Joseph Lyvers, pictured above with his wife Marsha,  has excelled in a lengthy career as an aerospace engineer, but though he himself doesn’t use the term, some of his work for Hughes and Caltech could be described by a phrase that requires so much brain power it has become synonymous with high intelligence – that of rocket scientist.

Appointed to the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis upon graduation from high school, Lyvers began studying English Literature. “Actually, I started out wanting to be a philosophy major but they didn’t have a Department of Philosophy, so I chose English Literature as the closest thing. I think I lasted about a year doing that and then I switched over to Physics. Actually, the Naval Academy had a funny term, a nickname for the English and History Department. They called it the Bull department. I switched over to Physics which was much more concrete and appealed to my sense of definitiveness, if you will. I finished up two years at the Naval Academy and then transferred to Caltech out here in Pasadena, California where I graduated as a Physics major.”

Lyvers describes his values as faith, family, friends and fidelity. He became a Christian on Pentecost Sunday in 1970. “We have stayed at the same church since then. We have lived in our house for forty-one years and in this community for forty-eight years, ever since I came out here.”

After becoming a Christian, Lyvers decided to attend seminary for a year. “With a new wife expecting our first of three daughters, I then went back to work at Caltech for ten years; then got a job at Hughes Aircraft Company, working on airborne radars.”

At Caltech, Lyvers worked on creating some near-infrared telescopes that are used in the Owens Valley for the Radio Astronomy Observatory and on telescopes that are now in the observatory on the top of Mauna Kea in Hawaii. Mauna Kea hosts the world’s largest astronomical observatory, with telescopes operated by astronomers from eleven countries.  There are currently thirteen working telescopes, nine of which are for optical and infrared astronomy, three are for submillimeter wave-length astronomy and one is for radio astronomy. They include the largest optical/infrared telescopes in the world (the Keck telescopes), the largest dedicated infrared telescope (UKIRT) and the largest submillimeter telescope in the world (the JCMT).

Lyvers also worked on particle detector counters. “Those were electronic versions of bubble chambers for the High Energy Physics Department. I put them into Fermilab near Chicago and I also did some stuff up at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in Palo Alto. Up at Stanford, they have this two mile long linear accelerator that takes electrons and fires them through an electron gun, like in the old-fashioned television sets. When you emit and then accelerate the electrons, they are magnetically printed across the phosphor inside the cathode ray tube. The picture is made at very high speed which is why televisions used to have the little flickering thing going on. SLAC would take electrons to very high speeds and then smash them into some other stuff and get positrons, which are the anti-particle to an electron. Then they’d run those around and around inside a circular tube, a vacuum tube, and smash them together so you have an electron smashing into a positron and out comes all kinds of weird stuff. The weird stuff gives you some insight into what was going on in the interaction. The same thing was done up at Fermilab with protons. That was just trying to understand what the fundamental laws of nature are at the sub-nuclear level.”

As a man of both faith and science, I asked Lyvers if he found science supportive of his faith: “It’s actually very supportive. There’s a long history of scientists going back hundreds of years including Isaac Newton, Galileo and many others who found the fingerprints of God in the universe. They are written large in both the astronomical fields and the sub-nuclear levels that the particle physicists examine. There’s order and majesty in the way everything fits together – clearly, the fingerprints of God.”

“There are all kinds of fine tunings that have been discovered,” he continued, “that hold together through over eighty orders of magnitude, from the subatomic level to the astronomical level. It is just remarkable. To know these things and think that it could be a matter of chance belies the laws of probability. It’s just unfathom-able how intricate and connected everything is in the universe.”

While Lyvers found the work he did at Caltech fascinating, the level of pay was much higher in the defense industry so eventually he went to work for Hughes. Since Hughes was located in El Segundo, Lyvers was faced with the option of moving or making the hour long commute twice a day in the heavy traffic of the California freeways. “When I was growing up we moved around a lot. My dad was in the army and I went to, oh, I don’t know how many different elementary schools. Then a couple of different high schools and I decided it was important for me to keep my family in one place where they could know and be known by people. A couple of weeks ago my daughter said, ‘Thanks for just keeping us in one place. Not moving us around a lot.’ So I have been blessed to have been able to do that. Even though I had to drive back and forth to El Segundo for twenty five years, it was worth it to stay in our home and go to the same church and have the same friends and neighbors.”

When I asked Joseph Lyvers if there were others ways in which his values may have limited his choices and how he defined freedom, he summed it up by quoting the apostle Paul who said, “All things are lawful, but not all things are profitable.” “The freedom we have in Christ is vast,” he continued, “but not all of that freedom is worth engaging in. The choices that you make reflect the values that you have. And the values that you have play out in the expressions of how you pursue the freedom. They end up defining you. There’s a phrase a cousin of mine had done on an embroidered piece that she gave us for our wedding. It says, ‘Choose your love. Love your choice.’”

