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In the thirty-seventh episode of the third season of the “Saturdays at Seven” conversation series, Todd Ream talks with Ard Louis, Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Oxford. Louis begins by discussing the documentary in which he co-starred with David Malone. Louis, a Christian and scientist, and Malone, an atheist and non-scientist, travelled the world, interviewing leading thinkers concerning the great questions with which humanity is called to grapple. Interviewing individuals, such as Jane Goodall, Louis and Malone were not necessarily invested in answering those questions but helping people frame those questions in ways that can be answered. Louis then shifts to discussing his own calling to physics, the influence of growing up in Gabon as the child of parents serving as biologists, returning to his native Netherlands as an undergraduate student at Utrecht University, and travelling to the United States as a graduate student at Cornell University. He discusses the ways his interests in theoretical physics developed, the ways those interests intersect with his commitment to Christianity, and the ways he seeks to share those intersections with other faculty members and graduate students. He then closes by discussing how he has come to understand the academic vocation and the ways scholars and the Church can be of greater service to one another in years to come.
- Ard Louis and David Malone’s Why Are We Here? (Glasgow, Scotland: Tern TV, 2015)
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.
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Our guest is Ard Louis, Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Oxford. Thank you for joining us.
In partnership with filmmaker David Malone, you created the four-episode Why Are We Here? film series. Sponsored by the Templeton World Charity Foundation, would you begin by sharing with us why you found investing in that effort compelling?
Ard Louis: Basically they came to me, or the filming company came Tern TV, and they said, “Hey, we, we would like to work on big questions, and you can help us decide who you would like to interview.” So basically I got, you know somebody to pay me to fly around the world and talk to interesting people. Um, who would say no to that, right. That was the first basically motivation for me doing it.
I just thought it was interesting. Um, I really like David Malone, the filmmaker. So there was that. David is an atheist so very different from me. He’s an atheist. He’s an artist. I’m a Christian. I’m a scientist. So our schtick was kind of to have two different, very different people, maybe subverting some stereotypes about the artist who kind of believes in impossible things and the scientist who’s rational, therefore doesn’t believe in God.
It was also during the height of the new atheists people who were basically taking science and claiming that this had all kinds of metaphysical implications for religion or for how we should live our lives. And David really disliked that, so he wanted to make a film that looked at big questions in a more thoughtful way. So that was basically it. But the real motivation, to be honest, was I get to talk to all these people that I’ve always wanted to talk to, ask them the biggest questions of life. I mean, how fun is that?
Todd Ream: You divided that series into four episodes. One: Meaning-Seeking Beings. Two: Reality of Ideas. Three: The Animal Within. And Four: The Moral Compass. Would you offer a few details concerning the arc of progression of those four episodes that you designed and followed?
Ard Louis: The arc is really that you’re starting by just asking: Who are we as human beings? What does it mean to be human? Um, then you ask big questions about: What is our universe like? What does that tell us about what it means to be human? In the end, we ask kind of big, more tricky questions like what might, might that mean for our actual daily lives? Like are there moral truths in the universe, just like there are mathematical truths. Um, so that’s kind of the arc.
I would say the arc is not, is not a single arc in the sense of we’re trying to tell one story. We’re trying to tell a whole series of stories at the same time. And what we did, which is unusual, is that it was David and I who interviewed each person. So two interviewers and one person being interviewed. And that often created a conversation, largely because David and I disagreed on a lot of issues, and as did the, often the person we interviewed with so that created a three-way conversation that I think the main thing that, that I was hoping to come out of that was that, A, there are these really beautiful and deep questions that we should all be asking ourselves, that they’re not simple, that they’re complex, and that there is a really rich way of engaging with them.
And that actually for, for me, of course, coming from a Christian perspective, I wanted to give my, a Christian way of thinking about these or a religious way of thinking about these, which I think is as intellectually strong and I think more, you know, I, I think is more intellectually rigorous and more intellectually interesting than an atheist point of view. David obviously disagreed, which is part of the fun of making one of these movies.
Todd Ream: In the end, as you were just echoing there, what sort of questions maybe do you hope to resolve for viewers? But then what questions, you know, by the time they work through the end, do you hope that you also raise?
Ard Louis: So the, the main, the main, one of our goals was actually that people would just have better questions at the end, rather than us giving them answers. So we didn’t feel like it was our job to give people answers, but rather that we sharpen their questions and make them better. So I think that I hope we did.
