Click here to listen to the episode on Spotify
In the twenty-ninth episode of the second season of the “Saturdays at Seven” conversation series, Todd Ream talks with Stephen M. Barr, President of the Society of Catholic Scientists and Professor of Physics Emeritus at the University of Delaware. Barr begins by unpacking the basics of the Grand Unified Theory for non-physicists. He details why the pursuit of such a theory has garnered widespread interest, the explanations that harbor the greatest potential, and the experimental efforts that need to be made to prove or disprove those explanations. Barr then shares that he always knew that mathematics and physics would be fundamental to how he exercised his vocation and that the only real decision he had to make was when choosing particle or high-energy physics as a sub-field. Barr discusses the ways the Society of Catholic Scientists has grown in recent years along with the programming and fellowship they offer including programs for high school students focused on cultivating a love for science as well as an appreciation for the relationship faith and science share. Barr then concludes by discussing his understanding of the academic vocation, the virtues physicists need to cultivate, and the vices against which physicists need to be vigilant.
- Stephen M. Barr, The Believing Scientist: Essays on Science and Religion (William B. Eerdmans, 2016)
- Stephen M. Barr, Modern Physics and Ancient Faith (University of Notre Dame Press, 2007)
Todd Ream: Welcome to Saturdays at Seven, Christian Scholar’s Review’s conversation series with thought leaders about the academic vocation and the relationship that vocation shares with the Church. My name is Todd Ream. I have the privilege of serving as the publisher for Christian Scholar’s Review and as the host for Saturdays at Seven. I also have the privilege of serving on the faculty and the administration at Indiana Wesleyan University.
—
Our guest is Stephen M. Barr, President of the Society of Catholic Scientists and Professor of Physics Emeritus at the University of Delaware. Thank you for joining us.
Stephen Barr: Thanks for having me on.
Todd Ream: I’d like to open by asking to explain Grand Unified Theory to non-physicists.
Stephen Barr: Okay, well, it’s a rather grandiose title. What it refers to is an attempt to find a, a, a single unified theory of the non-gravitational forces of nature. We know of four basic forces in physics: gravity, electromagnetism, something called a weak force and the weak interactions, and the strong force or strong interactions.
There’s a very, very strong reason to believe, I would say compelling reason to believe that the three non-gravitational forces are actually all stem from a deeper single force that they’re fragments of. Deep down they’re really coming from a single force, and that’s called the grand unified force. I wish they hadn’t used the word grand, because really, ultimately, we like to see how all the forces, including gravity are related, but anyway, but that’s what it is.
And well, I can give you more details, but that’s, that’s in a nutshell what the idea of grand unification is.
Todd Ream: Would you please then now explain why the pursuit of Grand Unified Theory is significant to physicists, but then also has captured the attention of non-physicists?
Stephen Barr: Well, I mean, my field of physics is called particle physics, as you mentioned, and our goal is to know what are fundamental, the truly fundamental constituents out of which all physical things are made. What are the fundamental forces that govern that by which they interact with each other, and what are the fundamental laws that govern the interactions that govern all of that? And so our quest in my field is to find what goes to the deepest sort of bedrock level of nature.
And so clearly we know, I mean, there’s very, as I said, very strong evidence that these three non-gravitational forces are all very closely related to each other and almost certainly as this has come from something that, underlying force. And so that’s obviously part of the goal in this field is to find that deeper more fundamental description of these things. That’s the name of the game in particle physics.
So but you know, all attempts to understand anything, when you try to understand something or explain something, you’re, you’re trying to find a unity to what seemed more complicated and a lot of different facts and data and, and phenomena. You’re trying to find how they all fit together in a coherent way, and that always involves some unification.
I mean, so, you know, even if you watching detective mystery, you know, Columbo or, or Adrian Monk, there’s all these facts and clues and complicated situations. And they’re trying to find that one insight that explains all of them, that all of them suddenly fit together into a single unified picture that makes sense. And that, and that’s what all explanation is about and so all explanation in physics too, is ultimately trying to unify things and and all the great breakthroughs in physics from the time of Isaac Newton to the present, have shown have had the effect of giving us a more and more unified picture of the natural world, things that it seemed unrelated turn out to be actually deeply connected to each other.
