard about the aurora, you know, you might have heard about uh the bow shock and things like that. There's various elements of Earth's interaction with the solar wind and uh the rest of the solar system, just within the Earth's local environment, that would be considered geophysics.

SPEAKER_04 2:26

Fascinating. And where did you go to school, may I ask?

SPEAKER_01 2:30

Uh my undergraduate degree was from Lehigh University, which is in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and my graduate degrees were from Caltech.

SPEAKER_04 2:38

What took you out to California? Is it because they have more earthquakes? And was it something about that?

SPEAKER_01 2:47

Um, when I finished my undergraduate degree, I had performed very well as an undergraduate and I had done some research. And so I kind of had my pick of graduate schools. And so I was looking for what were the best graduate schools in geophysics. And specifically, the area I was most interested at the time was seismology. And uh I was accepted at all of the top seismology schools in the country. So uh I visited a couple in the East Coast. I wasn't able to go out to the West Coast because I, you know, I was not a very uh wealthy person. Well, just put it that way. I could not afford to travel to the West Coast to visit any schools. Um, but uh Caltech had a very good reputation. They had a couple of uh professors who I knew, uh the kind of research they were involved in. Uh, I thought about going to MIT instead, but I was able to visit there. And when I visited MIT, it was a very dark and gloomy winter day. And their geophysics building was this tall, brutalist concrete structure. And it was very depressing. And I said, I'm really, I'm really not getting a good feeling about this. I think I'm gonna go to Caltech.

SPEAKER_03 4:01

Being in prison.

SPEAKER_04 4:02

First impressions can make make or break someone or a place or something.

SPEAKER_00 4:07

I mean, it's not it's no bad thing on MIT. It's just a bad day and not a very good building.

SPEAKER_04 4:13

I can understand. Yes, we had some of those experiences when I was taking my kids to look at colleges. It can make or break, you know, you get a gloomy day at Virginia Tech, winter in, you know, Blacksburg, Bleaksburg as they call it, forget it. Nobody wanted to, nobody wanted to go to Virginia Tech. Um, nothing about Virginia Tech. Yep. MIT in Virginia Tech. Okay with us. Um, so let me ask you. So I know that for many years you worked at Los Alamos, but we're not going to get into that yet. Did your work ever take you into any other any remote or unusual places?

SPEAKER_01 4:46

Uh yes. So uh early in my career, I started uh visiting Russia. Uh I ended up going to Russia twice as part of um confidence building measures toward the comprehensive nuclear test plan treaty. And I visited a little town, little nuclear town called Obninsk, uh, which is a few hours outside of Moscow, and it was constructed as a science town. Uh, and I worked with the National Academy of Sciences there. And we worked specifically on nuclear test ban monitoring. And then later uh I worked with the Ministry of Defense of Russia, and that was up in another little town called Dubna. And Dubna is mostly famous because that's where a large Russian accelerator is, and they've discovered several of the transuranic elements up there. But I was with the Ministry of Defense up there, and uh I it was a they were both very interesting experiences to visit Russia. Apart from that, I visited Norway several times. Norway is a close partner of the United States, especially on things like nuclear monitoring and other um material uh military cooperation, things like that. And there is a facility called North Star that's in a little town, uh Lilström, not far from Oslo, the capital. And we did a lot of cooperative work with Northstar, and uh they're they're a really good group there, and I visited there I must be a half a dozen times. I also got to visit Germany. We inaugurated a seismic array there called Jurass. Uh, at the time, that was right on the border with Czechoslovakia, and that made it pretty interesting because this was right around the time of the fall of the Soviet Union, so things were a little up in air with those kind of countries at that time, and that that made for an interesting visit there, but it was also interesting, it's a very rural area of Germany, and that was uh a nice visit.

SPEAKER_04 7:00

So we are talking about the it was the late 80s, uh it was the early 90s, early 90s, and up through the late 90s.

SPEAKER_01 7:09

My last visit to Russia would have been in about 99.

SPEAKER_04 7:13

Did you ever have the pleasure of going to the Republic of Georgia?

SPEAKER_01 7:17

No.

SPEAKER_04 7:18

Okay. I only asked because um my oldest son and his wife met in the Peace Corps in the Republic of Georgia, yeah, and and uh you know learned the language, and of course, Georgia used to be the my understanding, the playground of the Russian uh the wealthy oligarchs, oligarchs, oligarchs and royals. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:38

I I'm not familiar with that aspect of Georgia. I do know that there was a seismic facility in Georgia that we did some work with, but I'd never visited there. I didn't know the people who operated that facility, but I I was aware of a facility there and we did use, we did cooperate with them, use some of their data.

