“Truth Seeking” ft. the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Ian Hutchinson I Saturdays at Seven – Season Three, Episode Nine

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In the ninth episode of the third season of the “Saturdays at Seven” conversation series, Todd Ream talks with Ian Hutchinson, Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Hutchinson opens by introducing the legacy of the tokamak in the history of nuclear science. Initially developed by the Soviets, the tokamak offered considerable optimism concerning nuclear fusion. That optimism compelled the Soviets to invite scientists from other nations to observe and learn from the progress they made. Comparable advances were then made in Australia where, after completing his undergraduate work in physics, Hutchinson then spent several years as a doctoral student. Thanks to efforts made in labs such as the one he led at MIT and at France’s ITER, the opportunity to harness the power of fusion as a means of energy production is within reach. Hutchinson then discusses how his faith has informed his vocation as a scholar, service he offered through lectures he gave for the Veritas Forum, and two of his books concerning the relationship shared by science and faith. Hutchinson closes by discussing the critical role truth-seeking plays in guiding the life of universities and shaping the academic vocation. Although he emphasizes that role has been compromised by several forces in recent years, he remains convinced that efforts such as the Global Faculty Initiative will offer a course correction by drawing scholars across the disciplines into charitable and collaborative relationships.

• Ian Hutchinson, Can a Scientist Believe in Miracles?: An MIT Professor Answers Questions on God and Science (InterVarsity Press, 2018)
• Ian Hutchinson, Monopolizing God: A Scientist Refutes Religion-Denying, Reason-Destroying Scientism (FIAS Publishing, 2011)
• Ian Hutchinson, Principles of Plasma Diagnostics (Cambridge University Press, 2005)

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 Ian Hutchinson, Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Thank you for joining us.

Ian Hutchinson: You are welcome. I’m looking forward to it.

Todd Ream: To begin our conversation concerning your vocation as a physicist and engineer, I’d like to ask you to introduce our audience to machines that are known as tokamaks. What are they and what role do they play in the history of nuclear engineering?

Ian Hutchinson: I probably need to back up a little bit and talk about the fact that nuclear binding energy is something that we humans depend upon. We depend upon it primarily because it is the energy source of the sun and stars, and that energy source arises from reactions between the nuclei of particles, in which light elements are formed together, fused together, as we say, and become heavier elements, and that releases a lot of energy.

Nuclear binding energies are approximately a million times stronger than chemical binding energies and so we have nuclear energy of course, in practice on earth at the moment, which arises from a different form of reaction, which is a fission reaction, which is taking heavy elements like uranium and breaking them up. Fusion is the opposite. Okay? And fusion is a form of energy, which we humans might aspire to use. It has certain advantages. It’s potentially a clean form of energy and implement on earth.

And a tokamak, to come to your question, a tokamak is a way of trying to bring down the energy source of the Sun and stars on earth. Now to make fusion reactions take place, because nuclei of different atoms are positively charged, to make those reactions take place requires a lot of energy to overcome the repulsion of the nuclei, both positively charged.

And the way that energy arises in stars is by high temperature. So high temperatures correspond to the particles move of the gaseous medium called a plasma, actually the gaseous medium, moving around with very high energies, and they’re sufficiently high at the center of, let’s say, the sun to have fusion reactions taking place.

But those temperatures are so high, hundreds or certainly tens and sometimes a hundred million degrees Celsius that to make fusion reactions take place on earth requires something quite extraordinary because of course, the temperatures on earth are much less than that. And if you have something that’s, let’s say a hundred million degrees Celsius temperature, you can’t simply put it into a material bottle of some sort.

So a tokamak, which is trying to do this process, uses magnetic fields, immaterial confinement of the plasma in order to reach those very high temperatures. And the tokamak is one of the ways, perhaps the leading way of using magnetic fields with the ultimate objective of making fusion reactions take place on earth.

