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death by a random throng of Zoramites. The lesson
is clear: those who doubt, look out.
But I had few doubts in those days. (Too few, I
think, which made my eventual disillusionment
even more painful.) When my faith was challenged
with new scientific information—new for me, any-
way—Mormonism acted like the semipermeable
membrane of a cell: the new information was either
allowed to pass and assimilate into my worldview,
or it was rejected as untrue and banned from
being investigated further. The theory of human
evolution? Yes, it could enter, albeit with trouble,
since the Church had no official position on
evolution but still culturally claimed white-skinned
Adam and Eve as the first common ancestors of
all humans. And what about the assertion that
homosexuality occurs naturally in humans and is
not inherently evil? No, not a chance; the leaders
had made themselves clear on that point, although
they have recently softened this stance in the wake
of so many teen suicides. When I rejected facts
because of my faith, I brain-tagged the information
with the extremely useful title of “anti-Mormon,”
a label liberally applied to things or people I didn’t
like or didn’t understand.
Such a label could easily be applied to people in
other religions, too. One day, outside a Christian
convention downtown, someone handed me a
pamphlet. It was the first of many “anti-Mormon”
pamphlets I would receive from people trying
to save me from my religion. On this particular
pamphlet was an image of Jesus, his eyes replaced
by flames, and beneath it was the word sinner. I did
not recognize this angry Jesus. Why should this
fire-eyed god be upset with me if I were trying my
best to follow his teachings? The Jesus I knew was
based on Greg Olsen’s calm, quiet paintings: the
Savior wore soft robes and expressions and held
lambs as gently as newborns. In church movies,
Jesus sat and laughed with children and coaxed large
monarch butterflies to land on his shoulder. The
only time my Jekyll Jesus went Hyde was when
people started commercializing his temple.
I threw the pamphlet away without opening it.in the summer of 2001 , just before my senior
year of high school, the Utah Transit Authority
had almost finished building a second light-rail
line, the Red Line, out to the University of Utah.A good bus route was still in place, however.
Descending the steep bus steps, I marched into the
university’s cosmic ray research department and,
with all the confidence my seventeen-year-old self
could muster, told the program manager why he
should hire me as a summer intern. I suspect he
was more amused than convinced, but he hired
me on the spot. Day one, on the conference room
whiteboard, he began an overview of the project
and my assignment.
“Cosmic rays aren’t actually rays—”
“They’re tiny particles that hit the Earth,” I
interjected, wanting so badly to please.
“Very good,” he said. “We’ll just have a quick
review, then.” He proceeded to bombard me with
information as I wrote furiously in the large brown
notebook he had given me: ultra-high-energy
protons and iron nuclei, extensive air shower arrays,
Cherenkov radiation, pions with neutral charges
decaying to photons, isotropic scattering, atmo-
spheric fluorescence detectors, photomultiplier
tubes, photoelectric effect, GZK cutoff, the 1991
Oh-My-God particle (Oh-My-Gosh particle, I
autocorrected in my head).
I struggled to keep up, but I was filled with
awe. These were the mysteries of the universe,
unfolding before me! I was at the forefront of
astrophysics research! The manager gave me a place
in the Undergraduate Slum, a largish cubicle with
a scattering of computers, programming books,
half-empty coffee cups, and half-groggy interns.
My task? Create a set of computer programs that
would convert one geodetic, or Earth-based,
coordinate system to another. The end goal of
Geolib, as we called the program, was to help
full-time cosmic ray researchers more easily use our
data to determine where ultra-high-energy cosmic
rays came from. We—I liked saying “we”—had
theories that they came from supernovae, magnetic
variable stars, quasars, or active galactic nuclei, the
powerful radiation surrounding the supermassive
black holes at the center of galaxies. Here was my
big chance to connect heaven and Earth through the
scientific templum.
Stan, my direct supervisor, took me outside
later that day with a surveying unit, a plumb bob,
and a GPS device. In geodesy and cartography, he
told me, a fixed reference point is called a datum. I
squinted at him in the bright sun, trying to squint"SHUDDERING BEFORE THE BEAUTIFUL” | JAMIE ZVIRZDIN