SPEAKER_04 7:56

And do they have a lot of are is there a lot of seismic activity in that area? Is this why no?

SPEAKER_01 8:02

The the reason that that seismic array was established there was because the former Soviet Union was not well monitored uh seismically, and this is specifically for nuclear test band monitoring. Nuclear test band monitoring requires monitoring down to a fairly small uh magnitude. So if typically what people do as a real rule of thumb is let's say a one kiloton explosion underground is equivalent to about a magnitude four earthquake, and so that's kind of a rule of thumb. But if you're going to try and monitor for magnitude four earthquakes, you either need very close stations or you need very sensitive stations. And this the former Soviet Union really didn't have much of either one, and therefore we deployed a small array there in Georgia that would allow us to have greater monitoring capability, at least in that part, uh broad part of the former Soviet Union.

SPEAKER_03 9:02

We're getting very technical here. I'm afraid we may lose our audience in all of these details. It is fascinating for us, but uh but given our podcast is is directed toward even more literary audience. I was wondering if maybe we should shift into when did you become a collector of movies?

SPEAKER_00 9:22

Okay, that's a big trip.

SPEAKER_01 9:24

Um I I've always enjoyed movies. Uh my dad was a big fan of movies, uh, and I'm a big fan of movies. I've never really enjoyed television. Uh, and I would say that there's a very distinct difference between television and movies. And so I've always enjoyed movies, and I probably started collecting movies not long after DVDs became available. Uh, I watched several movies when I was younger on VHS, and I never really enjoyed it. It wasn't the same as the cinema experience, but DVDs really helped improve that experience a lot, and so I started buying movies when DVDs were available, and that's actually what motivated me to buy my own personal computer for the first time. I'd always use computers at work, but I had never bothered to purchase one myself, and so I purchased a personal computer, had a DVD drive, and I started purchasing DVDs. And then Blu-rays came out, and it was another step up in the experience. I could have a better experience in my apartment with a Blu-ray projector and a surround sound system than I could at most small movie theaters. At the time when I was living in Los Alamos, there was just there was first no movie theater, and then when the first one came there, it was not a very high-quality movie theater. The uh optical projector using film, film projector, and the equipment they had, the sound equipment just wasn't very good. That didn't really change until later. So it was worth it getting the blue rail to have a better.

SPEAKER_03 11:11

Let's tie this together then. What are some geophysics movies that you have in your collection? What do you think of them? Twister.

SPEAKER_01 11:21

Twister is a fun movie. Uh Twister is an absolutely fun movie. A lot of it is scientifically based. Um, don't, you know, don't take too much about those little things that go flying up into the tornado. That's you that you can kind of use your imagination there. That's not really something. And of course, tornadoes don't go and hunt down barns full of sharp equipment either. So there's obviously a lot of Hollywood license there. It does make the movie entertaining, but it does depict tornadoes relatively realistically. And it is true that geophysicists and meteorologists specifically do chase tornadoes and do chase them with advanced equipment to try and understand them better, be able to predict them better, and be able to try and reduce the threat that they that they appear to be for a lot of people in the in the United States in particular.

SPEAKER_04 12:20

But I just threw Twister out there. You did is that your favorite? You gotta have a favorite.

SPEAKER_01 12:24

Uh you know, I have a hard time picking favorites because I there's different reasons why I like different movies. And so, for instance, an old movie that I like a lot that's not very realistic at all is Earthquake. Um, and it's from the old disaster movie era, and those disaster movies they were star-studded and they were had great cinematography, some pretty good special effects, practical effects, but that they weren't very realistic about how earthquakes really operate or what happens during an earthquake.

SPEAKER_03 12:59

What if you had to compare that one to the core?

SPEAKER_01 13:02

The core is notoriously one of the worst science science-based movies out there. Uh it scientists, particularly physicists and geophysicists, can go on and on and on how many things are just a problem with the core, and it makes it so that it's poor entertainment, to be honest. Anybody who understands geophysics or understands the earth is going to be so distracted by the nonsense in that movie that it's just not an enjoyable.

SPEAKER_03 13:36

It's unwatchable, it's unwatchable.

SPEAKER_01 13:38

It's basically unwatchable.

SPEAKER_03 13:39

So we do know that the you know magnetic north can shift, right?