Todd Ream: Thank you. Why is it, from my understanding, that it’s historically and scientifically perhaps significant, that the Soviets, I believe, as early as the 1950s were the first to operate such machines?

Ian Hutchinson: Yes fusion research in the 1950s, which is when it first got going, we basically at the beginning of the 1950s was classified research, secret research. And it was opened up only in about approximately 1958 when people realized that even though fusion reactions are what goes on in a hydrogen bomb the search for controlled nuclear fusion, which is what we require to generate useful energy, with something in which international collaboration should, should be a part of what one does.

Well, the Soviets in the fifties developed this thing, which they called a tokamak, which simply means a toroidal, which means donut shaped magnetic chamber. And so it’s an acronym from the, from the Russian for the, for toroidal magnetic chamber.

In America and in the West other magnetic confinement approaches had been studied. And one of them, which we’ll probably come back to later is, was called accelerator. And that was pursued in the US. Predominantly in Britain, there were other toroidal devices, all donut shaped actually. And I’ll explain if you like, what, why that is.

But broadly speaking, the Russian connection was that in the 1960s, it was discovered, or the Russians started to claim that they had very good confinement from their tokamaks, which, which weren’t present in so much present in the other nations. And what happened was the British sent a team who had developed a way of measuring the temperature and density of the plasmas. These ionized gases were being confined using magnetic field.

And they went to the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow and, and implemented this measurement and their measurements confirmed the claims that the Russians had made. And so the skeptical West, who preferred to think that Russians were kidding us, realized that tokamak worked very well, better than the other approaches that were being pursued and the rest of it was history. 

Todd Ream: Would you describe then your involvement in the development of tokamak and in what ways did they interest you? What drew you to them as you were beginning through your scientific career?

Ian Hutchinson: I went to, you can probably tell I grew up in the U.K. I went to Cambridge University, and I became very interested in these plasmas, these ionized gases and the ways that they interact with mag electric and magnetic fields in part through a very entertaining and, and interesting and clear lecturer that I had there.

And I decided that I wanted to go to Australia for my graduate studies. And I went there and found somewhat to my surprise that they had a very interesting magnetic confinement device, which operated like a tokamak. And this was in the early 1970s. In the early 1970s, everyone in the fusion business was busily trying to build or convert their machines into tokamaks because it had been established that tokamaks worked very well.

And so I arrived in Australia in the very early days of the widespread development of tokamak And had an opportunity to do experiments on what we used somewhat, Riley to say, was the first tokamak in the free world. Because it was sort of an, it was a tomac by accident. I mean, it wasn’t particularly by design, but it was, it operated like a tokamak and so I had terrific opportunities as a graduate student in a very small group and you know, relatively modest machine to do experiments on to tokamaks.

And, and these were, to me, these were, this was an opportunity to do research on plasma physics, which was what I was interested in. 

Todd Ream: As you just mentioned, plasma physics is what interested you and drew you to it, and eventually you became a widely recognized leader in this area as highlighted, for example, by your book, Principles of Plasma Diagnostics, which was published by Cambridge University Press in 2002. Would you introduce our audience in a little greater detail to plasma physics and what its significance is here? You’ve echoed it a couple of times.

Ian Hutchinson: So a plasma is in short an ionized gas. If you heat a gas sufficiently hot, the electrons are stripped away from the nuclei and they can move around freely. As a result, this gas, this plasma, can conduct electricity, and because of that, it interacts importantly in important ways with electric and magnetic fields. And so that makes it a very different state of matter than the regular gases that we’re familiar with. Like the air in this room. Ionized gases interact primarily by local collisions. And so, that’s one way in which the collective behavior of a gas that’s ionized, that’s the main way in which it takes place.

But in plasmas, because they’re ionized, the more important reactions are these interactions between the particles and the electric and magnetic fields. And, and this is, this means that it’s essentially a different state of matter and we sometimes call the plasma the fourth state of matter, you know, solid, liquid, gas, plasma.

