Laura: How do religion and science meet in a mythological context? How do they explain good and evil? Do religion and science have something to offer each other? And how do scientific ideas influence religious and philosophical ideas?
Hello and welcome to Matter and Beyond, I’m Laura Wells. Today we will hear from Dr. John Albright, a physicist specializing in high energy physics also called particle physics. He brings a unique perspective to the apparent conflict between religion and science.
Male: The complexity and intellectual challenge of physics was initially what drew Dr. Albright to the field. His definition of physics itself reflects appreciation for explorations in new ways of envisioning ideas or establish understandings.
Dr. Albright: I define physics as the science in which you consider only the simplest systems and then analyze them completely. And it’s the completeness of the analysis that makes physics difficult. It requires a good deal of mathematics more so than most other science and so, therefore, physics has this reputation for difficulty. And I went into physics I think because it was pretty difficult and it was the only subject that made me worked hard.
Male: High energy physics also known as particle physics is especially captivating to him. His experience with boredom in teaching more basic and fundamental physics reflects his overall interest in complexity and the creative leaps that are possible in higher level physics.
Dr. Albright: Well I’ve called high energy because the only ways that we can figure out to study the smallest things are by bombarding atoms and nuclear with the highest energy particles. It has to do with the quantum mechanical motion, the faster the particle is going the shorter is the wavelength. And if you want to see great detail, you have to use illumination at short wavelength. This is true for light.
Male: The history of high energy physics goes back to the first nuclear reactors which significantly increased our knowledge of the nucleus of an atom.
Dr. Albright: When Enrico Ferming built the first reactor, that’s very low energy physics, and it gave rise to considerable information about the nucleus of the atom. And then after the war, firmly came back to Chicago from Los Alamos, and wanted to get more detail about the nucleus and the way to do it is to go to high energy bombardment.
Male: Work with high energy bombardment revealed fascinating and surprising results. Over a period of several decades, scientists discovered the host of previously unknown subatomic particles. After such a period of intense discovery, the path of high energy physics has altered its course.
Dr. Albright: Well the future of high energy particle physics is very much a question mark because we are not discovering whole host of new particles anymore. The progress of high energy physics since then has been to go to higher energy in the hopes of finding qualitatively different things and that hope really hasn’t been fulfilled.
Male: Dr. Albright’s interests now focus on more theoretical approaches to physics. Rigorous travel and teaching schedule in the 1980’s took its toll and convinced him to slow down. Celetrons and chaos theory are current interests.
Dr. Albright: Celetrons are terribly important and most people haven’t heard of them. Tsunami is an example of a celetron, it’s an organize wave on the surface of the ocean which when it hits the shore does terrible things. But the idea that you can have organized wave in a medium where you expect chappy little waves instead of one great big one, the mathematics there is really interesting, not so easy and I got all interested in that.
Male: Also in line with his appreciation for all things complex, Dr. Albright takes on fractogeometry and chaos theory.
Dr. Albright: And then there are fractos, those are non-linear like the mandlebrook set or you have an extremely intricate pattern which the smaller the scale you look on it, the more it looks like when it look when it was big. And then there’s chaos theory which is a non-linear theory. Any linear theory, physics, biology or anything else is not going to produce chaos. But if there’s non-linearity, then you can expect the possibility of chaos.
Male: Around this time, he developed a new interest in the relationship between religion and science. The relief from constant travel, gave Dr. Albright the opportunity to teach doctoral seminar on physics to humanity students. He had students from literature, philosophy and religion backgrounds.
Dr. Albright: And so these students in the first instance learned from me something about determinism and chance. The religious and humanistic dimension is predestination versus free will. But after about 1600 the philosophers and scientists took over that field and the theologians are very little new to it since 1600.
Male: At that point in history, certain questions were claimed by each area of thought, religion or science. For many people, this inherently means conflict. For Dr. Albright on the other hand, it means finding a way to bring the answers of humanity together from all perspectives.