They died on the same date—November 19—six years apart. Both were renowned professors at the University of Chicago. Both were formed in the crucible of World War II: the one, an aspiring Japanese scientist who saw firsthand the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the other, a young American teaching English in China who spent two-and-a-half years in a Japanese internment camp.
They also shared a deep fascination with the natural world, and their names are forever linked with the Whirlwind.
Tetsuya Theodore “Ted” Fujita (1920-1998), known as “Mr. Tornado,” invented the Fujita scale for rating tornado intensity. Langdon Brown Gilkey (1919-2004) was a leading theologian whose works included Naming the Whirlwind (1969) and Reaping the Whirlwind (1976).
Fujita is the subject of a new documentary in the PBS American Experience series premiering May 19.
He once told an interviewer, “anything that moves I am interested in.” After earning his doctorate at Tokyo University with a thesis on typhoons, he was recruited to the University of Chicago in 1953 by Horace Byers, chair of Meteorology, which at that time was a stand-alone department.
By 1965, Fujita had ascended to the rank of Professor. That same year, he made one of his most important meteorological discoveries.
On April 11, 1965, the Palm Sunday tornado outbreak killed more than 250 people across six states. Fujita flew 7,500 miles in a Cessna aircraft to conduct aerial surveys of the damage patterns. Comparing his photographs to film of radar echoes taken during the storm, he compiled detailed plots of the various tornadoes. He found that some tornadoes spawn multiple vortices (suction vortices or suction spots), which partially account for the bizarre randomness of storm damage.
Ten years later, he discovered another type of wind, a violent downdraft he called a “microburst,” which caused the crash of Eastern Airlines Flight 66 on approach to Kennedy Airport in New York. That event led the FAA to install the first low-level windshear alert systems in American airports.
Just as Fujita helped show that winds are more complex than they first appear, Gilkey devoted much of his career to arguing that the traditional doctrine of providence—God’s control over creation—is too simple to capture the complexities of an evolving world.
In a 1963 article published just as he was joining the faculty of the University of Chicago Divinity School, Gilkey declared the doctrine of providence all but dead—“a rootless, disembodied ghost, flitting from footnote to footnote” in academic theology.
Part of the reason, he contended, was modern empirical science, which assumed that “a storm, a flood, an earthquake” have purely natural causes. In trying to balance natural causation with the biblical tradition of divine control over all things, modern theologians ended up taking the logically contorted position that God can somehow “bring good out of these evils he has not caused,” as Gilkey put it. This was unacceptable, in his view. He called for a radical rethinking of how theologians speak of God’s action in the world.
Drawing in part on the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (a focus of his doctoral dissertation), Gilkey proposed that God is not static but changing and becoming through interaction with the world.
Gilkey’s Reaping the Whirlwind was dense enough that even his Harvard classmate and fellow theologian Avery Dulles, S.J., who later became a cardinal, found it a bit daunting. Laypersons, Dulles added, certainly lacked the “leisure to follow all the ins and outs of Gilkey’s laborious argument.”
As a professor, Gilkey was more approachable, even guru-like, with interests extending beyond Christian theology to tantric yoga, Sikhism, and Buddhism. “He was a magnificent teacher,” said his former student and colleague Richard Rosengarten, in a press release announcing Gilkey’s death in 2004.
I don’t know whether Gilkey and Fujita ever met. (They likely did, Rosengarten told me, since Fujita spoke on more than one occasion at the Divinity School’s Wednesday Lunch.) In any case, I’m guessing they would have appreciated each other, even though they spoke very different disciplinary languages.
Their careers testify to the irresistible mysteries of the Whirlwind—the sometimes violent natural world that dares the researcher to probe its secrets.
© 2020 by Peter J. Thuesen. All rights reserved
Photos of Fujita and Gilkey courtesy of the University of Chicago
In conjunction with the new PBS documentary, “Mr. Tornado,” about Fujita, see the related article by Rebecca Onion, “The Thrill of the Chase,” that quotes Tornado God: American Religion and Violent Weather.