Schrödinger's God - March 16, 2009
Posted for Declan Butler
Roll over Sartre. French physicist and philosopher, Bernard d’Espagnat, today picked up the £1 million Templeton Prize awarded annually by the John Templeton Foundation to “honour a living person who has made an exceptional contribution to affirming life's spiritual dimension, whether through insight, discovery, or practical works".
The award notes that the 87 year old d’Espagnat – professor emeritus of theoretical physics at the University of Paris-Sud, and a former senior scientist at CERN – was a well known researcher in quantum physics from the mid-1960s through the early 1980's.
What won him the prize was exploring the “philosophical implications” of quantum physics which the foundation's web site says has “cast new light on the definition of reality and the potential limits of knowable science” and on what d’Espagnat calls “'veiled reality', a hidden yet unifying domain beneath what we perceive as time, space, matter, and energy – concepts challenged by quantum physics as possibly mere appearances”.
It notes that though d’Espagnat acknowledges possible “theological implications”, he guards against “using it as justification for specific religious doctrines which can be easily falsified by reason and fact”.
“These perceptions offer,” d’Espagnat has said, “the possibility that the things we observe may be tentatively interpreted as signs providing us with some perhaps not entirely misleading glimpses of a higher reality and, therefore, that higher forms of spirituality are fully compatible with what seems to emerge from contemporary physics.”
See Reuters or, if you want more on the philosophy, try the Guardian blog. New Scientist meanwhile headlines with “Concept of 'hypercosmic God' wins Templeton Prize“.
Some brief background:
The prize was created in 1972 by the investment tycoon Sir John Templeton in 1972, who died last summer at the age of 95 – see Nature editorial and Nature obituary. A Nature news story at the time explains that the foundation, with a $1.5 billion endowment “Has a mandate for "engaging life's biggest questions". Although it has striven towards reconciling science and faith, the foundation has also funded research into fields as diverse as cosmology, quantum mechanics, psychology and biology.
Comments
Espagnat was philosophically careful, but the Templeton Foundation wasn't. And both perhaps suffer from the unnecessary need for absolute certainty. Science does not deal is such a sensless notion, but religions often do, unfortunately. All that's being said is that knowledge is probable, which is more than sufficient, and that there are levels of organization and perception that may go on to infinity in what we call reality. That is Systems Theory or fractal theory, as I've written throughout my career, and nothing supernatural (read, unnatural) or religious in the sense of epistemological dogma and blind belief. Science can supply what religion only claims to supply, a viable and meaningful metaphysics and cosmology (my latest work). The ancient Eurasian Culture described such epistemology, cosmology, philosophy of science and metaphysics quite well. Our Culture needs to relearn it before it's too late. There are no limits to science as probably knowledge and never have been. It's a mistake to chain the scientific mind or the philosophic mind. Levels within levels can be understood. No turf fences, please.
Dr. Colleen D. Clements
Posted by: Dr. Colleen D. Clements | March 17, 2009 09:29 PM