And one of the things we wanted to point out, for example, is that if you look at science, it points, in many ways, away from itself towards beauty, towards truth towards something bigger than ourselves. That’s one of the big questions, and what does that mean? That’s really interesting and with questions like fine-tuning or evolutionary convergence or the evolution of cooperation and ask what does that mean? What does that tell us about our world?
So part of it was taking kind of simplistic narratives about science, simplistic narratives about physics or about evolution, and trying to point out that if you looked at the science in more detail, there’s a much richer, more interesting, more fertile, more complex set of ideas that really point towards something bigger than ourselves. Actually point very often to religious questions or to philosophical questions.
And one of the points I also, I wanted to make to people was that, there are many things that we believe to be true that are non-empirical truths. In other words, truths that are not really decided by science or any kind of advance of science. And a simple example of that would be mathematical truths. So is it true that one plus one is equal to two, whether I know about it or not? We all think it is true. Then you get into really tricky questions from where does that truth then live? Well, it’s not really a physical thing. It, it, it’s true whether you believe it or not, whether the universe is made of material or not.
And so once you realize that there are non-material realities that are mathematical realities or logical realities, the law of non-contradiction is true whether I believe it or not, whether it can be physically instantiated or not. Then it quickly raises questions, could there be other things that are true, like moral truths? Could these be true whether we, they’re physically instantiated or not? And this raises really interesting and beautiful questions about are moral truths really out there, or are they merely something that we kinda negotiate as human beings among ourselves?
And those are the kinds of questions I hope we, we sharpened a little bit the kinds of questions that you would ask when you come out. We didn’t have a set of answers to those questions, partially because David and I disagreed on many of the answers, as did our interviewers. But I think we did agree that these questions were rich and exciting, and that there are many ways of looking at them.
And obviously, I had answers to some of the questions. David had answers to some of the questions. But we didn’t want to foreground those. And we wanted actually our own answers to be challenged, and we probably rethought some of them. I definitely rethought a bunch of things that I believed by going around and thinking about these big questions.
Todd Ream: Makes for a fascinating conversation then that you had in, in various locales and with a variety of people.
Ard Louis: One of my favorite conversations was with a philosopher called Alex Rosenberg, who really believes in scientism, so he believes that science is the only really reliable way of getting truth. Um, and that he also believes in basically physicalism, there’s nothing except the natural worlds of atoms and molecules, and that’s it. And David kind of believes this too, but David believes that there are moral truths. David believes that, you know, there’s meaning and purpose in the world.
And so Alex and David have the same premises, but Alex basically believes that once you realize that there’s nothing but atoms and molecules, then all these ideas we have of beauty and truth and morality kind of get eroded away. I disagree with Alex’s premises, but I agree with his logic. Whereas David agrees with Alex’s premises but disagrees with his logic. And so we had a lot of fun discussing, whether if you believed in just atoms and molecules, whether you could ground all of these things that we hold as being beautiful and true and precious or not.
And that was a, I think, a very rich and interesting conversation that we both learned a lot from and enjoyed. Even though, you know, Alex in the movie really thinks I’m, he thinks I’m crazy because he thinks, he thinks I, you know, how could you possibly believe in God and be a scientist? I think he’s nuts for not seeing how those two things connect together. But that’s part of the fun of talking to each other.
Well, it’s kind of thing where if you look at the, if you actually look at the, the bits that are, that made it to the film, at some point, I think he, I forget exactly what he calls me, but something like, “You’re schizophrenic if you believe those two things can be true.” But, you know, we had a great time afterwards. Uh, we had lunch, we talked, and we really enjoyed meeting. And so I, I think it’s really fun when you can meet somebody with whom you fundamentally, profoundly disagree and yet have a really deep and meaningful conversation about things that matter.
Todd Ream: Thank you. So somewhere out there, there is fascinating footage that didn’t make it into the film then probably.
Ard Louis: There’s also that. I mean, so we have a website actually that has some of the longer outtakes because we thought some of these conversations were so kind of interesting to look at. And I know some, I know people still use those. I’ve had people at various universities tell me they use them in philosophy classes to illustrate particular ideas for their students. We had just a really, we had a really incredibly interesting set of people that we interviewed. I mean, every single person was fascinating in one way or the other.
Another example of, was very touching to me was Jane Goodall, who recently passed away. And so I grew up in Gabon, in Central Africa. I had a chimpanzee growing up as a pet. Basically, we lived in the jungle. You know, the only meat that people had was jungle meat that they hunted. And they without meaning to actually kill the mother didn’t see the little baby that was holding to her, her, her chest. Normally, they, they, they wouldn’t kill mothers with young. And so they brought it to us. We bought it for its weight in sardines and raised it.