And that I think that’s just as in, you know, that’s why we like detective stories. We like to know what is, you know, what’s really going on here. What’s the simple thing that explains all this confusing stuff? And everybody gets some satisfaction out of that.
Todd Ream: Physicists, and of course non-physicists alike, too. While there’s several iterations of Grand Unified Theory that have been proposed, my understanding is that none currently garner pervasive or widespread acceptance. In what ways, if any, are those iterations that are out there drawing us closer to an iteration of Grand Unified Theory.
Stephen Barr: Well, the problem is this: so we don’t yet have experimental confirmation of the idea. So the idea of grand unification, people realized since the early 1970s, about 1974, people in my field began to realize these forces are probably coming from an underlying force.
The thing is, there are several ways of fitting these forces together. Think of some like free oddly shaped objects and each one is sort of odd and irregular, maybe a little bit of irregular shape, but then you find that they fit together, like the fragments, imagine a vase breaks into three pieces. And then you see, oh my goodness, they look irregular, but they fit each other perfectly to make something that’s very, very nicely shaped, and that, you know, in itself tells you, well, they must be fragments of that original thing.
But the thing is, there’s several ways of fitting these three forces together. If you want, there’s several different shapes that when you put them together, they might form very closely related. And there’s maybe three or four, most plausible, most beautiful simplest grand unified theories.
We don’t know which is true because we haven’t been able to experiment. We have no smoking gun. We have no experiment that confirms the idea of grand unification until we get some experimental confirmation, we won’t know which of those theories is the right one. This has now been, well, 50 years, you see, so it’s kind of frustrating.
It may require some luck, I mean, but we may never get that smoking gun, that’s the thing. It’s not a question of one theory being winning because it’s, it’s the nicer theory. It’s a question of which theory experiment confirms, and we don’t have the experiment yet.
Todd Ream: Is there in your estimation, perhaps a theory that’s showing more promise?
Stephen Barr: Well, they all, I would say there are three or four, you know, it depends. There’s a jar, the shapes that I talked about, there’s certain mathematical structures that are involved in unified structures. And they have names. One is called SU 5. One is called SO 10. One is called well, there’s another one that’s called Flipped SU 5. I actually had something, I was a co-discoverer of that one. But there’s another one called Pati-Salam.
And so there are different structures, about three or four, and they’re all very beautiful and they’re very closely related. And they’re just versions of the same basic idea. And they’re, I’d say, all equally plausible. Each one has something a little bit, you know, special going for it, you know? But they’re all, I would say, equally promising.
Todd Ream: Thank you. You mentioned that in modern history, this pursuit is approximately 50 years old dates, you know, to 1974 and a proposal that was made by Harvard University’s Howard Georgi and Sheldon Glashow. In what ways does the inclination to identify Grand Unified Theory have roots that even reach further back into history? You mentioned Isaac Newton also.
Stephen Barr: So the basic intuition that maybe everything in the universe is made of some single fundamental stuff, you know, goes back to the ancient Greeks, go back to the pre-Socratic philosophers, people like Thales and, and so on.
So for example, 25 centuries ago, I think Thales thought everything’s made of water. And Heraclitus thought everything’s made of fire and the atomists, you know, Democritus thought that, well, everything is made of little atoms. And so, there is this intuition that all this variety of things we see around us are really different manifestations of some single underlying stuff. So it’s very ancient roots.
But as far as physics goes, it goes back, I would say, well, you might say it goes back to Maxwell, James Clark Maxwell in the 19th century, you know, who had a, a theory that unified electricity and magnetism into a single force, we don’t consider them two separate forces. There are aspects of one force we call electromagnetism.
In the 20th century, they were already back in the 1920s and 30s, there were some very beautiful ideas, which were probably, which were premature for unifying electricity and gravity. Those are the two known forces back then in the twenties. And there were some very beautiful ideas for unifying electricity and electromagnetism and gravity. Einstein was very taken with these ideas, worked on them for quite a long time. That particular way of unifying then turned out probably not to be correct, but so this goes back as far as modern physics goes back, this quest for a unified theory of the forces goes back at least a hundred years.
Todd Ream: If I may, l’d ike to shift now and talk to you about how your passion for physics and your calling to pursue physics over the course of your life developed.
You earned an undergraduate degree in physics from Columbia University and a Doctorate in Physics from Princeton University. At what point did you begin to sense that physics would prove sort of central to your vocation?
