Henry Schaefer – The Godfather

Written By: Michael D. McClellan |

The godfather of quantum computational chemistry is rumored to have been in the running for a Nobel Prize on at least five occasions, but, like that old Tootsie Pop commercial, the world may never know – at least those of us not around when the nominees are finally revealed by the Nobel Foundation after its 50-year waiting period. Still, there remains the distinct possibility that Henry “Fritz” Schaefer might yet win the coveted Nobel Prize in Chemistry. His odds certainly increased in 2019, when the longtime University of Georgia professor was awarded the Gold Medal by the American Institute of Chemists. How accurate a bellwether is the Gold Medal? Seven of the past 14 recipients of the AIC Gold Medal have received the Nobel Prize. Whether or not he ever receives that life-changing, early morning call from the Nobel selection committee, Schaefer’s life has already changed in ways both profound and controversial. A Born Again Christian, Schaefer stands out in a profession where science and God are mutually exclusive, and where there is no room for a discussion about intelligent design. To some he’s a heretic in his field. To others he’s a breath of fresh air. Either way, Schaefer is unapologetic in his belief that Jesus rose from the dead, and argues that Big Bang cosmology provides compelling evidence for the notion of creation out of nothing.

A graduate of MIT and Stanford University, Schaefer taught at UC Berkeley for 18 years and spent one year at the University of Texas, Austin, as the inaugural director for its Institute for Theoretical Chemistry before moving to the University of Georgia, where he serves as both the Graham Perdue Professor of Chemistry, and the Director of the Center for Computational Quantum Chemistry. His work has led to the reversal of the conclusions of a number of distinguished experimentalists, and subsequent experimental studies have verified controversial predictions concerning the structure and singlet-triplet separation of methylene, the quadrupole moment of ozone, and the infrared spectrum of benzyne, to name just a few.

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Oh, and he happens to be one for the most cited chemists in the world. To put it into perspective, a typical Thomson Reuters H-Index value for a successful scientist is 20 for 20 years of research; an outstanding scientist will have an H-Index of 40 over that same span. Schaefer’s H-Index? Try 121. One-twenty-one. That’s like being wowed by Katy Perry’s 79 million Instagram followers, only to learn that Cristiano Ronaldo tops the list with 210 million and counting.

Not that he cares.  Schaefer would rather talk about his continuously evolving lecture “The Big Bang, Stephen Hawking, and God,” which he has presented all over the world, or discuss the problem solving prowess of his current crop of PhD students. Whether he’s teaching Molecular Quantum Mechanics at the University of Georgia or studying the Bible during mid-week church fellowships, Schaefer sees cohesion between “secular” science and his Christian faith. He became a Christian as a young professor at Berkeley in 1973, concluding that the historical evidence for belief in Jesus was too compelling to ignore, and that the physical resurrection of Jesus was the most rational way to understand the stories recorded in the Gospels and by ancient historians. His faith would be tested a few short years later, and it would carry him through one of the darkest periods in his life.

“I discovered that there is no problem too heavy for Jesus,” Schaefer says. “It was during my time at the University of Texas. On a Sunday morning – December 9, 1979, to be exact – I had just returned from church and was tidying up a few things in my office in Austin. My wife called and told me that our five–month old son Pierre had just died of crib death, or sudden infant death syndrome. Whatever illusion I had that life was just a bowl of cherries disappeared forever in that instant of time. Without going into the details, I can tell you that never before nor since have I been so overwhelmed with the certainty of the love of my heavenly Father. There is no problem in your life that Jesus can’t bring you through.”

The Best Schools annually recognizes “The 50 Most Influential Scientists in the World Today,” and in 2014 Schaefer made the list, joining names like Peter Higgs (Higgs boson), Timothy Berners-Lee (World Wide Web), and Stephen Hawking (no explanation needed). Schaefer appreciates the accolades but takes it all in stride. If the Nobel Committee decides that his contributions to science make him worthy of a Nobel Prize, then he’ll consider it a capstone to an already grand and momentous career. If the call never comes, then he’s fine with that, too.

Schaefer’s place in the universe is secure.

And regardless of what anyone says, he knows that it’s a place created by the hand of God.

Please tell me about your childhood; what are some of your earliest memories, and at what point do you remember becoming interested in science?