Um, and then at some point we brought it to a nature reserve in the hope that it would reintegrate, that Bertje, our chimp, would reintegrate into the, into the wild. And it’s a tragic story because he actually got ill and died. Um, and so Jane and I talked about that. It was very moving for me because she, she basically told me that, you know, by having taken the chimpanzee so young and raised it, it would never have been able to reintegrate, even if we wanted to, because we were basically naive. Um, and so I loved that conversation.
And actually afterwards, you know, we had a conversation about faith as well. Jane pulled me aside where David and the other film people couldn’t hear us, and she said, “You know, you and I have lived in the African jungle. We know that there’s something like God. Um, you can’t be there and not experience that. These people,” she pointed to the people and said, “They, they haven’t seen that. They don’t know, but we know.”
And I had never thought about my own faith in that way until she articulated that, and I thought, “Yes, that’s true.” Um, part of the strength and the kind of conviction of my own faith has to do with growing up in the jungle and just seeing the power and the beauty of nature. It’s hard to explain that if you haven’t experienced it, but if you have, you know, what you’re talking about.
Todd Ream: Thank you. I want to ask you a little bit more then about your upbringing and your education which eventually led to your development, as a theoretical physicist. You know, as you just mentioned, you were born in the Netherlands and raised in Gabon. You returned then to the Netherlands earning an undergraduate degree from Utrecht University, but then crossed the Atlantic to the United States earning a PhD in theoretical physics from Cornell.
At what point in time did the study of theoretical physics begin to prove compelling to you?
Ard Louis: My parents are biologists. Um, my father founded the Herbarium of Gabon, which is where all the plants are stored.
Todd Ream: Wow.
Ard Louis: So yeah, I grew up with my parents always with their note. And my mother taught she basically taught secondary school and then, or high school you call it in America. And then she also taught teachers how to teach biology and geology, actually. So I kind of grew up with my parents always stopping at every tree and talking about it.
And apparently, when I was about 15 or 16, I took them aside and said, you know, “Mom and Dad, I’m really sorry. I, I need to tell you something that’s going to make you unhappy, that you’re going to be displeased by, but, you know, I, I feel like I need to tell you.” Of course, when your teenager says that to you, you know, you, I think many children, you’re nervous, right? And apparently, I don’t remember. I have a vague memory of this, but not a very, but they have a very strong memory of this, which is that I then said, you know, “I’m going to be a physicist, not a biologist.” And I thought they’d be very disappointed. You know, they basically laughed and said, “Well, you know, of course. That’s totally fine.”
And it was basically I was not interested. I thought biology was just, you know, kind of stamp collecting. And, you know, actually I saw that they loved it. I saw that they, you know, they, they had that kind of detailed interest in the natural world, but I just thought I want to look at patterns.
So at that age, I knew I wanted to do physics. I went to university. Utrecht was the best place to do theoretical physics. That’s where I wanted to do. I didn’t, you know, I didn’t know whether I’d be able to do theoretical physics, whether I was, was, I’d be good enough at physics, but I just loved it. And so I basically did it because I loved it.
And it just one thing led to another. So that’s, you know, at the end of it, of my undergraduate time, I had yeah, Cornell was extremely strong in the kind of theoretical physics I wanted to do. There were a few people there that I really admired, whose books I’d read. I was absolutely thrilled to go there and work with them. And it was a great decision because Cornell is an extremely good place for the kind of theoretical physics that I do.
And being in that very concentrated, very high high-performing environment helped me kind of raise my bar of what I thought was possible or what I thought was normal. And so I’m very grateful for my time at Cornell in teaching me that. I then moved from after my PhD. Um, so basically up to my PhD, I just did it, you know, because I liked it. And I, every time I went, made the next step, I was just thrilled that I could make the next step. I didn’t actually think that I would be able to do this the rest of my life. I just thought, “Let me do this while I can.” I just loved the subject.
Obviously, when I finished my PhD, I was then offered a postdoc at Cambridge University. Um, and then actually the, the person I was, what, what really happened was I wanted to work with somebody who was working in France. I wrote to him and he said, “Well, I’m actually coming to Cambridge. Why don’t you come with me?” So that’s the only reason I went to Cambridge. He moved from physics into chemistry in Cambridge, so I ended up being in the theoretical chemistry department.
And that’s where my kind of more interdisciplinary interests started to develop because I started seeing all these really interesting questions that chemists, theoretical chemists were asking, and realizing that from using ideas and methods and techniques from physics, I could say something interesting about them. So I did that for a number of years. I had like a junior faculty position there. And then a permanent position in Oxford came up. I was asked to apply. This is how it often works. And, um I applied and got the job and have been here ever since.
