Henry Eyring

Chemist and Latter-day Saint thinker; the author of The Faith of a Scientist, a collection arguing that true science and true religion are in harmony. Eyring’s central framing in that book is the image of “two men in each one of us” — the scientist and the believer (a device he ties to Louis Pasteur) — and his answer to the recurring question “how can you accept revealed religion as a scientist?” is that “the Gospel commits us only to the truth,” subject to the same pragmatic tests as science (“Does it work? Try it.”). He treated mathematics as a tool rather than an end, never letting the physical or chemical nature of a problem be submerged in mathematical obscurity, and turned to LDS thinkers like Orson Pratt, James E. Talmage, and John A. Widtsoe for the right “slant on the Gospel for scientific friends.”

Eyring surfaces a second time in The Man From The Future — not in Ananyo Bhattacharya’s text, but in a Kyle note on the discipline of thinking: the line “Preach a sermon to yourself on the subject,” which Kyle attributes to Eyring.

Context: Henry Eyring (1901–1981) was a prominent theoretical chemist best known for absolute-rate / transition-state theory, with a career spanning Princeton and the University of Utah. A devout member of the LDS Church, he was widely cited as a model for reconciling rigorous science with religious faith. (His son, Henry B. Eyring, became an LDS apostle — a distinct person.)

Where this appears

• The Faith of a Scientist — Eyring is the chemist-author; the book is his case that true science and true religion harmonize, including the “two men in each one of us” framing and the “Gospel commits us only to the truth” answer.
• The Man From The Future — quoted in a Kyle note (“Preach a sermon to yourself on the subject”) on the discipline of thinking.