I was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan. My dad worked for the largest company in Grand Rapids, American Seating Company, which produced school seats, stadium seats, and auditorium seats, among other products. Even though I wasn’t a military child, we moved around some. We moved to Syracuse when I was one, and we lived there for seven years. From there we moved to Menlo Park, California, for five years, and then back to Grand Rapids for high school.

I became interested in science as an undergraduate at MIT. I went there thinking that I was going to be an engineer at the start, because that looked like a practical kind of career where one could earn a living and do okay, so I started out at MIT as a chemical engineering major for my first two years.

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I’ve read where your father was friendly with President Gerald Ford.

It’s funny, I’ve read where they were best friends, but that would be a little bit of an exaggeration. I would say that they were pretty good friends. When he wasn’t in Washington he actually lived in the same little town of East Grand Rapids, and, once a year, he would come to the high school and talk to anybody that was interested about government. That’s the first time that I ever remember meeting him.

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In what ways did your family help lay the foundation for your scientific career?

My dad was an engineer. He graduated from the University of Michigan in 1933 with a degree in civil engineering. He couldn’t find a job in the middle of the recession and wasn’t able to actually practice as an engineer, so he went back to Grand Rapids and got a job sweeping the factory for the American Seating Company. It wasn’t until eight years later, during World War, II that he was actually able to serve as a practicing engineer, working on fighter airplanes for our government. Then, after that, he got into sales and rose very high in the company. He later wanted me to go to MIT, because he thought that I would become an engineer.

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Was there a particular teacher or class that helped fuel your interest in science and mathematics?

That’s a good question. My high school chemistry teacher was poor. He only lasted one year, but I liked my math teachers, both in junior high and high school. They were pretty inspiring. My high school physics teacher was outstanding. It was a great experience to be in his class.

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What were your academic goals going into MIT?

I went to MIT thinking that I was going to be a high school math teacher. My first semester at MIT I was thinking that I was going to be a math major. Then I started looking around at what math majors do, and what they did seemed to be mostly about proofs, and I had never enjoyed proofs. I didn’t even like geometry, which was the one math course that I took. So, by the time the second semester was over, I knew that I was not going to be a math major. At the same time, I found that chemistry was a lot more interesting at MIT than it had been in high school, so I got on that track and transferred over to chemical engineering for the next year.

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You got your Bachelor of Science in Chemical Physics at MIT.

Yeah, I got out of chemical engineering [laughs]. Chemical engineering has changed a lot with computers, but back then the kinds of problems we solved – which were quite challenging at the time – were solved by trial and error. These were not problems that you could solve analytically. We would make certain assumptions about the solutions, and we would work through all of this stuff on our slide rules, and then, when we were done, we would find out that we hadn’t arrived at the right answer. We hadn’t made the right assumptions, so we would have to go back and keep doing this, over and over and over again, which I found to be very boring. So that’s when I decided to get out of chemical engineering. By then I was in my second year. I decided that I really liked chemistry, and that I really liked physics more than I liked chemical engineering. As it turns out, they had a chemical physics major, although it didn’t last very long at MIT. They canceled it within two years after I graduated.

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What was your MIT experience like?

It was hard. I didn’t have much time for a social life. My first year at MIT, I was pretty average. That was kind of a blow. I had been a good student at an excellent public high school, but I realized that it couldn’t compare with places like the Bronx School of Science, which has produced 16 Nobel Prize winners. A lot of the students in my class were just reviewing material during their first year at MIT, whereas I was really battling with it. Once I got caught up, things were very different. The second year I was an excellent student. To my amazement, as much as anyone else’s, I became one of the best students at MIT.

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Please tell me how you ended up at Stanford.

That’s a good story. I was going to go to Caltech – MIT is a nerd school, and since Caltech is the second best nerd school among universities, it seemed like the next logical step. I applied and was accepted, and I told them that I was going to come, but my attitude about that decision changed because I was engaged to a beautiful girl and thinking about marriage. And since not too many MIT nerds marry beautiful girls – it’s a rare occurrence – I had to rethink my decision in the most logical way possible. She was a year behind me, so I would be going out to California and leaving her 2,000 miles behind for a year, and then we were going to get married at the end of the school year. The more I thought about that, the less comfortable I felt. Amazingly, she didn’t feel comfortable about it, either.