But that interest in interdisciplinary work or trying to use concepts from physics outside of the traditional domains of physics, that really was built in my time in Cambridge, and that’s something I’ve kept with me ever since.
Todd Ream: Were there any mentors outside of the gift that your parents gave you, blessing your interest in physics and then theoretical physics, any mentors who encouraged you along the way?
Ard Louis: So when I was younger, maybe not so much. Um, when I was an undergraduate, I just kind of ticked along for the first few years. Uh, there was one Christian professor at the University of Utrecht that I knew of who was also an amazing lecturer. He was our quantum mechanics teacher, just an unbelievably clear lecturer. And I think that helped me, it gave me, you know, a plausibility structure that I could be a Christian and a scientist.
Because I would say one of the big transitions for me moving from Gabon, where in an African context, you know, religion is very much part of life, the question isn’t do you believe in God? The question is, you know, which God do you believe in, and how do you believe in God? But the idea that there is something outside us is just not really just part of the culture. It’s not really questioned. To a Dutch culture, which was deeply secular, where people basically said, you know, “You can’t be smart and believe in God. It’s a fairy tale.” Um, that was a big transition for me.
So it helped to see him. So he was a mentor in that sense. Um, in the Netherlands, the way it works is you do, you, you do about a year of research at the end of your, of your course, and that really sets you, that’s a really important part of your time. It kind of gives people a sense about whether you’re good at research or not, and gives you a sense about whether you can do a PhD or not.
I worked with a very brilliant Dutch physicist called Daan Frenkel, and he actually, he ended up at Cambridge and theoretical chemistry as well, where he would, the main chair there until recently. And I was very lucky that the building that we were in had a shortage of space, so I had to sit in his office, and I overheard him talking on the phone. And every time somebody came in to discuss with him, I would overhear the conversation, and I really learned how to be a good scientist from him. I would still say that experience of my first steps into research were very much shaped by him, and he’s a great, a great thinker a real truth seeker, and I just learned a lot about how to ask the right questions.
He would always emphasize, you know, the most important thing about research is being able to ask good questions rather than finding answers to boring questions. And so he’d always be asking like, “Okay, so you’re doing that, but why are you doing that? What’s the big-picture question? What’s, what, what’s really interesting about that?” And I just, I’ve never, that’s never left me. Um, so I still feel of myself as a, you know, that’s that first experience with research. And I also just love research.
You know, when you’re taking courses, you basically reproduce knowledge that’s already known. Now, the exam is always, somebody knows the answers to the exam. But research is very different, right? Nobody knows the answers to the questions, to interesting questions. There are lots of interesting questions that are unanswerable. There are lots of answerable questions that are uninteresting, and in between, is that gray zone where there are the interesting questions that are both answerable. And that’s much more creative, much more out of the boxy than the kind of coursework. And I just loved that experience. When I first really got into research, I thought, “This is what I want to do for the rest of my life. I can’t believe I’m being paid to think about all these interesting questions. They’re so fascinating.”
And sitting in Daan’s office and listening to all the people coming in and discussing their projects, I would listen in and hear about all these different projects, I would listen to him ask questions. And the funny thing was, you know, I was a young undergraduate. Afterwards, he would turn to me sometimes and discuss his take on the conversation he just had, which I think was a very generous, I now look back and think that’s a very generous thing to do, that he treated me as a peer. And I just thought it was normal that he would talk to me as a peer, and I would discuss what I thought about it, right? And it was an amazing, an amazing experience for me.
And I realized I was very, very blessed to be with, you know, one of the world’s greatest minds and just watch that mind work, and having reflected on it back afterwards, there’s many, many things I still do that I realize I’m a Frenkelian, which is, you know, he’s Daan Frenkel, in how I think, right? Um, in how I think about the world, how I do my research. And I just learned a ton about it. And I would still say that was my biggest scientific mentor. Even though I left him he wasn’t very happy about this, that I left to go do a PhD elsewhere. I wanted to see something else.
You know, also, I grew up in Africa. I’d gone back to Netherlands. One of the things was that my parents are Dutch. They told me, “You know, you’re Dutch. You’re going to go back to Holland. You’re going to be Dutch.” And I came back to Netherlands, and I realized I speak Dutch, I look Dutch, but I’m, this is not really my culture. I’m too different from these people. I like them, but I don’t really feel that sense of belonging here. Why don’t I go and, you know, the world is big. Let’s go look somewhere else. So I just thought, let me go somewhere else. Um, classic kind of third culture kid experience, right your parents, who were brought up in the culture, think of themselves as being from that culture.
