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Most people haven’t been kept up nights over the last
30 years or so by the mystery of the missing solar neutrinos.
For physicists, however, the problem has been both real and
serious; scientists had consistently been able to detect
only about half the number of neutrinos which prevailing
models indicated should be emitted from our sun. This raised
the possibility that they either didn’t understand something
fundamental about the thermonuclear reaction that heats the
sun, or that they didn’t understand something fundamental
about neutrinos—subatomic particles, classified as electron-neutrinos,
muon-neutrinos or tau-neutrinos.
As a physicist, these questions were very much a matter
of interest to Fr. Paul Nienaber, who spends as much of his
break time as he can at Fermilab, in Batavia, Ill., looking
into the behavior of neutrinos. It was important news to
Fr. Nienaber, in June of last year, when the Sudbury Neutrino
Observatory, in Canada, finally uncovered the reason for
the discrepancy between the number of neutrinos predicted
versus the number observed: the neutrinos oscillate in transit
between the sun and the earth, changing half of them in ways
that make them difficult to detect if you don’t know
what to look for. Fr. Nienaber’s current experimental
research at Fermilab focuses on more precisely explaining
how and why this happens.
Currently, Fr. Nienaber is the only Jesuit on campus working
outside the humanities, and this adds an extra layer of complexity
to the roles that he juggles. But his approach to teaching
is very much informed by his study of both theology and philosophy,
and by an alternation, over the years, between being a teacher
and being a student.
“One of the most valuable lessons I learned from a
diocesan priest, 25 years ago,” he says, “was that
you don’t preside over, you preside among. And that’s
the same thing that happens with me in the classroom: I don’t
teach over, I teach among. In physics education
research it’s called going from being the-sage-on-the-stage
to being the-guide-on-the-side.”
He recalls with pleasure, as well, an analogy drawn by another
friend serving as a diocesan priest: “He said, diocesan
priests are like shepherds and Jesuits are like sheepdogs.
We run around the edges of the flock, and pick up the people
who are on the margins. And I think that’s what we do
at our best. We stand at the center of our disciplines—I
stand at the center of physics, and I say this is what physics
means—but I also stand on those interface edges where
science comes up against society, where science comes up
against theology, where science comes up against ethics,
and you stand at the interface, and to the extent that you’re
able, you interpret in both directions. You don’t withdraw
to the middle and say the center must be held; you stand
on the edges and say, ‘I know this is hard, and I know
this is messy, but I’m going to stand here because I
know that there’s something valuable here.’ The
growth takes place at the edges.”
Moving back to the church from the academy, Fr. Nienaber
closes the loop: “Vatican II says the Church is the
people of God. So, welcome to this zany, multifaceted, weird,
human, messy, beautiful, gorgeous church!”
One current academic project about which Fr. Nienaber is
particularly excited is a proposal for the National Science
Foundation. “With two other faculty members—one
at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania and one at Embry-Riddle
University, an aeronautical university in Prescott, Ariz.—I’ve
put together a proposal to bring six students [two from each
institution] to spend a semester at Fermilab. The students
will take four faculty-supervised courses: one lecture, one
research laboratory, a particle physics seminar, and a practicum/seminar
on the goals and techniques of communicating science.”
The teaching of science is obviously at the heart of this
proposal. But in addition to giving undergraduates more hands-on
experience in an elite national lab, Fr. Nienaber is also
interested in a more complex and thorough process of academic
and professional socialization, one that does not slight
the humanities-side skills that working scientists need to
be successful.
“We never teach our students these things,” he
laments. “That’s the problem. And what happens
is they sort of pick it up—if they’re lucky! They’re
in a group either as undergraduate researchers or as graduate
students, where this sort of thing is taught to them, and
they’re socialized into, how you give a 10-minute talk,
how you give a 20-minute talk, how to give an hour-long talk,
how to write an article for the local newspaper, how to write
a letter to the editor, how to write for a magazine like Science
News, how to write to the government, how to talk to
funding agencies, how to communicate with the general public.”
If the project is accepted, Fr. Nienaber hopes to have the
first Holy Cross students out in Illinois in September 2003;
and, ultimately, this will enable him to expand and enrich
the kinds of courses he is able to offer at Holy Cross as
well.
Donald N.S. Unger is a free-lance journalist from Worcester,
Mass.
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