Quantum Leap

Quantum Leap

Polkinghorne’s office was on the first floor of a hundred-year-old building that used to house the university’s printing press. The building was tired, its stone façade crumbling. There was nothing quaint or delightfully British about the three-story structure; it was packed into its surroundings like so many of the university’s facilities. The interior was equally bland, with the exception of the contents of one cupboard in a lecture hall. The cupboard held a blackboard with equations preserved for eternity by a clear coat of varnish. The equations had been written years before by a visiting lecturer named Albert Einstein.

The building had spacious rooms, including a tea room large enough to accommodate faculty and graduate students from the research areas housed in the building: particle physics, general relativity and cosmology, astrophysics, fluid mechanics, and solid mechanics. Reflecting their natural territoriality, though, scientists from each of these areas sat at different tables in the tea room.

Polkinghorne’s office was large enough for the five colleagues to gather and choose the post-doctoral students to continue at Cambridge. The faculty gathered in his office knew each other well. Two were former students of Polkinghorne’s. They discussed eight candidates, evaluating their strengths and weaknesses, and reached an easy consensus within twenty minutes. After a few moments of silence, the professors gathered their papers and began shuffling their feet, indicating they were ready to be dismissed. “Before you go,” Polkinghorne said, “I have something to tell you.”

The tiny audience settled back into their chairs.

“I am leaving the university to enter the priesthood. I will be enrolling in seminary next year.”

There was stunned silence in the room for several seconds. Peter Landshoff, a long-time colleague, broke the silence: “I did not foresee this, but had I been told that you were going to leave physics, I would have guessed what you would do next.” Another colleague said, “I don’t know what to say, but I am moved by what you’ve told us.” One atheist in the audience was both wistful and wary: “You don’t know what you’re doing.”

Polkinghorne’s announcement of his impending transformation from physicist to priest was big news in that small community, and it didn’t take long for word to spread. Even in the tea room, the tables that normally held separate conversations, converged on a common question: “John, what were you thinking?”.

Excerpt taken from Quantum Leap by Karl Giberson and Dean Nelson, published by Monarch, an imprint of Lion Hudson plc, 2011. Copyright © 2011 Karl Giberson and Dean Nelson.