Um, interestingly, my parents still live in Gabon. Um, and now, you know, they’ve lived there so long that they’re basically Gabonese in their culture and their style of living. Um, and I think if they were to go back to Netherlands and live, there’d be a huge and almost impossible cultural adjustment. But at the time, you know we all thought I would go back to Netherlands, you know, live a suburban life like any Dutch person, and I just realized that wasn’t for me. This is why I wanted to go, go out and went to the US and really loved that experience.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Well, that’s great to hear.
Are there any authors then also who have inspired you along the way, especially when it comes to sort of the interdisciplinary arrangement of ideas with which you work? You obviously spend your time, your days there in Oxford, which has been a center for thinking about the relationships shared by science and religion. But authors from the past or currently working that have helped you and nurtured your sense of vocation?
Ard Louis: So that’s a good, good question. So depends a bit on which direction. I’ll talk first about my science. Um, so Daan Frenkel, who I mentioned who’s, you know, not well known outside of this very narrow field. He’s a very interdisciplinary thinker. I learned a lot from him.
I just got this prize from the Institute of Physics called the Sam Edwards Medal and Prize, which is the main prize in my subfield of subfield of subfields. So it’s the big prize in my very tiny little area. And Sir Sam was a real huge inspiration for me, and his, his works were. So Sir Sam is one of the great geniuses of the last century. He took ideas from quantum mechanics and applied it to things that look very prosaic, like polymer molecules, and showed that you could understand a lot of things about these molecules which look like maybe like a zoo of different, complicated, messy things. And that by using these mathematical techniques that came from quantum mechanics, you could suddenly bring order into this wide array of differentness and see really deep, profound patterns.
And that really, I remember I read his book called The Theory of Polymer Dynamics. It just really amazed me. It had a big impact on the kind of work that I do. The kind of work I do is very much influenced by that type of an approach—taking ideas, so technical techniques, mathematical techniques that have worked in one area of physics, and then applying it to an area that wouldn’t traditionally have been called physics, and finding out that you can actually apply these ideas and turn it into a more physics kind of approach. So that’s kind of the scientific, that book had a big impact on me.
So that was one set of ideas that really impacted me. On my own integrating faith and science. So there’s another person that really impacted me, another mentor I now realize looking back. That was a professor at Cornell University called Richard Baer, Dick Baer. He’s a professor of environmental ethics, and he used to have us over for lunch at his house after church, and we would talk about some subject. And he was extremely widely read, and so we read this really wide range of things and talked about them. As I came across Mark Noll’s book, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, that had a big impact on me because I suddenly recognized that I myself had been also influenced by some of the these anti-intellectual sentiments that, that’s that’s Noll points out.
Um, and then I read George Marsden’s book, The Soul of the American University, which is a history of the kind of secularization of, of many of the, the major universities in the United States, like Harvard and Princeton and Yale, et cetera. And that really struck me because I suddenly understood a lot about my own university in Utrecht and the kind of what, what, what, what the culture was that they were living in and why, where that anti-religious sentiment came from.
And also I realized, it helped me realize why I thought that way of thinking was so thin. But the point was you can see it as being thin but not know what the alternative might be or not know, not have a better story that you really want to tell. And so you don’t really, you just think something’s not right, but I’m not sure what the better story is. And they kind of helped me, pointed me towards a better story. And that was, you know, mediated by, by Dick Baer talking about these things in very, in these, these concepts in, in, in very rich and interesting ways. So I, I really, that was a really important mentor for me in my kind of thinking about faith and science.
And then what also happened is a kind of classic thing for an academic. I was invited to go, there’s a big missions conference called Urbana, InterVarsity every, every so often around New Year’s time. And I had done a lot of work with international students, which is natural for me because I was my, I, you know, having grown up in Gabon, I felt very, that, that worked really naturally for me. So they asked me to give a series of seminars on that, which I knew would be a niche topic. So I said, well, if you’re going to fly me over to, it was in, it was in Illinois at the time, to Illinois. And I’m going to be there for a few days. Why don’t I give another seminar as well? So I’ll do one on science and faith, which I’m interested in.
I knew that would force me to read up on it, so I did. I read a bunch of books, gave a talk, and, you know, my seminars on ministering to international students, you know, were small and warm. But my seminar on science and faith packed out the room. People were in the corridors trying to squeeze in. After I finished, I was basically mobbed by students asking a million different questions. And I really, I really touched on something that, like, I really, I touched on an itch there that wasn’t being scratched by the Urbana Conference. And people just really, really had really existential questions about it. So that got, that, that, that made me realize this is a really interesting thing to start thinking about, so I started thinking about it more.