In fact, most of the visible universe is made up of plasma beyond the cold places like planets, which on which we live. The universe out there of stars and of the regions between stars is mostly populated by ionized gases. And so plasma physics is extremely important for understanding the universe, astronomy, black holes, all these kinds of things that are part of the modern physics of space and the cosmos.

And so plasma physics is important in its own right, but it’s also been extremely important, the application of plasma physics to this human goal of making fusion energy on earth a reality. And indeed, a lot of what we’ve learned about how plasmas work has come from trying to explore fusion energy and make confined plasmas. 

Todd Ream: Thank you. I want to transition now to asking you a little bit more about your growth as a scientist and the things that interest you. You mentioned earlier that you went to Cambridge, earned a bachelor’s degree in physics and then made the effort to go to the Australian National University to do doctoral work there. And that you mentioned that you also had a lecturer, who captured your attention in that way.

Can you say, sort of as an emerging graduate student, what was it about that lecture that captured your attention and maybe what other experiences were going on at the time that galvanized that sense of calling?

Ian Hutchinson: Well, the most important thing that became a calling for me at Cambridge University was that I became a Christian. I didn’t grow up as a Christian. My family weren’t believers. I went to a school, which was nominally associated with the Christian Church and, you know, there were things like prayers and, and hymns sung in the daily gatherings. But I didn’t really believe it. And I wasn’t particularly against it, but it wasn’t something that I participated in or was committed to.

And when I went to Cambridge University, I went with the idea of being not just a scientist. I wanted to be a physicist, but also to be an intellectual. And so I read widely and um, and I explored philosophy as well as, as well as science and mathematics and so forth.

And I think the most influential thing at Cambridge was that I had two close student friends in my year, both of whom were, you know, smart people like me. And they were both committed Christians and their lives were attractive to me and I enjoyed their friendship and so forth. And it was really in my second year at Cambridge that I reached the point in part by listening to lectures that they had invited me to, my friends had invited me to, I began to realize a couple of things that I hadn’t understood about Christianity from my high school experience.

And these were basically this, that, first of all, there is very good evidence for the resurrection, not scientific evidence per specifically per se, but historical evidence for the resurrection and, and for the claims of Christianity. Not to mention the fact that Christianity was indeed the foundation of the civilization that I could see all around me at Cambridge University, Cambridge University, the history and the development of science for that matter.

And the second one was that, Christianity is not just a theory or a theology, that the call of Christ is a call to a personal relationship in a certain sense with God through Christ. And those two things were new ideas to me. It seemed to me come across. And eventually I reached the point of saying, of saying that I really did believe that the resurrection of Christ was true. 

And even though I wasn’t too sure, I didn’t see a knockdown proof, absolute proof of the reality of the Christian faith. Nevertheless, I came to the point of realizing that one couldn’t really expect some come absolute intellectual proof. The Christian faith was about a personal relationship with God. And so I reached a point in my life where I committed my life to following Christ and began to experience that personal relationship. And so that was the most important development of my vocation.

At the same time you asked about this teacher he wasn’t someone with whom I had interacted as far as Christianity was concerned. But he was an extraordinary man. He was rather profoundly deaf, and yet he was an extremely good lecturer and people would occasionally try to ask him questions. And even though he was so deaf, he would usually manage to answer those questions in a way that I thought was very entertaining and very direct and, and I just appreciated his, his thought.

And quite frankly, I just found the topic of this fourth stated matter, an interesting one, and I went to Australia, not particularly because—to the Australian National University—not particularly because I thought this was going to launch my scientific career. It, it, it really wasn’t that. It was more a sense of vocation to a life of experience. And I felt it was really simply God’s will for me to go to Australia, and I obtained a fellowship to support me financially during that time and off I went. 

Todd Ream: Thank you. In addition to your study of Scripture, are there any other authors or texts that you encountered during that time that played an important role in terms of how your vocation unfolded?