So now I’m rethinking my decision and struggling with my choice of graduate schools. I wanted to select a school that worked for us both, because her father said that we could get married as long as she finished with a degree. She was an art history major at a superb university, and Caltech didn’t even have one course in art history, much less a major, so that was a problem. And then the Fellow that I had applied to work for at Stanford called me up and said, “Schaefer, why haven’t we received your acceptance yet? We’ve given you the best offer that Stanford University can.” And I said, “The truth of the matter is that I’ve already accepted at Caltech, but I’m kind of wavering on that.” Well, he wanted to know the whole story. I told him that I was going to marry the homecoming queen, and that she needed to graduate from art history at a good school. He just asked me right off the bat, “Do you know that we have one of the best art history departments in the world?” I said, “No, I don’t know much about art history, except for what my fiancé has told me.” Then he said, “Is she smart?” to which I replied, “She is much smarter than I am.” And he said, “Send me her transcript.” Within two weeks she got a letter from Stanford University, without applying, saying that they would be very pleased to have her as a student in the fall. So, that was it. We got married and went to Stanford.

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Were you happy with your decision to attend Stanford?

In retrospect it was a very good choice because my professor at Stanford, Frank Harris, had just a few students, and, candidly, I was a lot better than the rest of them. On the other hand, the Fellow that I was going to work with at Caltech, Bill Goddard, had 15 or 20 really, really sharp students. So, my being able to work with my boss, Frank Harris, by myself, without a bunch of super bright guys breathing down my neck, was extremely beneficial to me. He was a great advisor and we did great things together. Who knows what would’ve happened if I had gone to Caltech. I might have lost the homecoming queen. I could have ended up a failure in quantum chemistry. So, God works all things for good. Neither my wife nor I knew Him at that point. Our faith was all ahead of us.

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The average layperson may think of highly successful scientists as not being approachable or relatable.

When my future wife agreed to marry me, that was a real turning point in my life. I guess my feeling was, “Boy, if she is going to marry me, then I must be okay.” Then we got married, and that feeling just grew, and grew, and grew. I felt that I went from being kind of bookish to being very optimistic about life. Again, My wife, is a huge part of any success that I have had.

I’ve gotten to become much more outgoing since my nerd times. There is no question about that. Everything is different in my life now. I have 17 PhD students that I am supposed to guide along the way to their doctorates. We also have a few admin people and some more senior scientists, so it’s a big responsibility when you’re running a big research group. It helps to have some personal skills.

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Another misconception is that scientists are only interested in science. What are some of your interests and hobbies outside of the scientific world?

Well, I am interested in art to the degree that my wife takes me to art museums [laughs]. I have her do all of the research, and then when we go in there I say, “Okay, show me the 10 most important works.” I just worry about those and don’t mess with the others, because I know that I am out of my league. But I do enjoy looking at great art. A big surprise to me occurred when I was lecturing in Kraków. My wife was with me on the trip and she explained that the National Museum had a Leonardo painting titled Lady with an Ermine. We went to see it, and it was a stunning piece of art – much more interesting than the Mona Lisa, in my opinion. So, my wife gives me treats like that.

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What kind of music do you listen to?

My parents tried to raise me on classical music, so I’m not completely devoid of a classical background. I like classical music. But I have to admit that if I go to a symphony and sit for a couple of hours, I start thinking about equations [laughs].

I remember when my sister bought home Heartbreak Hotel by Elvis Presley, in 1956. I listened to that album and thought it was really good, so I also have a love of old style rock ‘n roll. Later, after becoming a Christian, I started listening to a lot of contemporary Christian music. I still do that. So I mix the old style rock ‘n roll with the modern, contemporary Christian music.

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What kinds of books do you read for fun?

I am a member of a group of six gentlemen – four retired surgeons, myself, and a person at a clothing store – and we are called the Pickwick Club. We read a lot of Charles Dickens novels. Right now we are reading one called Dombey and Son. We’ve read together maybe half of the Dickens novels, but we also read a lot of the other old books, most of them novels from the 19^th century. I feel like I know that material and that period pretty well. I love it. We also do the best of the Russians, like Tolstoy and so on, but Dickens books are at the heart of the club. And we are not aggressive readers. We may read 50 pages a week, and then talk about it. So the idea is not to tear through all of these books as quickly as possible. We have been reading Dombey and Son for the last little while. That book is 700 pages long, so that is 14 weeks. That has been special. These are all books that we should’ve read when we were 20 years old.