You know, I’m very lucky. In the UK, you have people like John Polkinghorne. Um, there’s Alister McGrath, tons of people around that I could just talk to who are very deep thinkers on these topics. So I just devoured all of that stuff and learned a lot from them. And that’s basically how I, how I got interested in science and faith.
And it, science and faith is a very interesting set of, you know, ideas. They’re very different in certain ways. John Polkinghorne likes to talk about this, but they’re cousinly different disciplines. They have overlap as well. And so I found that just absolutely fascinating really interesting, and I, you know, I, I just like, I just enjoy thinking about it and reading about it and talking to people about it.
If I hadn’t done that talk, I probably wouldn’t have quite realized how interesting the topics are. I probably would’ve gotten into it, but not to the same extent. And one of the things that happens is once you give one talk, you get invited to give more talks. Then you have to, you know, the best way to prepare for, to learn a new subject is to give a talk on it, because it forces you to, it forces you to read stuff that you’ve put on your, on your bedside table for later. And so that’s how I got into it, and I’ve been writing a lot about it and interested in it ever since.
Todd Ream: Thank you. Thank you. I want to ask you a little bit about sort of the day-to-day efforts of your work there at Oxford. You direct the research, the Louis Research Group, a group focused on exploring the dynamics of biological physics and the dynamics of soft matter, efforts which, as you just mentioned a few minutes ago led to the Institute of Physics to confer upon you the Sam Edwards Medal and Prize for distinguished contributions in soft matter physics. Would you provide an overview of the questions you and your colleagues pursue, and perhaps give an example one of your more recent projects or efforts?
Ard Louis: Yeah, so soft matter is a, is a big catch-all word for a lot of things that are basically soft. So, you know, you’ve got hard matter physics if you look at things like semiconductors, it’s or metals or something of that nature. And then you’ve got soft matter physics if you look at polymers or colloids or anything that kinda wiggles and shakes. And so a lot of biological matter would fall under that category. And, you know, inspired by people like Sir Sam Edwards, physicists have been thinking about these kinds of problems for quite a while.
Uh, maybe I’ll take a step back and say, you know, physics kind of separates itself into people that look at fundamental particles, so very small things or very big things like the astrophysics in the universe, and they’re basically looking at particular, you’re trying to study something very large or something very small. But there’s also a very big, probably the biggest part of physics are people that look at the emergent phenomenon, which is where a set of many small things come together and something new emerges out of it.
So a classic example would be wetness, right? So if I take one water molecule, it’s not wet. Two water molecules are not wet. Three are not wet. But I put enough of them together, suddenly this property of wetness emerges that we’re used to. The fascinating thing about wetness is it doesn’t have to be water that’s wet. You know, ammonia is wet, mercury is wet. So it turns out that that wetness emergent property that comes, that’s not a property of the individual molecule, but a property of a collective can have many different instantiations at the bottom that give you the same collective behavior.
So in soft matter, I’m looking at that kind of physics, and I was very interested in self-assembly, so things that make themselves. So, for example, your body is full of little machines that walk along tracks, little motors that spin, and these motors are made of many separate components. But these motors aren’t made all in one go, and they’re not made in a, a factory assembly line. Rather, your body makes proteins, which are little molecules that are the workhorse of the cell. Individually, they float around in the cell, jostled by thermal energy, and then they stick together in these very specific three-dimensional shapes that have to be absolutely perfect.
And these little motors that will spin at a hundred thousand RPM stop in a quarter of a turn. If I gave you one that you could see, you know, with your eyes or hold in your hands, it would be made in a factory, right? But these things make themselves by just randomly wiggling around, wiggling around. It’s like taking Lego blocks, okay. Putting glue on them, putting them in a box, shaking the box is how you stimulate thermal motion. Then you open the box and out comes, say, a fully formed train. That would be absolutely amazing, but this happens all the time in life. So I was interested in how does that work?
Well, so one of the ways that people have been studying these is by using DNA molecules. So DNA, we’re used to using them or thinking about them as storage of, of information. But you can also use them to make really complicated structures. And it turns out that DNA is the best self-assembly material we have for artificial self-assembly. You can make boxes that open and close. You can make walkers that walk on tracks. You can make little robots that do all kinds of amazing things that emulate what we can do in life.