Stephen Barr: I’m a strange case because, I don’t remember a single moment when I was young, when I was a kid, when I asked myself what I wanted to do when I grew up. From the time I was a little kid, very little kid, I was interested in math and science. And while my three older brothers would be out playing football in the park, I would be curled up with math books, you know, recreational math book, puzzle, brain teasers, that kind of thing. And so I always knew I wanted to do something involving math and something involved in science.
And I didn’t even ask myself at any point what branch of science. I somehow always, it’s just physics was the obvious and natural thing. It was just it was almost inevitable. And that’s what I went into. It’s funny. I found it hard to advise my kids on how to pick a career because I’d never gone through that process.
Todd Ream: When you think back, were there any authors that you enjoyed reading mathematicians, whose work captivated you maybe more than others?
Stephen Barr: There was usually, you know, there’s this thing called recreational math. It’s puzzle books, you know and they were famous puzzle makers back in the 19th, 20th century. So there were a lot of books. I don’t remember the authors of them. But I’m just fascinated by mathematics. A lot of people are turned off by it, but math is actually a very beautiful thing. But it’s not everybody’s cup of tea.
Todd Ream: As your preparation as a physicist moved along, were any individuals or mentors more instrumental to your development and your commitments than others?
Stephen Barr: In physics, well, of course, for everybody that goes into a career in science, you know, or any academic fields, it’s your PhD thesis advisor, who is your mentor.
And, and so in my case my thesis advisor at Princeton, my PhD thesis advisor was a very eminent physicist named Tony Zee. And so, of course, he’s probably had more influence on me and my development in my career than anybody else.
Todd Ream: Your area of expertise, as you mentioned, is theoretical particle physics. For individuals unfamiliar with theoretical particle physics and how it is bounded and defined within the field of physics, how would you define it?
Stephen Barr: Well, I actually sort of gave the definition earlier. I don’t know if it’s a definition, but let’s say, in fundamental physics as I said, you’re trying to find out what are the fundamental constituents, the fundamental forces, the fundamental equations and laws, and up until recently, and still now—even today the fundamental, constituents were to be particles of various sorts.
And so, you know, the electrons, which were discovered in, I think 1897, and then protons and neutrons discovered in the 1930s, so since the early 20th century, we’ve known that matter is made up of particles of various types. And, and then we found out some of these particles are made up of other particles, so protons are made up of more fundamental particles called quarks and gluons, for example.
And so the question, so that’s where the field of particle physics emerged, originally it was part of one field with nuclear physics, and, and then they sort of went—nuclear physics remains studying nuclei. And particle physics then was trying to find what are the sub nuclear particles? What are the more fundamental particles? And so I’d say the field of particle physics, that that name probably comes from, there’s some time in the 1950s where it became a special branch of physics.
Todd Ream: Now, you referenced yourself as a cradle physicist, but were there anything or experiences or individuals that led you, drew you to theoretical particle physics in particular?
Stephen Barr: Particle physics, so I somehow always knew I’d be in physics, so when I went to, when I went to college, I just majored in physics. I didn’t give it a second thought. And then at some point you have to choose what branch of physics and I didn’t really do that. That question didn’t arise until graduate school.
And I am interested, I guess it’s part of my mental build or I want to know how everything fits together. I want to know the big picture. How does everything fit together and that’s why I was drawn to the particle physics. I mean, there are many very fascinating branches of physics. There’s atomic and molecular physics. They study atoms molecules. There’s condensed matter physics is called, it studies, you know, liquids and solids and metals and how matter, astrophysics all sorts of different branches of physics.
But the one that seemed in a certain sense, most fundamental, which wanted to fight, get to the bedrock, what are the fundamental laws of physics? What’s the ultimate description of the physical world? That attracted me because as I said, I want to know how everything fits together.
And so I was a little worried because it’s a very tough field, very competitive and hard to make your mark in it. And so I toyed with the idea of going to other branches of physics, but then at a certain point I rashly made the decision of going into particle physics.
Todd Ream: Yeah. In this pursuit for that which holds these things together, you mentioned mathematics, you know, being almost inextricably tied to and part of this. Are there any other disciplines that you’ve learned to borrow from, appreciate in terms of what they can offer?
Stephen Barr: Well, I mean, all the fields of physics are tied together, obviously, and, and, and physics with chemistry, and chemistry with biology. So there’s no sharp boundaries between these fields.
