Waves and Particles

The professor of computational and applied mathematics celebrated his 90th birthday in September, an accomplishment that seems to hold little interest for him, perhaps because the focus of his research is probability theory. His father lived to age 85. His mother died three years ago, 13 days short of her 105th birthday. The professor became an “emeritus” almost a decade ago but still reports to his campus office most weekdays at 8:30 a.m. On his desk are the current issues of Foreign Affairs and Macworld.

On his resume I noticed he earned his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering here at Rice University in 1938. Five years later he received a bachelor of divinity degree from the Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University. He preached for several years in Dallas, and also rode the circuit of small country churches, at the same time he was teaching and studying at Rice, eventually earning his Ph.D. in mathematics in 1952. I asked him about his parallel lives, his balance of faith and science, which for some would signify inconsistency or, worse, hypocrisy.

“It changed, but I didn’t lose my religion,” he said. “That would imply an inadequate notion of what science is and does, and a limited view of what religion is. I’m a bigger person than that.”

So are millions of others, and so was R.S. Thomas. The Welsh poet-priest devoted much thought and many poems, beginning in the late 1940s, to the purported antagonism between science and religion. Thomas famously rejected the abject worship of technology, and the spiritual and environmental damage it caused, but he was sympathetic to science and more knowledgeable about it than most 20th-century poets. Here’s an example from one of his interviews:

“The West has been under the thumb of reason for a very long time. Because of this we divide everything into A and not-A. Nothing can be A and not-A at the same time. However, contemporary physics contradicts this by showing how matter is both a wave and a particle at the same time, and by describing the strange behaviour of one of the elements of life, the electron. We are gradually beginning to see how the scientific mind works. Some of the most abstruse and complex problems of nature have been solved, not by means of a process of reasoning, but as a result of a sudden intuition which was closer to the vision of an artist or a saint than anything else….So, in the long run, what emerges from the vision of contemporary physics is a picture of the world as a living being of which we all form a part. This is the unity of being of which we must be aware, if we wish to survive.”

Thomas insisted he was suspicious not of the scientific method (his 1986 book of poems was titled Experimenting with an Amen), but of what he called “applied science as manifest[ed] in technology.” In another interview he said:

“So it is not pure science and religion that are irreconcilable….If pure science is an approach to ultimate reality, it can differ from religion only in some of its methods.”

The nonagenarian professor had never heard of Thomas, and said he didn’t know much about theoretical physics. For a recent revised edition of a textbook on probability theory he published more than 40 years ago, he had to brush up on combinatorial analysis and set theory, but what’s really engaging him is a close textual analysis he has undertaken of the New Testament, augmented by the findings of recent scholarship.

“What we’re learning about is the kind of world Jesus was living in,” he said. “It was a pretty primitive place.”