Ian Hutchinson: Yeah probably the most influential thing at Cambridge was that I went to these lectures were given by a well-known speaker in the United Kingdom called Michael Green, who was at that time, well-known as a Christian apologist and speaker and, and evangelist and so forth. And I found his writing and his lectures extremely persuasive. Obviously the most I would say, I did a lot of reading around Christianity but also of philosophical discussions when I was an undergraduate.

But the most important thing for me when I became a Christian as an undergraduate, was that I joined the InterVarsity Fellowship at my college. And got to know the Christians who were interested in fellowship and understanding their faith better. And that was probably the most important thing to me.

When I went to Australia, I continued this interest in understanding the faith better. I actually, I studied Hebrew for a year. I had studied Greek as a high schooler actually. Um, so, you know, I have the doubtful benefit these days of having had a classical education. But anyway, I wanted to understand the Bible better, so I took a year’s course in Hebrew. I’ve completely forgotten what I knew about Hebrew by now.

But the other thing was that I was involved in a church, a Methodist church, and I felt a call to become a Methodist local preacher. So the Methodist church historically has always had lay preachers who are people who help to minister in the, in the Church. And I took a course in theology and various pastoral aspects to become a Methodist local preacher.

I realized even though that people around me, my friends, my Christian friends, you know, were thinking maybe I had a call to the ministry to become ordained, I realized quite, quite soon that was not my call, science and my scientific career seemed to be the way that I was going to move forward in my own personal development. And I think that’s been true, but we can talk about what happened later, if you like.

Todd Ream: Thank you. When you think about your scientific career, we’ve talked about your investment in tokamaks and plasma physics, is there a particular question or set of questions to which you’ve come back to time and again that are, you would say, are close to, or perhaps even central to your sense of vocation as a scientist?

Ian Hutchinson: Well as the majority of my career has been focused on a single question, which is, can we bring the energy source of the sun and the stars down to earth and make it available for humankind? So that’s been the driving question of the vast majority of my scientific and, and, related engineering activities.

And I became the leader of a big experiment at MIT, tokamak experiment, which was an important international facility for doing research on the magnetic confinement of plasmas and achieved, you know, in some world records, one of which we still, we still possess even though our experiment was closed down 10 years, approximately, 10 years ago after operating for 25 years. 

So this was obviously the central part of the bulk of my scientific focus and the central question. I mean, it was relatively big science, not perhaps as big as the big accelerators in Switzerland and, and those kinds of things, but, but typically my team consisted of approximately a hundred people, students engineers, PhD scientists technicians, administrators, and so forth.

So it was, for part of the time, it was the largest on campus research group in terms of its, of the size of its funding at MIT. And it was an, as I say, an international facility to which collaborators came and did important research and so forth.

So part of the challenge that surrounded that question that I was pursuing was not, not just physics and, and technical things. The engineering was an important part. The education was an important part, and quite frankly, the leadership and the management of this substantial group was a very important part too. And I think these were, you know, I would say they were, there were parts of what I, of what I did and the leadership that I gave. 

Todd Ream: I do have to ask before we go on, since you mentioned it. This world record, what’s the specific nature of that record?

Ian Hutchinson: It’s the world record for the pressure of the plasma confined by magnetic fields. So basically we have a world record for that pressure. The pressure is approximately two atmospheres, which doesn’t seem like that terribly much, but it, but it’s pretty good. And it’s better than, than has been achieved anywhere elsewhere up until now. There are many other ways in which other records could be manufactured and probably everyone could figure out they’ve got a record for something. So there are records for how long it’s been confined for, and so on and so forth. 

Todd Ream: Thank you. I had to ask when you, when you put that out there. I had to follow up and ask about that.

Ian Hutchinson: No problem.