SPEAKER_01 13:47

Yes, the poles can shift. And in fact, when I was an undergraduate, I did not specialize in seismology. That's what I did as a graduate student. When I was an undergraduate, I specialized in paleomagnetism. Um, and paleomagnetism is studied the Earth's magnetic field through time, and yes, the magnetic field reverses, and that's due to how the geodynamo works. The geodynamo is how the magnetic field is generated in the Earth's outer core, and because it's generated through these eddies, these convection cells in the Earth's outer core, those those convection cells um grow or wane, then at some point the field can reverse. And these reversals go through time, they make an interesting record that you can use to date things. And so, for instance, uh, one of the things people may be familiar with is the magnetic seafloor stripes. When they survey the magnetic field across the ocean floor, they find these alternating zones in the rock of basically you can think of it as higher and lower magnetic field because the magnetic field recorded in the rocks is either parallel or opposite the current magnetic field. And when you look at those so-called seafloor stripes across a mid-ocean ridge, you'll find that they're symmetric across the ridge. And that shows how seafloor spreading is occurring because you create new crusts at the ridge, and the new crust is created at the time of whatever magnetic field you happen to have, whether it's forward or reverse, and then the reversals occur, and then it's got a different magnetization, but then these go out from the ridge, and that's why they're symmetric. And you can then create a time sequence there, and we can use a time sequence to date rocks and uh date things in the rocks.

SPEAKER_02 15:49

So no imminent danger, nothing's gonna happen anytime soon in that department.

SPEAKER_01 15:54

No, I the there if we look at the measurements of the Earth's magnetic field today, uh Earth's magnetic field is declining slightly. Uh, it's not at all noticeable for anybody who's like relying on a compass. Uh, of course, there is something called uh true polar wander, where the Earth's magnetic pole wanders relative to the rotation axis. They're not the same. That's why when you have a compass, you have to adjust for the declination at your particular longitude and latitude. Um, like right here, right now, I think our our declination is about 10 degrees or so. Um, but that's just because magnetic north does move around relative to the rotation axis, but the rotation axis wobbles too, so you have to account for both of those.

SPEAKER_04 16:44

Okay. I I just I just heard uh someone on ancient aliens, one of our favorite talking about the wandering pole. Yeah. Yeah. No, I have a question. Have you written much in your career? Have you written any books?

SPEAKER_01 16:59

I'm sure you've I've never written a book, but I've written a lot of technical. I've done a lot of technical writing.

SPEAKER_04 17:06

I imagine you have, yes.

SPEAKER_01 17:07

I've written papers for peer-reviewed publication, I've co-authored papers for peer-reviewed cut publication. I've written a tremendous number of technical reports. Those aren't peer-reviewed, they're generally submitted to whoever the funding agency is. Um, so that's the kind of writing that I do. I I have not written any books.

unknown 17:26

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 17:27

No, but that's that's still that's amazing. I mean, technical writing is a whole different uh whole different thing.

SPEAKER_05 17:32

Yep.

SPEAKER_04 17:32

So if we could, let's get to the elephant in the room. Um, and that is that, well, you both, Cheryl and Dr. Sted, Richard, you both worked at Los Alamos. Um, it's been in the news a lot lately, and I realize that I I have heard Cheryl say it was a stressful place to work at times.

SPEAKER_00 17:54

Yes, it can be.

SPEAKER_04 17:55

And um that also, I mean it's been in the news a lot uh lately.

SPEAKER_01 18:01

Well, it's not just lately. Los Alamos National Laboratory is a magnet for news coverage because of its history. It is the birthplace of the nuclear bomb, and it is the birthplace worldwide of the nuclear bomb. The first nuclear bomb was developed and engineered and created at Los Alamos National Laboratory. That create makes it a magnet for anybody interested, pro or con, about that subject. And it puts Los Alamos National Laboratory under a microscope for media coverage. So we yeah, all you have to do is add Los Alamos National Laboratory to almost any subject, and it will get a lot more attention.

SPEAKER_04 18:42

Okay. So on a less uh media blitz kind of topic, because we all know that you know there have been some, well, maybe we don't all know. I mean, we we've been talking about how there have been some missing scientists in the last three years or so, and a few of them has had worked at Los Alamos. Not a conspiracy theory, might just be total coincidence. But what what was your overall um I mean, did you first of all, how many years did you work there?

SPEAKER_01 19:11

I worked there 22 years.