And for experimentalists, people who do experiments, this is the best material that we understand the best. And so I’ve worked very long with my colleagues on a, a, a modeling method that allows you to predict what kind of shapes you’re going to make. So what’s going to self-assemble out of the DNAs and how those things will work. And it’s called oxDNA. So it’s Oxford DNA. You can download it, you can use it. And so a lot of people, when they make experiments, they first test their ideas in oxDNA on the computer with our, our formulas to see whether that’s going to do what they think it’s going to do, and then they’ll try it.
And then if something, they do something that doesn’t quite work, they’ll go back to this computer on which you can manipulate things, you know, molecule by molecule by hand and see where they can improve their designs. And so this has led to a lot of understanding of how these self-assembling things emerge from the individual units. And that’s, that’s one of the things that I was given the prize for, for understanding and developing this with my, well, yeah, with a whole series of colleagues and very brilliant students and postdocs, this framework that’s now used all around the world. So I’m very proud of that. I think it’s very exciting that it works.
I mean, the really exciting stuff is that we are starting to understand how things self-assemble. We’re starting to understand what the rules of some self-assembly are. And if we can understand it, then we can emulate it and perhaps apply it in medicine or in nanotechnology. Um, but just as a, you know, as an intellectual question, it’s absolutely fascinating and beautiful.
Todd Ream: Thank you. Before we close our conversation today, I want to sort of step back and then, and ask you about the academic vocation and how you understand it. Perhaps how, how do you define it? What’s the good of it? Uh, what’s its scope? And what practices sustain it?
Ard Louis: Well, I think that’s a good, very good question. Um, so just as a little aside to introduce this, with my wife and some other friends here who are academics, we run a course called Developing a Christian Mind, which is basically helping Christian graduate students and above think about what it means to be a Christian in the academy. What does it mean that you are a Christian sociologist or a Christian physicist? How does your faith impinge on your work? And, you know, why are you doing that subject?
One way of thinking about those things is that, you know is in theological terms. So if I take a doctrine like the, you know, the theology of sin, this helps me understand what I’m doing if I’m a, a social scientist, right? Social sciences can be seen in one part as the study of sin and its impact on individuals and institutions and communities. I can also look at the doctrine of creation. Not was the world made by God at the beginning, but does God sustain the world right now? Does God care about stuff? That’s often linked to a theory of the good. That also can be applied to the social sciences because you’re also studying the good in communities and institutions and individuals.
And once you realize that, then it gives you a kind of a theological lens to what kind of work you’re doing. And this helps us understand why we might be doing the kind of work that we do. And one of the motivations is just because this is the world that God has created, and it’s, it’s a calling to discover that world, to understand that world. It’s also true that as we understand that world better, we can do more good, very obvious in fields like medicine or engineering, a little less obvious in theoretical physics, but that’s also it can be a very strong motivator for doing this work. So I think this kind of calling, I think we can have a real genuine calling to the academy that’s really important.
I mean for me, this was a not, not a theoretical question. When I had finished my graduate school, I was, you know, invited by a large Christian organization to help, to run it basically. And I remember thinking that would be quite exciting. I could do Christian, you know, real Christian work full-time, all the time, have some influence. And I prayed about it and just really felt that wasn’t the right calling for me. They then hired somebody else to be their CEO who, who was, she was much better than I would have ever been, so that was definitely a confirmation.
But I also, that forced me to think about why am I devoting my life to these physics questions. And I think it’s because that can be a real calling from God to just understand something better about the world. And sometimes when I’ve discovered something new, which happens, you know, occasionally and I see something new, I really, it’s just amazing, and I want to praise the God who made that bit of the world that I’ve now understood. And I think that in and of itself can be a perfectly good motivator for the academic calling.
Todd Ream: Thank you. What virtues, particularly moral and intellectual virtues, have you found are important for individuals to cultivate if they’re seeking to flourish as physicists or theoretical physicists? And then what vices do we also need to be mindful of which may threaten that ability to flourish?
Ard Louis: Rather than answering that question in general, I’m going to answer it with one specific angle that I’m actually writing about with a friend of mine at Cambridge called Simeon Zahl. So the founding of the modern scientific methods, part of which happened here in Oxford with the founding of the Royal Society, was heavily influenced by a kind of re-understanding of the doctrine of sin that came with the Reformation. And the idea is basically if sin affects us and affects our ability to understand truth about the world, so the noetic effects of sin, then we need to work in communities where others can check our work and make sure that we’re not doing something wrong, and we need to go out and test our ideas in the natural world. We can’t just sit on our armchairs and think about them and believe that they’re true.