Todd Ream: With the experience that you’ve had, the size of the team that you helped lead the experiences you were affording to the next generation of physicists, I want to ask that as the demand for safe and clean energy continues to increase, in what ways do you believe the education we are providing physicists and nuclear engineers is sufficient today or perhaps maybe there are insufficiencies in that. 

Ian Hutchinson: I’m not quite sure what you mean by insufficient, but I mean, we, we know but now a, after a long a, after many decades of research in fusion energy, we know roughly what it takes to reach the point where we can make a plasma that is reacting with fusion reactions and keeping itself hot by those reactions. And that is called ignition.

So to give you an example, sort of analogy, if in a chemical fire you can put the sticks together, you can hold a match or a lighter up against it, and some smoke comes from chemical reactions, if you take away the match or the lighter, either that those sticks can keep burning and burn themselves up and turn into a fire and burn, burn themselves up. If they do, that’s called ignition. But it’s also possible that you take the match away and the, and it just fizzles out. And that’s not ignition.

So the same idea works in fusion except that the reactions are nuclear rather than chemical. We need to reach the point where the energy that’s being released by the reactions is sufficient to keep the plasma hot, which is, you know, in the, in the case of the chemical reactions, it’s to keep the sticks hot, okay? So we haven’t actually demonstrated magnetic confinement, where that has taken place on Earth. But we’re very close to it and we think we know because of all the background research that we’ve done. We know how to do it.

And in short there’s a big experiment being built in France that’s taken extremely long time because it’s very big and very expensive, and it’s an international collaboration of seven nations and it’s hard to organize and so on and so forth. That is aimed at achieving essentially that burning plasma state or that ignited plasma state even.

And there’s also one actually that’s much smaller than the big experiment in the south of France that’s being built about 50 miles from where I am right now in Massachusetts by a commercial company called Commonwealth Fusion Systems. And they are using a new technology to produce the magnetic fields, which allows them to produce the higher magnetic fields and in, in a more compact device that is essentially a third of the size of ITER, of the big experiment in the south of France.

A third of the linear dimensions means that the volume and the mass is about 1/27 because it’s cubed. And so this is a much more cost effective way of doing that. And they hope that they’re going to achieve it this decade. Oh, let’s just say.

Todd Ream: Wow.

Ian Hutchinson: It might happen. It’s very ambitious.

So we’re in infusion research. We’re at the point where we’ve got a great deal of understanding now of what is required to achieve a burning plasma, but we’re not to the point where we’re ready to put electricity on the grid or anything like that, so we’re still in an experimental phase. 

Todd Ream: Thank you. I want to transition now to talking about your writing in other areas, in particular in relation to the intersection of your faith and science. For example, in 2011, you published Monopolizing Knowledge. Would you highlight the thesis you sought to advance in that book and what led you to write it?

Ian Hutchinson: Yeah, well, what read me, what led me to write the book was that I had throughout that previous decade been engaging very much with the writers and, and authors who collectively called the New Atheists. So these were people who had become, let’s say, more militant and more, more emphatic about their rejection of all religions, in part as a result of September the 11th attack on New York and, you know, those kinds of things.

And the New Atheist, by and large based their rejection of religion on an appeal to science and to the belief that science shows that religion is bunk. To make it, to make a short description. And I, as a scientist and a Christian consider that to be nonsense. And so I had basically been spending many opportunities throughout the decade of the ’00s speaking to university audiences about the real relationship between science and religion, or at least the relationship between science and Christianity, which is the religion that I know about. And so, what I found was that throughout much of the West, an attitude that existed, that was drawn upon by the new atheists.

And that attitude is called scientism. So it’s the view that really all of the knowledge that really counts, that’s real knowledge is obtained by the methods of science. And in my view, this was one of the biggest stumbling blocks for people to take seriously the claims of Christianity or, or to take religion seriously as a whole. And it seemed to me as a completely erroneous intellectual position because in truth you know, we know lots of things about the world that we don’t find out by the methods of science.

