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.