But it’s a good group. They have a lot of good insights, and I try to contribute.  They are nerds, too, except for our clothing guy. The physicians are older, and they didn’t read much of anything that wasn’t required in high school and college. So we are all catching up on all of these classic books that we’ve never read, and it has been a delightful journey. The first book that we read was The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins. That was probably about 15 years ago. We like great literature.

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What kinds of sports or physical activities are you into?

My wife and I used to play a lot of tennis. Every second or third year, when I was a professor at Berkeley, we would go to Australia for three months, to the Australian National University. We always went in their summertime. We would wake up early in the morning, and we would play tennis. At best, we were tolerably good. Eventually, we graduated from tennis to jogging together.

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You are one of the most highly cited chemists in the world, with a Reuters H-Index of 120. For the uninitiated, please explain the Thomson Reuters H index.

Oh my. The Thomson H-Index is something that is very popular these days, and it is related to how many important papers that you have published. Not just the number of papers, but the number of important papers. According to their index, we have published 120 important papers. In fact, we’ve published some other important papers that never got that degree of public attention, but, in my mind, were better than some of the ones that were in the 120.

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How does Thomson Reuters keep track of the number of citations?

It starts when you publish a paper. If people are interested in it, they will refer to it in future papers of theirs. That’s how they determine the H-Index.

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To put your 120 H-Index into perspective, what is a number that is considered great?

I would say that 40 is considered great.

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You’ve published something like 1,600 important scientific papers.

I don’t want to pat myself on the back too much. The key to publishing 1,600 papers is surrounding yourself with 15 or 16 of the most gifted young PhD students in the world, throw out a few suggestions, and see what they do. Basically, give them a lot of freedom. Not in their first year as a PhD student, but as they grow, they become more and more able to do things by themselves, and often times they are doing things much better than I would have thought. They may get stuck, but when they do, you help them out. I’ve had about 140 PhD students now, and some of them have just been extraordinarily brilliant and hard-working. So that is the secret to getting a lot of papers published – having a lot of students with a lot of ideas.

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Let’s talk a little science. Erwin Schrödinger is considered a founding father of quantum mechanics.

Yeah, we like him.

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To the general public, Schrödinger is perhaps best known for a thought experiment involving a cat.

The cat is pretty much irrelevant, it’s just something that people find to be cute. The question is, is the cat dead or alive? It’s not terribly relevant to anything in real life, but, in 1926, Erwin Schrödinger published several papers which showed us how to solve for the electrons, protons, and neutrons that make up the atoms and molecules. This, in turn, opened up a much deeper understanding of how the universe works.

There were others who were making significant, groundbreaking contributions at the same time, scientists like Werner Heisenberg. They were both giants in the field, but, in my opinion, Schrödinger’s work was the most profound. Schrödinger’s equation is the fundamental equation that we still use to solve for all of the properties a person would be interested in when it comes to atoms and molecules, and here we are creeping up on the 100-year mark.

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The double-slit experiment is one of the most famous experiments in physics. What’s it all about?

To start off, imagine a wall with two slits in it. Imagine throwing tennis balls at the wall. Some will bounce off the wall, but some will travel through the slits. If there’s another wall behind the first, the tennis balls that have traveled through the slits will hit it. If you mark all the spots where a ball has hit the second wall, what do you expect to see? That’s right. Two strips of marks roughly the same shape as the slits.

Now let’s go into the quantum realm. Imagine firing electrons at our wall with the two slits, but block one of those slits off for the moment. You’ll find that some of the electrons will pass through the open slit and strike the second wall just as tennis balls would: The spots they arrive at form a strip roughly the same shape as the slit. Now open the second slit. You’d expect two rectangular strips on the second wall, as with the tennis balls, but what you actually see is very different: The spots where electrons hit build up to replicate the interference pattern from a wave.

So, the double-slit experiment is a demonstration that light and matter can display characteristics of both classically defined waves and particles; moreover, it displays the fundamentally probabilistic nature of quantum mechanical phenomena. If you are looking at microscopic objects, what you observe behaves as if it is a particle, or some conglomeration of particles. But if you start looking closer, and closer, and closer, with a super-resolution electron microscope, you start to see things that look more like waves. Anything that you or I can see, touch, smell, or feel, behaves in a classical manner, like particles or a conglomeration of particles. But once you get down to a level that is so small, say, 10,000 times smaller than anything that could be seen with the naked eye, then these electrons become wavelike particles.