SPEAKER_04 19:12

And how about you, Cheryl?

SPEAKER_03 19:14

I lived in Los Alamos for 30 years. I only worked at the lab for about four and a half of that.

SPEAKER_04 19:19

Okay. And do you feel like the work that was going on there? I mean, was there a moment when you realized that there was important work going on there?

SPEAKER_01 19:31

Oh, that moment would have gone way back probably to when I was an undergraduate, long before I ever worked at the lab. Los Alamos National Laboratory has an international reputation. If you are in the sciences, you know about it and you know that important work is done there.

SPEAKER_04 19:49

Okay. And so overall, I mean, you you're very well spoken, you're very well educated. I can only imagine some of the tasks or the you know, the career that you had there. It sounds like an incredible career. Would you say overall you were incredibly happy working there?

SPEAKER_01 20:09

I was happy for the most part, absolutely. Uh, I mean, there's any workplace that you're at, there's going to be some personality issues, and you're going to have issues with management. That's pretty typical for any workplace. You're not going to be satisfied with how things are run. I had some of that. I would say I had a little bit more of that toward the end of my career than at the beginning. Um, but I I I wouldn't say that it characterizes the laboratory.

SPEAKER_03 20:39

Okay. Anything you want to say, Cheryl? Uh no, um, not really. I mean, it's a great place to get um into research. You know, I was able to get my master's degree work done there. Um, they provided me a place to do research, and I'll always be grateful for that. Um, I know that the scientists who were working on the various projects um did have to struggle. I mean, I never worked at that level because I was a student while I was there, but I could see you know the difficulty in in funding and keeping things going um was very stressful for them. And over time, the contracts for running the lab changed, and I could see that things were not as well thought out and implemented as they could have been with each contract. I I noticed kind of, you know, it just kind of a general feeling like this is not how it used to be, and I think it was better the way they had it before. Okay. That was, would you agree, Richard?

SPEAKER_01 21:48

Uh but there were certainly elements that I would agree there. There were times when we were under new management that I was like, there's something wrong with the way the direction of the lab is taken. And uh I remember one time in particular, one of our directors shut down the entire laboratory because of uh two incidents that occurred. And those two incidents were isolated, they were not characteristic of the entire laboratory. Nevertheless, the director shut the entire thing down. And I felt that that was definitely a poor decision.

SPEAKER_04 22:23

Was it a safety issue?

SPEAKER_01 22:25

One of them was a safety issue, another one was a security issue. And the this I mean this has been in the media forever, so I'm not saying anything new here, but one of them was a graduate student had received an injury to their eye from a laser. That was the safety issue. And the other one was a security issue that turned out to be really nothing. It was uh more of a bookkeeping problem than anything had actually been misplaced. But nevertheless, the director shut down the entire lab because of those two incidents, called the entire staff names. Uh, I don't need to mention what names he called us, and it was entirely impropriate. The lab is a very large place, uh, it's always numbered between about nine and twelve thousand employees. You can't characterize an entire laboratory by the actions of a couple and then just go around making accusations. So that was one time I remember in particular, I was very disappointed with the highest management of the lab. Um, but you know, these these things happen in any workplace. I I don't think there's any workplace that would be a perfect workplace, but there are certainly times when things could have been handled better.

SPEAKER_04 23:41

How long was the lab shutdown?

SPEAKER_01 23:43

It was shut down for about um depends on where you were. So most places it was a week. Um, some places it was a little bit more. And I I actually had a strange experience during that time because I was scheduled to be on travel and I had set up the travel, and we had I had left work on Friday. I had not planned on going to work during the weekend, but I left work on Friday fully understanding that I was going to be leaving for Florida on Sunday. Um, come Saturday afternoon, I got a phone call. Oh, your trip may be on hold. And I'm like, Can I know why? Uh no, but we'll let you know. And I'm like, okay, great. I've got like 24 hours and I'm gonna be on an airplane.

SPEAKER_03 24:29

I bet I better feel like you're you're a character in one of your movies, huh?

SPEAKER_01 24:34

Yeah, and then you know, then a little while later they get back to me and say, Oh, go on your trip, go on your trip. And it's like, okay, I'll go on my trip. So I went on my trip and it was it was a trip to do some cool collaborative work with the Air Force in Florida. And I got there and I got informed that the lab was shut down, but because I was in Florida, I was supposed to continue with the work that I was supposed to do on that trip. And so I did so. So I was working while the rest of the lab was shut down because I was on travel. Then I came back after that week, and then I was shut down because I didn't get the week shut down. So I got to be shut down for a week while everybody else was still.

