REFLECTING ON MY CHRISTIAN HERITAGE

Charles P. Poole, Jr.

Written February 2005; revised June 29, 2006

As a physicist my industrial career involved one year spent designing radar components for Westinghouse, followed by six years spent testing and studying petrochemicals and catalysts for the Gulf Oil Corp. using electron spin resonance (ESR) and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) instrumentation. From 1964 to 1994 I was on the faculty of the University of South Carolina teaching and directing thesis research projects. This research involved mainly ESR and superconductivity, plus several articles written on Clifford Algebras. When I retired in 1994 I found that most of my citations in the Science Citation Index were from the books that I had written and coauthored rather than from the articles that I had published, so I decided to concentrate on writing books during my retirement. The research had been rather routine, and had not led to any major discoveries, so the citations for the research articles were somewhat limited. Overall this lifetime career resulted in about 2⁷ or 128 journal articles, a dozen chapters and review articles, and 20 books. I am grateful for my collaboration with my fellow professor, Horacio A. Farach, who was a coauthor on almost all of the publications that appeared during my tenure as a professor.

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I have always been interested in the academic side of religion, and after four years of study I was ordained a permanent deacon in the Catholic Church on June 26, 1993. For over 50 years my family, science, and religion had been the main foci of my life, and at the beginning of 2004 I wrote the initial chapters of this proposed book “Reflections of a Scientist on His Christian Heritage.” These chapters are an attempt to correlate my beliefs and my experiences as a Catholic and as a scientist based on the premise that there is one reality in the world, with the spiritual and the physical, that is, with God and science, as important components of it.

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In June 2005 I established my first website   consideringpiusx.com , and on St. Patrick’s Day 2006 my second website rciaresources.com went on line. Both concern religious issues. Since these were moderately successful, it seemed appropriate to post on the web draft chapters of the present proposed book on science and theology to give others the opportunity to criticize it, and hopefully help to improve it, prior to publication as hard copy. The chapters of this book are being written in a somewhat random order, as the spirit moves me, and then posted on this website in draft form. No attempt will be made to coordinate them with each other until many more have been completed. In most cases adding references is being postponed until a later date. Several of the chapters are based on material written a long time ago, but most of them are totally new. Some are written for a general audience, and others are more specialized. I am anxious to receive comments, critiques, long lists of errors, etc., from as many friends and other interested parties as I can get. Unfavorable critiques are sometimes the most helpful, and often the most appreciated. Suggestions for books that I could profitably read would be most welcome. Dates are given for the completion of the initial and subsequent revised drafts of each chapter, and sometimes the date of an earlier article is mentioned. The sidebar of the main menu lists the categories which link to the chapters. Every chapter does not fit precisely into a category, but of necessity must be assigned to one to appear here.

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