The great thing about the following quote is that they admit that they got to use the church computers to do work on Saturdays. Apostasy! Like all things in Armstrongism, there were ways to get around everything just as long as you were not one of the dumb sheeple in a field church.
Kuppermann and his colleagues knew that these computer resources would not be sufficient for their project, so they actively started looking for solutions. The answer was provided by a postdoctoral scholar who uncovered a wealth of unused computer time at a Pasadena religious organization called the Worldwide Church of God. The church and its associated religious school, Ambassador College, used an IBM 360 computer to record information about their donors —the same type of machine that Kuppermann's group was using at the Caltech's computer center. Such machines required that each line of computer code be physically "punched" out on a card, which would then be fed into and read by the computer.
The computer at Ambassador College was only used for church business during the week, so Kuppermann's lab group got permission to use the computer for research purposes on the weekends. "We would take these boxes of computer cards and either drive or ride our bicycles to Ambassador College," Schatz recalls. "When it started, we were doing this on Fridays—we'd prepare these cards, deliver them on Friday afternoon, and then go back on Monday to pick up the results. And since the computers were sitting idle over the weekend except for our work, we were actually able to accomplish a huge amount."
In fact, this unorthodox collaboration between a religious organization and a group of scientists enabled the Kuppermann group to resolve several important issues about the importance of quantum effects in chemical reactions. "These calculations allowed us to to solve the Schrödinger equation—in other words, to use quantum mechanics to describe the reaction of a hydrogen atom and a hydrogen molecule (H2)," he says. "And it was the first time that the Schrödinger equation was solved for this reaction," a highlight of Kuppermann's career, Schatz says.
Despite the importance of the computing time, the staff at Ambassador College "had no idea that their computer was basically the center of the universe for doing computations of reaction dynamics," says Schatz. "We acknowledged Ambassador College in our papers at the time, but they never charged us for anything; they just seemed to be interested in the fact that we could do fundamental science with computer resources that they just were never using. Resourceful Computing Advances Chemistry at Caltech