The very famous theoretical physicist Richard Feynman once said, “The first principle of science is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool. After that, you can just be conventionally honest.” So I think that principle, he’s basically rearticulating the kind of ideas that people like Robert Boyle and Bacon and others articulated much more clearly in theological terms at the founding of modern, of the modern scientific method, is that you always want to worry that you might fool yourself.
And so that’s why you need to do research in community. I tell my students, “You can’t think about this stuff on your own. You need to test your ideas with others constantly because you can fool yourself.” I mean, obviously, you know, we, we want to be honest. It’s kind of boring if you see scientific fraud or someone who’s dishonest, I mean, it’s bad, but we all know that’s wrong, right. The much more tricky thing is when do we fool ourselves, right. When do we get things wrong?
That’s why we, as imperfect as it is, and as irritating as it is, things like peer review are absolutely critical to the scientific method. And so I think that’s probably the most important principle, is that we have that kind of humility, realizing that we can be wrong, that we need others to look at our work. And those can be others that are here in the here and now. Those can be others that are coming after us that, that reexamine our work. But that we are often wrong, that we see through a glass darkly.
And that’s actually a deeply Christian idea. Historically, had a huge impact on the founding of modern science. It’s articulated in the kind of quotes I gave you by Richard Feynman. And I think that Christians really would do well to remember that that’s also why we invest in institutions. Like, why do we have Christian institutions of higher learning? It’s because we can’t think about these things on our own without there being a community around us who spend a lot of time thinking about this and who check and correct and re-correct our ideas. You need that kind of sustained long-term investment in, in institutions.
I think the Scandal of the Evangelical Mind that Mark Noll so articulated, I think, almost 40 years ago, is actually about, in his case, evangelicals losing sight of the very doctrine of sin that was so important in the, the, the founding of, of evangelical Christianity. And that’s because they stopped understanding that they needed to build long-term institutions to, to be able to engage with the life of the mind because they felt they could just do it on their own, right, in that kind of populist way.
And that’s fun. It’s, it’s, it’s kind of interesting because it’s actually so deep in the founding narrative, and they somehow lost touch with their own roots, and that’s a tragedy.
Todd Ream: Yeah, absolutely. Before we close our conversation then today, I want to ask you to perhaps extend this thinking even a little bit more relation to the Church. And in what ways can the Church be a partner that supports theoretical physicists? And in what ways can theoretical physicists also be supportive partners of the Church?
Ard Louis: Well, so I think that’s, those are excellent questions that are hard to give short answers to. But the first, I think, is that it’s important for churches to support people who are theoretical physicists, for example in their callings and help them discern their callings. So they need to, rather than them thinking that’s a kind of strange thing that people do, why are you not doing real work? Um, why aren’t you doing the activist work that we care about? It’s important for churches to support the life of the mind more generally and understand its importance.
It’s also important for churches to support people that are on the front lines of the academy spiritually and help make them more rounded people. So for example, for me, it’s really important when I’m in church that I meet people who are not academics, who help me kind of you know, relativize some of the things that we sometimes get very insensitive about as academics. We tend to think of ourselves as the center of the universe, and it’s helpful to have people sometimes around you for whom that’s not the case. So those are all helpful ways that they can keep us grounded.
That’s something churches often do well, what they have more difficulty with is understanding this as a calling. And I think for those of us who are, you know, Christians in the academy, it’s important that we try to explain to our fellow Christians who are not academics what the big ideas are, where they’re going, how this interacts with the life of the Church. And, you know, the academy doesn’t reward that kind of work, and so we have to do that, I think, anyway, even though it’s not necessarily rewarded.
I mean, in an ideal world, we would change the incentive structures to make that more important. Um, I also think that in some cases, it’s precisely by the, the guilds that we’re in in our academic worlds are often also very determining about what’s important and what’s not important. And we can get stuck in certain ruts. And sometimes talking to the Church can help us break out of those ruts. It can help us, as Christian scholars, maybe have a richer set of questions that we might be interested in, a richer set of ideas that would be intellectually very fruitful. So I think that it can go both ways back and forth.
I mean, right now, I’d say, you know, in the evangelical church or in the kind of, you know, more orthodox Protestant church, these connections have become very weak. There’s a lot of suspicion of the academy. Academics, if I speak to academics and ask them about their Church, they often moan. That’s very, that’s a dangerous, both for the academics and for the Church. In that situation, that’s, you know, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a scandal, as Mark Noll points out, and it’s something that is incredibly important that we try to work on and mitigate.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Thank you. Thank you very much.
Our guest has been Ard Louis, Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Oxford. Thank you for taking the time to share your insights and wisdom with us.
Ard Louis: Thank you. It was a great pleasure.
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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.