And if you understand what science is really about, you would recognize this. So history is an example I would usually give for an important discipline that has real knowledge, very important knowledge, arguably, but doesn’t proceed by the same approach that the natural sciences do. And so I realized that this was the biggest stumbling block for a lot of people in the intellectual world is that they had bought into scientism.

Scientism also has all kinds of debilitating or, or, or difficult implications for non-scientific disciplines. Non-scientific disciplines often become distorted by scientism because they set out to try to become sciences in a way that is sort of impossible, and therefore, ends up being a kind of vain effort. And that distorts their, their disciplines, and basically leads to all sorts of difficulty.

So monopolizing knowledge is a shorthand for saying that if you think that science monopolizes knowledge, you know, the science is all of knowledge there is, then you are, then you go down this rabbit hole, which has important consequences for all kinds of academic disciplines and also you know, has important consequences for understanding the relationship between science and faith.

So the New Atheists would, would often say things like, there’s no evidence for Christianity, let’s say. But what they were really meaning was, you, there isn’t scientific evidence to prove these things.

There’s all sorts of historical evidence that one can point to and consider in, in respect of evaluating the significance of religions, but basically they were bound up in this scientific worldview. So I, you know, I wrote this book. It was originally intended to be a book that would be of interest to a broad audience, not just scientists and not just philosophers. And it’s not really philosophy book per se, it’s not a formal philosophy book, but it is basically a repudiation of scientism and that’s what that book is about.

Todd Ream: In what ways did the writing of that book then perhaps lead to the next book along these lines that you wrote the 2018 publication by InterVarsity Press, Can a Scientist Believe in Miracles?

Ian Hutchinson: Well one of the things that it did was, what Monopolizing Knowledge did, was it basically embodied a lot of things that I’ve been saying at events where I had either a dialogue or a lecture about science and religion. And many of these were done through what is called the Veritas Forum, which is a Christian organization which helps university fellowships put on events where, to which they can invite their friends, both Christians and non-Christians, talking about the relationship of the Christian faith to various intellectual endeavors. And in my case it’s Christianity and science. So I have given many dozens of these lectures or dialogues over the years and that was one of the things that I had been doing and continued to do.

What led to the second book, which is called, Can a Scientist Believe in Miracles?, it’s actually not just about that particular question. So it wasn’t actually, that wasn’t my first choice for a title, but, but you know, the editors have their own ideas about what will sell and this kind of thing. What I did was I had many of these lectures and dialogues had been video recorded by the students and were available to me on the internet.

And so what I did was I said, I’m really interested in going back about the questions that I was asked at these because from my point of view, the most interesting thing about these dialogues and, and lectures wasn’t, you know, the lecture, the standup part of the lecture or dialogue. It was the questions. So I realized that that was the thing that was most interesting to me, and I thought that would be of interest to other people too.

And so what I did was I collected over 200 of these questions, the literal questions that I was asked by audience members or by my dialogue partners. And because I had recordings, I could literally, I mean I transcribe the questions and I didn’t edit them, essentially at all. And I organized them into themes, otherwise it would be all over the place. And that was the basis for this book. So it’s basically a book in which I go back and I look at the questions that I’ve been asked at events about science and Christianity and religion in general.

And in the first instance, it represents what young people in universities are asking about these, about this question, okay? But it also gives me an opportunity to give a more sustained answer than I was able to do, you know, live at a live event. I mean, it’s not that I repudiate my answers. I stick by my answers I gave at those events, but it is an opportunity to give a more systematic answer and to gather together some of these themes. So that’s basically what the book’s about.

Todd Ream: Thank you. Before we close our conversation today, I want to ask you about the qualities and/or characteristics that you believe define the academic vocation in particular, from your perspective as a physicist and nuclear engineer, but also as a Christian. And so what are they, and in what ways, maybe as your career progressed and the projects that you were taking on got larger, did they change over the course of your career?

