A Catholic, A Croatian, A Physicist: An Interview with Dr. Bojan Tunguz
As a Roman Catholic freshman aspiring to be a Physics major, Dr. Bojan Tunguz was an ideal interviewee to open my journalistic career. Dr. Tunguz is a Visiting Professor of Physics, who, aside from his recent employment at DePauw University, has several redeeming characteristics. A Stanford graduate whose area of expertise is in Unification Theory, Dr. Tunguz has an intriguing background and worldview.
Dr. Tunguz was born in Bosnia and Herzegovinia, a socialist republic of Communist Yugoslavia. He says that he’s always considered himself a conservative, noting that he felt “as strongly as you can about it in a Communist country.”
He moved to Croatia in 1992 as one of the several million people displaced by the war taking place in Bosnia and Herzegovina, a conflict that was “the biggest war in Europe since World War II.” Croatia had already declared independence form Yugoslavia in 1991 and had just signed a UN-brokered cease-fire agreement that previous January. “The war was probably the most momentous occasion of my life and for my family,” Dr. Tunguz says. Later that year, Dr. Tunguz moved to the United States to study physics at Stanford University.
Dr. Tunguz was hired into the Physics department this year and plans to stay for both semesters. He likes Wabash’s atmosphere very much. “I feel that I am given a lot of freedom in terms of how [I] can conduct the classroom.” The all-male aspect of the college originally took him aback. “But after a while you realize that students are just students,” he says, also commenting that “there is some sort of camaraderie between all men.”
When I asked him about his thoughts on the Gentlemen’s Rule, he said that it paralleled the sort of disciplinary system in place at his alma mater Stanford. They had an “Honor Code” that was very similar to the Gentlemen’s Rule, and he said that such a rule “was one of my fondest things that impressed me the most.” He especially appreciates the fact that students are treated like adults and do not need to worry about small regulations that “you are bound to break” sooner or later. “The word gentleman implies adults.”
Physics has been a part of most of Dr. Tunguz’s life. “I always had a technical, scientific mindset.” Growing up in Bosnia and Herzegovinia, he started specializing in physics in the sixth grade. “In my country, you have expectations to start specializing in a particular field really early on.” He went to high school in a specialized Mathematics and Science high school, where he had a rather proscribed curriculum of science and physics classes. On this note, he says he prefers the liberal arts philosophy of education to the specialized schooling he received through high school. “I’m much more of a liberal arts kind of person.” He regrets that he didn’t have a more varied education, specifically citing Latin as a subject he would have enjoyed. He also does not believe that his focused, in-depth study of physics gave him much of an advantage in the field as he study in college and became a researcher. “No amount of prep work will prepare you for doing physics on a really high level,” he says. There is a huge difference between academic understanding of theories and practical experimentation.
He was in for a surprise when he came to study at Stanford, because he did not even have to declare a major during his first year. Stanford offered its students the option of designing their own majors, and Dr. Tunguz considered making a major out of robot building. But, after his freshman year, he was hired into a research position in the lab, and realized that as a physicist he could “actually make money.” Dr. Tunguz eventually went on to receive a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Dr. Tunguz is a devout Catholic. Growing up in Bosnia and Herzegovina, he was not exposed much to religion until his high school years when the Communist regime was starting to lose its control. This was around the time that Dr. Tunguz began his Christian conversion.
He began reading the Bible during high school out of curiosity. “If you read a lot, which I do, sooner or later you come across references to something in the Bible or Christianity.” Living in a country that suppressed religion, this was something new and interesting to him.
He read the whole book cover to cover, and something stuck with him. Upon reading the Old Testament, he “felt that there was some new ethical grounding that was lacking in the world around me.” But while Christian publications were readily available in his country, the government still would not tolerate organized religion.
“I realized I was Christian, but I just didn’t know how to practice it,” he says. “I didn’t want to be just an individual Christian in a vacuum.” But when the war began, he had a chance. Just before coming to the U.S., Dr. Tunguz went through R.C.I.A., the Catholic Church initiation program for adults.
Because of the war, and because of his anxiousness to join the Church, Dr. Tunguz’s R.C.I.A. program – one that generally takes participants upwards of a year to complete – was condensed into two months. He studied at a Jesuit school that he describes as having a “pragmatic” view in theological education.
He follows and has developed his faith mainly in the American Catholic tradition. When asked the differences between American and Croatian Catholicism, he said: “Piety is much more stressed back home: praying of the Rosary, veneration of the Saints, and other daily activities.” Americans are much more “subdued.”
I mention that, in having read the entire Bible, he has a leg up on many Christians. He replied: “Christianity not centered around the book. It is centered around the Son of God becoming flesh. The Final Revelation is not the book; the Final Revelation is Jesus Christ himself. If you keep that in mind, then you have a slightly different attitude than you would if you believe…that the Law itself is revealed in the book itself.”
“I like to say that being Catholic is pretty much the most important thing that shapes my life,” Dr. Tunguz says, “Being Catholic, being Croatian, being a Physicist – this is the ordering of how I see myself.”
At this point, I asked him if he ever has trouble justifying his faith with science or justifying science with his faith. It seems that the world often likes to demarcate the realms of science and religion, and often the two may seem to be at odds with each other. The creationism vs. Darwinism debate is a prime example of the phenomenon. But Dr. Tunguz doesn’t see it that way. “I never really felt that there was that much of a tension.” He describes religion and science as belonging to “two different levels of understanding of the world.” “If anything,” he adds, “I feel that one enhances my understanding of the other.” He often uses faith to comprehend the workings of our world that science cannot explain and relies on his scientific knowledge to deepen his theology.
Dr. Tunguz’s area of specialization in Physics is Unification Theory, or the “theory of everything,” as he describes it. Unification Theorists are trying to explain the universe in such a way that all principles and laws of Physics can be explained by one, unified, fundamental explanation. Such a theory, when discovered, would simultaneously explain the workings of gravity, electromagnetism, and nuclear forces.
This area of expertise puts Dr. Tunguz in an area where his faith is an integral part of his research. “Monotheism believes that there is one Lawgiver for the laws of the Universe and that all of them stem from one single unifying principle…If there is one unified way of thinking about nature, there must be one unified Force behind all of nature, and that would be God.”
Specifically regarding the theory of evolution, Dr. Tunguz points out that the Catholic Church has never had any issues with it. Dr. Tunguz places himself in what he terms the “middle of two camps.” The one “camp” supports unconditionally supports evolution as a fundamental truth, while the other “camp” would cry heresy at the very mention of evolution. He would tend not to agree with either extreme, leaving room for divine intervention while supporting many Darwinian beliefs. On an aside, Dr. Tunguz points out that this “hot-button” issue sparks more debate in America, than in his native Europe.
So what does all this mean for Dr. Bojan Tunguz, a conservative Catholic physicist from Croatia with a job at a small, liberal arts college in the corn fields of Indiana? “I don’t know if I personally can actually solve any grand problems in the world,” he says, “but I feel that I definitely bring a particular, very unique set of insights to the table, and I would like to think that if there’s any kind of public discourse about these issues that my particular background and worldview would be appreciated…I’d like to shape the public dialogues of different issues coming from all these perspectives.” He adds: “I’m not trying to hide any part of my identity. I’m very public about who I am and what I stand for.” He hopes that encounters with him can change people’s opinions, or at least get them to rethink the relationships between conservatism, Christianity, and science. He hopes that people can realize these three areas of reality can coexist and are “not necessarily irreconcilable.”
And what more can we ask from a former DePauw professor?
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