So for example, a lot of people in the field of particle physics is very closely connected to cosmology, especially the cosmology of the early universe for technical reasons. And so most people, theoretical particle physicists like me, also do a significant amount of work in what happened in the very early universe. So those are naturally connected.
But you have to draw on, on findings in other branches of physics. So you know, I have to do what I’m doing, you know, nobody can do it all. So you have to accept what people in other branches of physics are telling you about, say, stars. Or people were in the field of cosmology, they’ll have to learn from them in order to apply your ideas to cosmology.
So, you know, there’s a lot of relying on the findings in other branches of physics or other parts of particle physics, because particle physics has many sub fields. And nobody can be a master, or only a few people can be a master of all of them. So you’re relying a lot on what people have found in other branches.
Todd Ream: In terms of how you then frame and bind and define a project that you may pursue, would you please describe the process that you would go through perhaps in relation to one of your recent efforts?
Stephen Barr: Well, you know, that’s something that worried me before I went in, became a physicist. How do you get the ideas? You know, I wondered, did they put you at a table with a blank sheet of paper and a pen? And you’re supposed to just suddenly come up with an idea. I thought what happens if you don’t have an idea? You sit there at your desk all day and there’s nothing on your mind.
I don’t know if you ever watched the Three Stooges, but there’s a wonderful line that Curly had. He says, I tried to think, but nothing happened. I still wonder about this with other people, like people who are comedians, people who write comedy. They have to think of funny stuff and how do they do it? So I think actually it’s probably similar. The comedians actually look at things in the world around them and they just notice things and that suggests a joke to them.
The way it works in physics, and I think most branches of science, there’s already a lot of unanswered questions that people are working on and have been working on and they’re constantly proposing ideas. And so you are listening to what the conversation is in the field. The problems are there and they’re well known, many of them, and they’re already ideas out there. And so often it’s a question of improving on somebody else’s idea or thinking about someone else’s idea, and that stimulates a thought in your own mind.
So, if you were just sitting in isolation it would be impossible. But it’s, it’s, part of, there’s a lot of give and take and discussion and conversation and, and, and ideas naturally arise in the context of this.
Todd Ream: You mentioned a little bit of this already, but in terms of the intrinsic enjoyment to the appeal, you mentioned the sort of the beauty of it, can you elaborate a little bit more in terms of when pursuing such a project? You know, what it is that draws you? What it is that you find satisfying and gratifying?
Stephen Barr: There are people in science and I will tell you that they enjoy every moment of what they do. And I think I can’t believe that because every kind of activity, any kind of field, however interesting, there’s a lot of drudgery. There’s a lot of stuff, you know, if you’re a great pianist, you know, they have to practice and all this.
But the things that for me were the pay off, two things that give me pleasure as a physicist. Well, one was learning something new and interesting that I didn’t know. And this is not part of my own research, but I would go to a talk and there’d be some really beautiful idea or something about the world that I may have wondered about. And then I learn about it and I say, wow, that’s really cool. That’s just a very interesting thing.
Now, as far as my own research, it’s when I myself get an idea and it turns out to be a good one. That gives me a lot of satisfaction. Just having the idea. It’s, I guess, the same as if you’re a chess player and, and suddenly the right move occurs to you. Or I guess if you’re a detective and suddenly, the aha moment. So that’s what gives me the satisfaction, more than anything else.
Todd Ream: Thank you. I wish I had more of those aha moments.
Stephen Barr: I’ve only had 5 or 6. I mean, with most people they write hundreds of papers. I probably have 150 papers, but there’s only about 10 that are the ones that really give me satisfaction.
Todd Ream: I want to shift our conversation now, if I may, to talking about your work that relates to science and religion. You served on the Editorial Advisory Board for First Things, written for periodicals such as Commonweal. You received recognition for your efforts from Pope Benedict XVI in 2007, and you were inducted into the Academy of Catholic Theology in 2010.
Presently, you also serve as President of the Society of Catholic Scientists. Would you please detail the scope of your efforts as they relate to the society? And in what ways do you hope that your leadership influences the scope of those efforts now and then for coming generations?
