I received an interesting email a couple of months ago from a woman named Sarah Nagel, who reads Real Live Preacher. She was going to be in San Antonio and wondered if we might get together and chat.

Every sort of life has its own hardships and blessings. One of the hardships and blessings of being a minister/writer is accumulating too many relationships to keep up with. As I’m in a mode of simplifying my life where possible, I thought perhaps I should pass on this conversation. But then I noticed the domain attached to her email address. Rice.edu. That was curious to me, so I googled her name and found that she is a Ph.D. graduate of Rice University in the department of physics and astronomy and is currently lecturing there.

Ooh, that changes things. Astronomers and physicists are like rock stars to me. I don’t understand the mathematical language with which they express their understanding of reality, but I’m thrilled with even the simplified explanations they offer to lay persons. And I think that I can sense the grandeur of these truths even in that diluted form.

I wrote back and we set a date. I arranged to have the entire afternoon free on a Friday.

“Wow, my own personal physicist,” I said to myself with glee. “I am now the luckiest man in America!”

She came with her boyfriend, a computer programmer and linguistic philosopher who seemed to know something about, well, everything. I lured the two of them into my office and peppered her with questions for a couple of hours. Then Jeanene and I went out to dinner with them and continued the conversation. It was an absolutely wonderful day.

There was so much I wanted to know.

"I understand particle reality. And I know how waves move, of course. But what ARE waves? Are they ways that particles move, or are they their own kind of reality? And if they are their own kind of reality, could you describe that to me somehow?"

"What is dark matter? Is it true that it makes up 96% of reality? And do we call it dark because we haven’t figured out how to perceive it, or is it a kind of reality that is so completely different from us that we will never be able to interact with it at all?"

"I understand that you fire a single photon of light from some sort of gun or whatever in that classic quantum experiment with the slits in the paper. What I want to know is: who made that gun? I mean, how do you design a machine to fire a single sub-atomic particle? And how do you know if you really ARE just firing one photon?"

I suppose you’ll be wanting to know how she answered those questions. That could be a problem. If you consider how simplified her answers must have been for me, and if you further consider how I’ve lost the edges of those memories in the weeks that have passed, I’m certain I cannot do justice to her answers.

Briefly:

1. Particles seem easy to understand. They have their own energy and fly around colliding with each other. It’s the sort of thing we see every day in life. Waves are strange. They involve movement. And that movement transfers energy through a medium in some mysterious way. Like when you see wind waves moving across a wheat field. The stalks of wheat and the individual air particles don’t move all that far, but the motion itself moves great distances. Electromagnetic waves, like light, do not require a medium for their energy to move. That seems very strange. And now, far from feeling more enlightened in these matters, I’m not sure I understand anything about matter, whether in particle form, in motion, or in any state at all.

2. Yes. Dark matter makes up about 96% of all that is, which is a little sobering, considering we make a lot of broad statements about reality for creatures that can only perceive about 4% of it. But no one knows if we simply cannot see dark matter or if it exists in some way that is outside of our ability to perceive it at all. That’s the thing about dark matter. We can’t perceive it, so we can’t even know if we will ever have the ability to perceive it.

3. They do indeed have such a gun. Light is directed through a tube and exposed to elements of very low temperature such that collisions are caused. Somehow, by the process of elimination and by repeated actions, they are able to be quite certain that only one photon is emerging from the end of the tube, thus enabling some rather astonishing experiments.

To be honest, she lost me with that last one. I just don’t have the requisite knowledge to comprehend how they make this photon gun thingy. But here’s the deal: If you spend more than a few minutes with Sarah Nagel - or any serious physicist - you will realize that these are not the sort of people who take this kind of thing lightly. They aren’t going to take someone’s word for it if he says he just fired a single photon out of a tube. The makeup of that gun and all of the physics behind it are worked out ahead of time in a completely other set of disciplines.

If you, like me, are not a physicist and have taken a different path in life, you will never have enough knowledge to understand a lot of what goes on behind their experiments, even if you can understand the experiments themselves.

It comes down to trust. I trust Sarah.

Sarah tells me that the people who design these “photon guns” are certain that only one photon is fired from them. So I accept that respectfully and we can move on to what happens when you shoot a single photon of light at a point between two slits in a sheet of paper, which is where things really get interesting.

I suppose you’d like to know a bit more about that experiment. Well, I’m definitely in over my head now, so you’ll have to find your own personal physicist and talk to her yourself. Sarah Nagel is mine, so she’s taken. But I’m sure you’ll find someone. Try the Yellow Pages.

This is an interesting twist to the story: Sarah came to San Antonio to see ME. She has read Real Live Preacher, and clearly my writing has meant something to her. Maybe that is because I am called to drink from many different wells and draw them all together with the art of writing. And she has been called to drink very deeply from the well of physics. I don’t really know what she was hoping to get from me, but for one afternoon a physicist and a theologian/writer sat together in peace, talking and laughing and each valuing the other. I love her passionate search for truth in the Cosmos, and she loves my quirky, artistic ramblings about life or God or whatever you want to call whatever it is I think I’m writing about.

And now everything I’ve told you leads me to this truth that I believe, though I must confess that I have no proof for it save my own experience. But it seems right to me.

We all matter. All of us. And there is no way that any one kind of human search for truth, much less any one human, will ever be able to find all the answers to the most fascinating truths about life and existence. You will have to trust someone. People have given their entire lives to creating single photon shooting machines. Will you trust them, or will you spend two or three decades gathering the knowledge you will need to check the validity of their answers?

I find that trusting people is its own kind of spiritual exercise. I am deeply impressed by the strong and unwavering commitment of scientists to their method. It takes that kind of commitment to empirical data to discover their kinds of truths. Brother and sister scientist must take that path. And I love them for it. I am not ashamed that I cannot follow them. I don’t even speak the language. My path was set in another way long ago. But my ignorance is no shame for me with Sarah. So I can come to her with joy, like a child, and drink in an afternoon’s worth of her knowledge and her journey.

And I think I saw in her eyes a certain trust she has in me. “Here’s a man,” she might have said, “who has given his life to unraveling and understanding the oldest story/poems of humanity. He and thousands like him testify that there is still meaning to be found in these scriptures. They seek communion with deep forces of creation through ancient spiritual disciplines. And I trust this man. At least I trust him enough to respect him and sit and talk with him for a couple of hours.”

Back of everything is a love for truth and a desire for knowledge and wholeness and happiness. That we all share. Why would we be so drawn to God unless we have a love and desire for truth somehow embedded deeply into our humanity? Pilate, a proto-scientist, rightly asked, “What is truth?” And Jesus, the son of man, did not tell him. But he did once say that the truth would set us free.

And why would brother and sister scientist seek truth with such vigor if they had no spiritual connection to it? Why, if there were no desire in their souls, no emotional drive to know and conquer and to find joy in the discovery of what is?

I tell you this: If I had the time I would hear all of your stories. You could drag whatever expertise you claim and whatever experience is yours to San Antonio, and I would sit with you and love you and marvel at what you bring to the greater human search for knowledge. We are not all equal in this journey. Some are more equipped with intelligence, some with emotion, others with experiences that burned truth into them with a painful fire.

But we all matter. We all play our part. I cannot gather every precious bit of knowledge to myself and drink it, though I would love to. But I can love everyone who carries a part of our journey forward. And I can hear their stories with whatever time and energy is given me.

This is a goodness because this is a human communion that is a sacrament we all may share together.

rlp

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