Don Page: Found in the Cosmos

Story by Mark Van Tilburg, Photos by Richard Siemans and John Page

Don Nelson Page ’71 is shown above in his office at the University of Alberta, and at right with his wife Cathy and colleague Stephen Hawking.

As he prepared to leave Jewell for graduate school in 1971, Don Page was already being called “Dr. Page” by the faculty members of the Physics Department. He had spent his time at Jewell amazing his peers and his mentors with what Dr. Don Geilker (then a junior faculty member, followed by years as head of the Department, and now Professor Emeritus ) remembers as “the most sophisticated and perfect holograms most of us had ever seen.” When Page then scored the top 990 score on the Graduate Record Exam (GRE), it was apparent that he was not only well on his way to a real Ph.D., but that he was also beginning a journey that would take him to extraordinary heights (both literally and figuratively).

Today, Dr. Don Nelson Page is professor of physics at the University of Alberta and one of the world’s most eminent theoretical gravitational cosmologists. His list of important publications and contributions to exploring the thermodynamics of black holes and quantum gravity are nearly as breath-taking as his aptitude for being able to work through the most complex equations and calculations, some of which exceed 100 meticulously hand-written pages. Don is also a loving husband, father of five beautiful and happy children, and a devoted New Testament Christian.

It has been observed that a remarkable percentage of the world’s great physicists and cosmologists experienced very unorthodox, often extraordinary childhoods, and Don Page’s certainly fits the bill. His parents were elementary school teachers (both graduates of William Jewell College) who decided to trade the comforts and predictability of life in Kansas City for a life of adventure and service, teaching somewhere remote and challenging. In 1941 they accepted positions with the Bureau of Indian Affairs to teach school in small villages in Alaska, often north of the Arctic Circle. Don was born in 1948 and grew up among the Eskimo and Indian people, skiing, hiking and fishing amidst the pristine wilderness in an awe-inspiring natural setting. He also remembers the long, long wintertime nights when he developed a natural inclination for mathematics and an interest in physics and chemistry (nurtured by the gift of a chemistry set from a favorite aunt).

Being home-schooled by his parents and taking high school classes via correspondence courses, Don had been in a class with others only one year when he enrolled at Jewell in 1967. He was attracted to Jewell by its intimate size and by the excellent reputation of its Physics Department, then headed by the legendary Jewell professor Dr. Wallace Hilton. Don had applied to and had been accepted by Harvard and other top schools as well. But the Christian foundation at Jewell was important to him, as was the fact that he had close family on his mother’s side living in Liberty.

By all accounts, Don Page was an extraordinary undergraduate student who relished the challenges and opportunities he encountered in the more formal educational setting at Jewell. In addition to his burgeoning intellectual growth, he also was growing spiritually and emotionally. He studied the Bible vigorously and was well integrated into the social life of the College in the late ’60s. He was a member of the mysterious “Aeons” and remembers sitting on the Quad with his fellow Aeons “doing absolutely nothing for an entire day,” as a kind of homage to a predecessor organization known as the “Sons of Rest.” It was a feat that impressed Dr. Geilker, who rarely saw Don idle.

With a highly developed sense of humor, Don’s enthusiasm for his work and his life are invigorating, and he is a delight to be around. In her book Music to Move the Stars, A Life with Stephen, Jane Hawking, wife of Stephen Hawking (possibly the world’s most imminent cosmologist and for many years a close professional colleague and friend of Don Page’s) writes about first meeting Page: “…Don bounced energetically into our household like A.A. Milne’s Tigger.” And indeed Don does bear a striking resemblance to Winnie-the-Pooh’s effervescent and mischievous ally. Page is one of the scientists that appear with Stephen in the documentary film “A Brief History of Time,” directed by Errol Morris in 1991 and based on the famous book of the same name by Hawking.

Don began his graduate work at Caltech with the intention of pursuing his interest in elementary particle physics, but soon began developing a passion for relativity and cosmology. Shortly after grad school, during one Christmas vacation in Liberty, Don tried his hand at being an “experimental” physicist. Assisted by Dr. Geilker, he conducted hours and hours of meticulous observations using the College’s Cavendish Balance to test for gravitational anomalies. The resulting paper, “Indirect Evidence for Quantum Gravity,” co-authored by Page and Geilker, created a storm of controversy when first published in Physical Review Letters.

Strongly influenced by one of his professors at Caltech, the famous cosmologist Kip Thorne, Don began working on problems involving black holes. He then began to pursue more complex problems involving quantum mechanics and relativity, taking advantage of the opportunity to work with Hawking while he was at Caltech as a Fairchild Scholar in 1974-75. The two got along well and wrote a paper together about primordial black holes and gamma ray bursts. When Don began looking for post-doctoral opportunities the following year, Hawking asked him to join his staff at Cambridge University.

Don lived with the Hawkings for three years in Cambridge, assisting Dr. Hawking personally as well as professionally, and often accompanying him to important international conferences and gatherings of the world’s great cosmological minds. As his own reputation and insights grew, Don became more and more fascinated with his studies of quantum gravity and black hole thermodynamics. In an interview with Alan Lightman, published by the Harvard University Press in 1990 and included in the book Origins–The Lives and Worlds of Modern Cosmologists, Page discussed this important time in his career:

“I was working more with black hole thermodynamics and various problems of quantum gravity until Hawking proposed the idea for the boundary conditions of the universe [the conditions of the universe at the moment of the ‘Big Bang’], at this meeting in the Vatican, I think in October 1981. Then, in the next year, he and James Hartle worked out the mathematical details, which they published in 1983, in Physical Review.

“I’ve had a lot of interest in the second law of thermodynamics and the arrow of time—partly arising, I suppose, out of black hole thermodynamics and entropy. So I knew there was this problem of the arrow of time, even before Hartle and Hawking made their proposal.”