Stephen Barr: So back in the summer of 2016, I and a few friends, a few colleagues, half a dozen of us all together decided to start the Society of Catholic Scientists. And, it’s grown rapidly. I think we now have close to 2,500 members. And I’m the founding president because the other people who are the founders were very much in the middle of their research and teaching careers, whereas I was approaching the end of my career. So I had more time that I could devote to it. So I, in fact, retired from research and teaching in 2020 so I could devote full time to the society. So that’s what I’ve been doing.
So the scope of our efforts has gotten to be quite well. I mean, we do a diverse set of things. We have an annual meeting, which is for fellowship among the scientists. We feel that scientists who are religious and in our case, Catholic scientists need to be talking to each other. There’s strength in a community, so we can share intellectually and spiritually, have fellowship and share our gifts, so to speak.
But we also want to reach out to the wider audience. We also have now 30 or so college chapters, which have all around the country and a few, few in other countries that have lectures. They sponsor lectures and other events. We have a chapter, we have a whole national chapter in Spain and one in Poland.
One thing we’d started a few years ago is reaching out to high school students. And so we have an annual thing we call the St. Albert Initiative where they bring together about and we go from city to city, usually about 200 to 250 high school students with their parents and teachers. And we have a one day kind of science religion fair. We have talks and poster presentations for them, so there’s a lot of different things we’re doing.
We have, of course, a website, which we’re very proud of, which has a lot of very good material on it. And so there’s always endless possibilities. There’s a lot of things we want to do that we haven’t gotten to yet.
Todd Ream: In terms of those possibilities, which ones might you point to with sort of greater focus as demonstrating promise in relation to science and religion and how the two relate to one another?
Stephen Barr: Well, I mean, a lot of the ones I mentioned, there’s sort of outreach. As far as discussions among scientists and theologians and so on, that takes place to some extent we have at our annual conference. We have articles on our website, which are aimed at the general public but they’re pretty high level in the sense that they’re not just breezy magazine articles or something. They’re serious intellectual discussions of science, faith issues. And we have about 40 something articles up already.
And, and these are, we think a lot, a lot of very interesting ideas are discussed in, and presented in those articles. But anyway, there’s a wide spectrum. I wouldn’t focus on one thing. We were doing a lot of different things.
Todd Ream: I want to ask you now about two of your books in particular. And the first of those that I’d like to ask you about in 2003, the University of Notre Dame Press published Modern physics and Ancient Faith. One of your most frequently cited and referenced efforts of which I’m aware. Would you please describe your motivation for pursuing that project and doing so at the time that you did in your career?
Stephen Barr: Yeah. Well, so I’ve been thinking about it just for my own benefit, you know. As I said, I’d like to understand how things fit together. And so from the time I was 10 or 12, I’ve been interested not just in science, but of course I’m religious, a believer. And so I wanted to say, how does what we know about the physical world from science and what we know from our faith, how do those fit together? And I thought a lot about it over the course of my life, did a lot of reading and thinking just for myself.
But then almost by chance or providence, back in 1995 I read a book that I thought was very important and I thought religious people should know more about it. It had to do with the human mind. And I wrote a review and sent it to First Things, a religious sort of ecumenical religious intellectual journal. And to my astonishment, they accepted it. And then I started writing a lot for them.
And then around 2000 or so, the year 2000, I thought to myself, I didn’t find that there were books out there that are saying the things that I thought needed to be said. And I wasn’t quite satisfied with the book, because I’d gotten a lot of them to review, and I’d reviewed a lot of them. And I felt, you know, there’s things that need to be said, and I don’t see these people saying them. And so, I thought maybe I should write a book, and I did. And that’s Modern Physics and Ancient Faith.
Todd Ream: Would you briefly identify your core argument and what impact you hope that book had in terms of how people think about physics and faith?
Stephen Barr: Well, I didn’t expect it to have any impact. But it actually, it seems to have done reasonably well for a book of that type, especially. So the core argument is this: the main, antagonist of religion is not science. Science is not, there’s no conflict in science and religion. It is an ideology or philosophy, let’s say a philosophy called scientific materialism which in materialism or scientific materialism says that everything is made of matter, the only reality. The only thing that exists is matter.
And so ultimately, physics would explain everything that there is, including the human mind. It’s all just matter in motion. And so if you were living in the year 1900, there were a lot of things in the history of science that seemed, discoveries that seemed to be pointing away from a religious view of the world. I can see how many people of goodwill who are not anti-religious might have seen science as being fundamentally at odds with religion.