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Quantum Leap.

Electronic states change. If you’re talking about a big molecule, the wave function for these states are very complicated. But they do change by either absorbing a little packet of electromagnetic radiation called a photon, or by emitting a particle of electromagnetic radiation called a photon. So, we see the absorption and emission of electromagnetic radiation. All of the colors that we see in the universe are a result of molecules changing their electronic states due to either absorption or emission of tiny little pieces of electromagnetic radiation.

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You are very well-known for your faith. When did you accept Christ into your life?

Jesus Christ came into my life during my fourth year of my 18 years as a professor at Berkeley. That’s when it happened, but it was a long process. Jesus clearly had his eye on me for a long time before that, but I was pretty resistant before becoming a Christian. Eventually, I got it.

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Science and Christianity don’t often go hand-in-hand.

The entire foundation of the modern physical sciences come from Christians. Christians taught human beings how to think about science. There are a couple of exceptions to that, but virtually all of them were Christians, and many of them were very committed Christians. People like Isaac Newton, James Kirk Maxwell, Michael Faraday, and on and on and on. They wanted to understand the universe, because they believed it was a product of God’s creative genius, and they wanted to understand that genius.

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As a Christian, do you view scientific discoveries from a different perspective?

Well, there is much more of a sense of awe. Much more of a sense of, “Wow, so that’s how God did it.” An atheist can be resistant to that thinking. Sadly, I think atheists miss out on the beauty of science. That’s not to say that there aren’t extraordinary scientists who are atheists. Once you teach an atheist how to do science, they can do it, and do it very well. The Christian contribution was to show them how to do it, and continue to do it. There are so many Nobel Prize winners and other award winners who were Christians, and, like atheists, they can have a sense of awe and wonder about what they discovered, but I think it’s a little bit different. Walt Whitman, who is not one of my favorites, once said, “One of the best things in the world is to see a sunset and know who is responsible for it.” So I have a little bit of that sense, and I don’t know that an atheist does. It’s an interesting comparison, but it is what it is.

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Has being a Christian changed the way you are perceived in the scientific community?

It has. Some people don’t like me. There are others who think I am great. It’s a mixed response. With my PhD students, they are all my children, whether they are Christians, atheists, or anything in between. They are all my children and I treat them all the same. We have to get along with our students, or nothing gets done in my field. I think that if a student knows that I am a Christian, and that is really, really offensive, they might not choose to work for me. I had one student who wrote in to me and said that he really wanted to come and work with me, but then he found out that I was Christian and he just couldn’t have that in his life, so he wasn’t going to come. And I wrote back and said that that’s fine. We are still all friends.

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Please share with me a blessing that has resulted from combining your faith with science.

Life is different when you attempt to put Jesus first. You’re not always successful in that, and it is a very different perspective on life. My wife says that I am a much better husband since I became a Christian. And we had been married for about seven years when we became Christians – we became Christians at about the same time. One didn’t lead the other. We both felt the call at about the same time.

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Do you think the Fibonacci Sequence helps prove the existence of God?

It’s interesting. I hadn’t really thought about it that way, but maybe I should. Clearly, the Fibonacci Sequence is a beautiful sequence that arises from the mind of God. Other than that, without thinking about it some more, I wouldn’t want to say too much.

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From a faith standpoint, how would you describe yourself?

I’m what they call an Old Earth creationist. That is to say that I think the universe probably is 13.7 billion years old, but I have reservations about the most popular theories of evolution. So I think the universe is old, and I think what is happening at the Big Bang is described in the first couple verses of the Book of Genesis. That is the beginning. Creation out of nothing. That’s what the Big Bang says.

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Does being a Christian give you a greater appreciation for science?

I think it does. Others might disagree with me, but I think science gives you a sense of how everything all fits together. It reinforces our understanding of everything as a seamless fabric – the spiritual world, the scientific world, and how it all fits into one beautiful picture with no inconsistencies.

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Final Question: You’ve achieved great success in your life. If you could offer one piece of advice to aspiring scientists, what would that be?

That is simple – run to Jesus.