SPEAKER_03 25:12

Everybody had to take a week to do all this extra training, is what they did.

SPEAKER_01 25:17

We were supposed to be doing the training and we were supposed to be thinking about how bad we were or something.

SPEAKER_03 25:22

Go to the corner for naughty. You're in time out. Think about what you did, Mr. Dr. Said.

SPEAKER_00 25:27

Yeah, we're all gonna put the time out, I guess. You know what?

SPEAKER_04 25:30

It's not unlike a bank that I shall not name that I use this word for. Um so it this is fascinating. I I I am loving this fact. I could go on forever. I have so many more questions for you, but in the interest of time, is there anything else that you would like to say about anything we've talked about already or something you'd like to talk about that we didn't ask you about?

SPEAKER_03 25:51

Well, I was thinking, you know, this being two writers interviewing you is are there aspects of your life that you've seen mirrored in, you know, popular culture, in any entertainment venues? Because a lot of movies are based on books. And I was just trying to think about my life. Yeah, so any anything in your life that has, you know, if you're watching a movie, you're like, oh, that reminds me of this experience here.

SPEAKER_01 26:18

Not so much, actually. I don't see myself in in movies and and things like that usually. I don't put myself in there.

SPEAKER_03 26:25

I do see these missing scientists, you know, and this idea that there's some sort of overarching conspiracy as really good fodder for some kind of movie.

SPEAKER_01 26:35

That would make a fun movie. Now, of course, if you're asking my opinion about the missing scientists uh issue that has been in the news lately, uh, I would say that I would give it 99% is just coincidence. Um, there's always the possibility that something else is going on. You can never dismiss it entirely until it's really been investigated, but the likelihood is very, very small. Um, these people do not have enough to do with each other for there to be any kind of a pattern. They're they're not all at Los Alamos. The ones are at Las Alamos. We had one of them was an admin, you know, not even involved in technical work. So, you know, to try and build these connections, it is kind of odd that they were able to find so many people associated with this kind of technical work that have gone up and gone missing. That's weird, but not impossible and not likely to be associated. There's just too much distance between the various individuals. They're just not associated with the same work, they're not associated with the same groups. You would expect to see more of a pattern.

SPEAKER_04 27:51

You know, what ancient alien theorists would say is too much of a coincidence to be a coincidence, but we're not we're not ancient alien theorists, sorry.

SPEAKER_03 28:00

Um we we will um keep an eye on the story, and if Dagny and I notice anything odd, yeah, we will drag Richard back onto our show part two and to explain himself.

SPEAKER_04 28:14

And I just have one more question before in closing. What would you be if not a geophysicist?

SPEAKER_01 28:21

Oh, I would probably end up in other some other type of science. So I had other interests as a as a young child. I was interested in everything from horticulture to uh just straight up physics, like nuclear physics, something like that. Um all kinds of science, even chemistry.

SPEAKER_04 28:40

So always science. You're never gonna, I was gonna be a lawyer, right?

SPEAKER_01 28:44

No, I was never interested in being a lawyer or a doctor or any one of these other traditional uh paths that people take, technical type of paths, I guess. But no, it was always it was always gonna be science. It wasn't even I didn't even really have all that much interest in engineering. I find engineering fun, but I didn't find a lot of interest that I wanted to pursue there. And so it was always gonna be some form of science.

SPEAKER_04 29:11

Okay. Well, you sound like my my soon-to-be daughter-in-law who actually just texted me. She she is a a scientist in a laboratory. So I think she's really gonna, you know, Cheryl, at the beginning, you said, are we gonna bore people with this going on and on and on about what you have, you know? No. They I think that there are gonna be many people fascinated by this, and um, including my family. And and I thank you so much for really going into great detail about many fascinating things. And I think you should write a book.

SPEAKER_00 29:44

Well, maybe I don't know what the subject would be.

SPEAKER_03 29:46

Write a book.

SPEAKER_00 29:46

I have no idea what the subject would be.

SPEAKER_03 29:49

All right. So wrapping it up here on the porch with Dagny, Cheryl, and Richard, thank you again for joining us.

SPEAKER_04 29:56

And please remember if you want to get in touch with us, you can do so at two pens one porch at gmail.com. Again, that's two pens one porch at gmail.com. No spaces, T W O P E N S O N E, P O R C H at Gmail.com