But, I think in the 20th century, things changed. I mean, I think science had seemed to be going in one direction in many cases, in a sort of direction that seemed to go against religion. But then there was what I call a twist in the plot that suddenly our scientific picture of the world had changed in such a way as to go back towards something much more congenial to the traditional Christian view of reality. And I call these twists in the plot and there were five of them that I talked about in my book.
So I said, you know, as a hundred and something years ago, it did seem that they were the religious picture of the world and the scientific picture were drifting farther and farther apart. But now they’re a lot closer together in ways that I don’t think many people realize, including many scientists. And that’s what I wrote in my book. Very little in the book is original, but I was making a kind of forceful presentation of these things.
Todd Ream: Yeah, in many ways, I think conversations that still occur at the popular level are stuck on a paradigm of warfare established in the 1800s, whereas there’s a lot more nuance that’s there now that hopefully over time will emerge and is beginning to emerge.
Stephen Barr: Right, right, exactly. I mean I think a lot of atheists are in a kind of time warp. The arguments that the so-called new atheists were making, especially about ten years ago, are really very much the same arguments that atheists were making in the late 19th century. And I think things have changed a lot in ways that they don’t appreciate.
Todd Ream: The second book I want to ask you about is in 2016, Eerdmans published The Believing Scientist. The essays included in that volume cover a wide and impressive array of topics. And you argue at the outset that the volume that you were seeking to offer was to re-narrate this story concerning the relationship that science and religion share. In what ways would you identify the state of that narrative, and perhaps we’ve already sort of started into this conversation have been impacted since the time you published that book in the last 10 years?
Stephen Barr: That book was really collecting. I decided I’d written, as I said, many, many articles over the years, mostly for the journal First Things, but for a wide variety, other types of magazines. I wanted to collect what I thought were my best articles and book reviews in one place. Because otherwise, even if you knew that I’d written these things, you’d have to chase all over the internet and places to find them and I wanted to gather them into one place. And so there’s, I think, 26 or 27 articles and book reviews gathered together there. And they cover a wide range of things.
As you said, my book, Modern Physics and Ancient Faith, was more physics concentrated, but in this collection of essays, I talk about evolution. I talk about more topics that have to do with science and faith. The first article was a talk that I gave back in 2002, actually, called retelling the story of science and, and that’s basically the same theme as modern physics and ancient faith, that there was this older narrative that dates to the 19th century.
And now in light of the things we’ve learned since then about the big bang, about quantum mechanics, about a number of things, very fundamental developments in science in the 20th century, really we see that that older narrative is deeply flawed and we really need to retell the story of science.
Todd Ream: Of the topics that you cover in that book, if you were to go back and re-edit it today, add to it, are there any points that you might want to emphasize more—expand more?
Stephen Barr: Well, there’s so many important points. For example, probably want to talk a little bit more about things, whether the mind is a machine, you know, artificial intelligence, this kind of thing, though I do think I have some essays in there about that probably. But there are these very basic issues that keep coming up over and over.
There are questions about human origins and evolution, about whether the mind is reducible to physics and matter. Is there something about us? Is there a soul? I mean, is there such a, is it makes sense to talk about a spiritual soul? Is that some kind of goofy, you know unscientific thing. I mean, so the question about the mind. The big bang and the early universe, what is cosmology telling us? How does that fit together with religious ideas about God, about creation and so on. There are very fundamental themes that are part of the science-faith discussion and always will be, so.
Todd Ream: As our time, unfortunately, begins to now become short, I want to ask you about your understanding of the academic vocation you as expressed as a theoretical physics, but how, what characteristics, qualities or components were fundamental to how you understood how you oriented your commitment, your sense of vocation?
Stephen Barr: Well, I think ultimately the academic vocation is about the pursuit of truth and teaching, teaching and research. And as far as research is concerned trying to find the truth about things. And so truth is the goal of the academic world or should be.
Todd Ream: In what ways do you think that there were any particular virtues, whether they be intellectual, moral or theological, that were more important to cultivate in terms of how you understood and exercised your, your sense of the vocation, the academic vocation?
Stephen Barr: I haven’t thought about that in my own case that much because one is so focused on what you’re doing. I think generally speaking, of course, there are certain basic virtues that you need to have: honesty, a certain diligence, you know, hard work that’s probably my weakest area.