Ian Hutchinson: I think this is a very important question at this particular moment for the academy and for our society. I have always and still taken the view that the academic vocation is a vocation to discovering and disseminating truth. And I think that has always been a very important part of my psyche. Truthfulness has always been the most significant virtue that I both value in others and seek in myself. I think that virtue is a Christian virtue at least as far as the West is concerned.

I don’t mean to say that those who aren’t Christians can’t be truth seekers. They can, but I do think that it is in a certain sense a Christian virtue and I think that that emphasis has been lost by many aspects of the modern academy.

So if you ask me how these things evolved in time, people often ask me, well, you, you know, you taught at MIT for 40 years, what changed over that time? And the most, most significant thing that changed was the evolution of the attitude towards truth towards what the academy should be doing and to what the mission of the academy is.

And you know, there are all sorts of very complicated things which we don’t have to go have time to go into that make up those changes, but postmodernism has repudiated the idea that there, in some respects, that there is anything about truth or the, or at any rate that we can find it. I think there’s been a whole movement towards, away from truth seeking, towards social and political activism in the universities and colleges. I think all of these things are, in my view, mistakes. I think to a large extent, missing the mission of the academy.

And I think that the vocation to discovering and disseminating truth is completely compatible with the Christian vocation to follow Christ, you know, Jesus said He’s the Way, the Truth, and the life. And to me, those two emphases of truth seeking and of spiritual connection to God through Christ have been parallel emphases in my academic vocation.

I am currently one of the co-presidents of the MIT Council on Academic Freedom. This is a grassroots initiative at MIT amongst faculty to try to recover and promote open discussion and investigation, open inquiry, academic freedom of speech and of action, and diversity of opinions and so forth.

I just think that we’ve lost, the academy has lost a great deal of its openness to dialogue across differences, and that that would be enormous. If we can recover that, this would go a great way towards recovering, first of all the standing of the universities amongst the society as a whole, but also it would help society as a whole overcome this enormous political polarization and polarizing polarization generally.

And so the, you know, I think that Christians potentially have a great deal to offer. I’m not sure that they’re always offering it but I think that those parallel vocations have been part of what I have set out to do in part through, speaking in, in universities about the relationship between science and the faith. Because in a certain sense those are two facets that mirror this question of open dialogue.

Todd Ream: You mentioned truth seeking as being fundamental to this recovery that it’s the historic commitment that’s animated the academic vocation, but it’s what must be recovered then to not only return to the kind of dialogue universities have curated, but also put them back, you know, on course in terms of mission and public confidence.

What other virtues do you believe are important to cultivate amongst our colleagues and amongst our communities that can allow for this to occur? 

Ian Hutchinson: I certainly think that there are some Christian virtues such as love that are enabling factors for collaboration, for team building, for the things which go into the sciences I’ve experienced it, mostly big science, and the academic endeavor generally.

I’ll mention another aspect of what I am active in. Um, there’s a new initiative called the Global Faculty Initiative which is curated by Terry Halliday and others, which is an international effort to enable Christian academics to exchange ideas across disciplines. And that Global Faculty Initiative, you can find it on the, on the web, is something that I think is tremendously important. And crossing academic disciplines I think is a very important thing and very, actually, very enjoyable thing.

And the reason I raise that is that the theologian Oliver O’ Donovan has recently written for the Global Faculty Initiative a brief about love and its relationship to the academy, and I think that’s a very insightful approach that he has and he’s got many things that are very rich. But I think, to make a long story short, actually this idea that love has a place to play in academy is not a new idea, but it’s one that bears reemphasizing. 

Todd Ream: Thank you very much. Our guest has been Ian Hutchinson, Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Thank you for taking time to share your insights and wisdom with us.

Ian Hutchinson: You are welcome. I’ve enjoyed it.

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Todd Ream: Thank you for joining us for Saturdays at seven Christian Scholars reviews 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.

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