Another way in which family values have affected Lyvers’ career path is his decision not to go into management. “I chose not to go down the managerial track. I think I was about 34, maybe 35, when I came to understand that it was not a good fit for me or for my family. In the aerospace industry, you have people like me who are more pure engineers, technical fellows. I had an opportunity to become a technical manager of a department, but I chose not to do it because of the stress it would put on me and how that would affect my family. I think the value of being supportive and available to my family overrode the headiness of a management role. Management roles were kind of open-ended. You could rise to become vice president of the company but, in the end, I never really regretted that decision. That was a positive thing in the end. I’m not trying to pat myself on the back, but I think in retrospect, it was a reflection of the value of family first.”

At Hughes, Lyvers’ skills excelled and soon found him working on one of the very top military projects in the country – the stealth project. “I ended up making contributions to that field which I am proud to have done. Former Secretary of Defense, Zbigniew Brzezinski, attributed the demise of the former Soviet Union and the consequential end of the Cold War to two things. One was Reagan’s star wars, which meant they couldn’t get us, and the other was stealth technology, which meant they couldn’t stop us. To have been able to help on that and, in a small way, contribute to the end of the Cold War was very satisfying.”

I asked Joe Lyvers who he looked to for inspiration: “The older I get, the more I don’t want to look to a particular human for that. There are so many inconsistencies and faults with people. I’m more inclined to say, look to Jesus. All else have clay feet. Now Dallas Willard was a fellow who I admired. I admired his scholarship and his groundedness. I’ve read a number of his books. He was a USC philosophy professor and a Sunday School teacher in a small church somewhere in the Valley. He really was grounded: grounded in Scripture and grounded in the way humans actually work. The more we put people on pedestals, the easier it is for us to get discouraged when those people exhibit the frailties of human nature. At the end of the day, I say don’t look to failed humans or to humans … failed humans is a redundancy, if you get my drift. We all are failed, so look to the author and perfecter of our faith.”

“Our nation was founded with guys like John Adams and Benjamin Franklin imploring us to maintain a moral fiber, moral character in our stance,” Lyvers continued. “From that, we would be able to self-govern in this great American experiment of our government. To the degree that we allow the forces of Godless-ness to pervade the public square, then we are setting ourselves up for a devolution into chaos much like the French Revolution. I believe that starts with me. How can I be better, how can I influence our neighbors, act locally, right? How can I influ-ence our neighborhood to be more connected, more influenced by our Godly beha-vior? I think it starts in a universal sense — I have to become better. We all know there’s only one way for that to happen and that’s on our knees. I think without the individual’s humility to say “I need to be better”, the future of America doesn’t look good. The coarsening of the public culture, the public expressions of culture which are rampant these days is just a reflection of the lessening of the moral strictures in guiding us. As we remove the lid from the pressure cooker, all kinds of things can be expected to come out. “

Perhaps the greatest threat to living the vision the founding fathers once had is moral relativism. “If things that were considered wrong in 1950 or any other particular period of time are done enough, then the law adapts to consider these things right. That’s just decay. The world is in moral decline so there will continually be such changes. Just because everyone is doing something now doesn’t make it right. You see this in a trivial example in the use of tobacco. In the 50s, 60s, so many people smoked that no one even thought of banning it. The people who smoke didn’t think the tobacco companies should be punished for targeting, drawing them in to smoke when they were kids until they really experienced the tragedies this behavior created. I don’t think the profit motive is to blame. The profit motive is fine. What causes the failure is the time in which the profit motive is expected to work. People ought to take a longer term view of what is a better expression of a corporation’s healthiness and its longevity and its gain over the long haul. Its effectiveness in being a force for good for its employees and the people who own the company will often turn out to benefit those very same employees by the way through stock option plans and 401Ks that are invested back into the company. But that long haul view is short circuited by the instant gratification that pervades the stock market. That’s the culprit that’s causing the owners or the leaders of the companies to make these ill-advised, short-term plans. It’s make more money faster all the time, often to the detriment of the long-term health of the company.

“There is one more thing. When we set up human courts as definers of moral rightness, we fall into a big trap. It’s part of what can be done about the country, but we have defaulted. We have allowed the courts to become the definers of morality. That is counter to what we need to be doing. The courts were and ought to be arbiters of narrowly articulated legal questions. To the degree that we as a culture allow them to define right and wrong, we fall into a huge trap. We are allowing an oligarchy to rule us when in fact we should be ruled by our own properly motivated consciences. This goes back to the idea that all things are lawful, but not all things are profitable.”

Joseph Lyvers readily applies his brilliant scientific mind to reasoning truth in matters of faith and love. That is one of the many things that makes him a man of value.

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