Humility, I think humility is extremely important in all areas of inquiry. That involves, for example, not being too attached to one’s own ideas cause sometimes you get an idea and you just like it because it’s your idea in this, you can have these pet ideas. And you stick to them in the face of contrary evidence. But you need to have humility to learn from other people to admit you’re wrong, that you were thinking about things wrong. To understand that certain problems are deeper than you had thought and so on. I mean, so I think humility, if of all the virtues, I think in intellectual inquiry, humility before the truth. And you have to be, you have to be willing to be taught, be led by the truth. You have to be, have to be willing to submit yourself to the truth.
Todd Ream: And perhaps pride then is one of the components of what, what you may offer in relation to this question, but against what vices do you believe it’s most important for physicists to be vigilant?
Stephen Barr: Well, maybe pride, as you said pride and arrogance. I don’t know. I mean, part of the problem with, with the science and religion area, is that some, I think a small subset of scientists, a very small subset, rather arrogantly think that they they know it all, that is, there are no mysteries, that physics has explained and will explain everything, or biology will explain everything, and they have no sense of wonder, you know. Maybe that’s another thing.
I don’t know if it’s a virtue. But if you don’t have a sense of wonder about the world, that’s maybe part of humility. Then why are you doing science, you know? I feel some of them have a certain, a few you find people with the cocksure attitude that they understand everything already, that it’s important.
Todd Ream: For our last questions then, I want to ask you about the contributions that physicists can make to other disciplines but then also to the Church. So to start, you know, when you think about physics and the array of academic disciplines that exist, what contributions can and are physicists making to other areas, perhaps even areas beyond the natural sciences?
Stephen Barr: Yeah, so of course I said within natural science, it’s all connected, you know, like the parts of the body. So, you know, in biology, there’s a whole subfield of biology called biophysics and in chemistry, there’s physical chemistry. So they all talk to each other and rely upon each other and so on. So that’s already happening.
But outside of physics, there are interesting ways in which physics actually helps other fields. We had a talk at one of our conferences a year or two ago to a young Israeli physicist, who is using physics techniques to date archaeological sites in the Holy Land and finding some rather remarkable things using some very cutting edge physics methods that hadn’t been used much before.
USo, you know, even in archaeology, other fields, physics is handy in medicine, you know, that, you know, there are a lot of proton therapy, sorts of therapies based on very advanced physics.
I would say in the humanities, they’re probably the fields that most should pay attention to physics and they do, would be philosophy or the field would be philosophy and, and, and of course, theology because philosophy and theology want to give us a sort of all embracing perspective on reality, the biggest picture of what’s going on.
And you can’t do that unless you’re paying attention to what you know about the physical world. And in the 400 years since Galileo and Kepler, we know an enormous amount. Probably, we have made more progress in the physical sciences than in any other field of inquiry. So we have a very deep understanding of how the physical world works. And so philosophers and theologians need to be aware of that, to sort of have some understanding of that. If they’re going to have this, give a big perspective, they can’t be detached from what physics has discovered about the world.
Todd Ream: Then for our last question, then what contributions are physicists uniquely positioned to make to the Church?
Stephen Barr: In theology, theology inevitably forms a sort of world picture. There’s a Polish physicist, theologian, philosopher named Michael Heller who says that in every age, theology tries to, to integrate what we know from revelation, from divine revelation with what we know from reason. And so inevitably form, there’s a synthesis there. There forms a picture of how the world is. It’s partly from revelation, partly from reason or from empirical study.
And this world picture can sometimes get trapped in older views of the natural world. That happened in the Galileo case. It happened in other times. Ensuring a sort of coherent picture of the world, theology has to keep up with what the physical sciences have told us about the physical, about physical reality, so that we don’t form outdated pictures of the world.
Todd Ream: Thank you. Thank you very much.
Our guest has been Steven M. Barr, President of the Society of Catholic Scientists and Professor of Physics Emeritus at the University of Delaware. Thank you for taking the time to share your insights and wisdom with us.
Stephen Barr: Thank you for having me on.
—
Todd Ream: Thank you for joining us for Saturdays at Seven, Christian Scholar’s Review’s conversation series with thought leaders about the academic vocation and the relationship that vocation shares with the Church. We invite you to join us again next week for Saturdays at Seven.