Page was able to disprove Hawking’s assertion that the arrow of time should reverse itself when the universe begins to contract, thus throwing cold water on the notion that in a contracting universe (of course the universe continues to expand, as it has been doing for the past 13 billion years), everything would happen in reverse “People in the contracting phase would live their lives backward: they would die before they were born and get younger as the universe contracted,” as Hawking wrote in his book, A Brief History of Time. According to an interview with Allen Abel published in Saturday Night in 2001, once Hawking became convinced that Page was right, Don recalls that “he willingly admitted it and called it the biggest mistake he ever made—at least in science.”

Don Page joined the faculty of Penn State University in 1979 and in 1990 accepted his current post at the University of Alberta. He has published more than 130 scientific papers during his brilliant career, received many grants and honors, and has traveled the world many times over giving lectures, collaborating with other distinguished scientists, and delivering important papers. His research is often cited in the work being conducted on “String Theory,” which some scientists assert is the answer to the greatest quest of science: a single “Theory of Everything,” or TOE, that unifies the laws of the very small, sub-atomic world (quantum mechanics) with the laws that rule the very largest, the galaxies and clusters of galaxies that make up the known universe (gravity). Don says that the top superstring theorists are doing some remarkable work that is “beyond” him. He speaks of fellow Jewell alum, Donald Marolf, whose work in quantum gravity associates him more closely with the work in string theory, saying, “Marolf’s way ahead of me. His work is making an important impact on what the string theorists are doing. Some of my stuff gets cited by them too, but Marolf is one of the top theorists these days.”

Whether or not superstring theory (that provides for 10 or 11 dimensions and the possibilities of parallel universes) proves to be the big TOE we all have been waiting for, family and faith are at the real center of the universe for Don Page. He and his wife, Cathy (a physician on hiatus to raise and home-school their children) have created an idyllic home where openness, warmth, intellectual curiosity, Christian values and just the right mix of familial chaos resonate in remarkable harmony.

The day I visited the Pages, I was welcomed into their modest suburban home by Don and Cathy, their five children (Andrew, 18, John, 16, Marie, 11, Anna 9, and Ziliana, 7), along with two dogs, two gold fish, a rabbit and a recently rescued crow (William) who had taken up temporary quarters in one of the dog’s travel crates. Amidst snacks and anecdotes about their father, the family painted a picture of daily life full of intellectual and spiritual exploration tempered by a large dose of fun and practical jokes. (Water fights apparently are a particular favorite indulgence, as is switching around room furniture to see whether Dad notices.)

During the summer of 2005 Don was invited to lecture and collaborate with physicists and cosmologists in China and Korea, so he took the opportunity (as he often does) to bring along his whole family (sans dogs and crow) on what ended up being a ten-week journey through Asia. Like other lengthy summer trips in recent years (a month’s stay in Paris, several trips around Europe, and one to Australia), the itinerary included Don’s work, presentations and meetings, punctuated by side-trips with the family to tourist attractions as well as more remote, off-the-beaten-track destinations. The kids recalled a great swimming outing with other children from an orphanage in Hanoi, the performance of the Shanghai Acrobats in China, and petting a baby panda in Chengdu. All agreed that they would remember the night spent camping in a remote guard house along the Great Wall, where they stacked stones to build crosses to commemorate their stay.

The bedrock of this loving family is clearly anchored in their faith and the work they do through their church, Southview Christian Fellowship, a small, community-supported, all-volunteer organization. The Pages are exceptionally generous in their financial and personal support of those in need. Cathy has been particularly active in supporting an orphanage in Haiti, organizing shipments of much-needed supplies and volunteers. It was during this work in Haiti that they met and brought into their family Marie and Ziliana. On the front lawn of their home is a stone upon which is written: “Live simply so that others can simply live.” And it is obvious from their lifestyle that they follow that “simple” principle.

While contemporary debate gets more and more complicated and confusing, Don’s position regarding the current controversy of “creationism” vs. evolution is wonderfully clear. In a web thread on the subject several years ago, he wrote: “To lay my cards on the table, I’ll say that I believe God intelligently designed the universe so that it obeys a fairly simple set of physical laws and boundary conditions that we partially understand, and it is a good working hypothesis that biological evolution by natural selection is a consequence of this lawful way God has created the universe.”

In his interview fifteen years ago with Alan Lightman, Don summarizes his broad understanding eloquently:

“I’m a conservative Christian in the sense of pretty much taking the Bible seriously for what it says. Of course, I know that certain parts are not intended to be read literally, so I’m not precisely a literalist. But I try to believe in the meaning I think it is intended to have. I know that a lot of Christians believe that man is the main purpose for God’s creating the universe, but I’m perhaps a little less certain of that than many of my friends are.

“We see such mathematical beauty and simplicity and elegance in the physical universe, in the dynamical equations that God’s created here. I’m not quite sure how to tie those aspects of the creation into purpose. In some sense, the physical laws seem to be analogous to the grammar and the language that God chose to use….It’s a bit like if you tried to analyze the grammatical structure of some of Shakespeare’s writing, but you didn’t look at all at what the plays meant, or what the story was there.”

Twentieth Century novelist and essayist Walker Percy titles Chapter Ten in his insightful and humorous book, Lost in the Cosmos, The Last Self-Help Book, with this dilemma: “The Bored Self: Why the Self is the only Object in the Cosmos which Gets Bored.” As a young boy gazing up into the brilliant, deep Alaskan nights, and today, with his mind securely engaged in pursuit of some of humankind’s greatest questions, warmly enfolded by his faith and his family, I would suspect that this is one problem Don Page never has to confront.