Science News Review

2009 Templeton Prizewinner

Apr 15 at 6:06pm by Aileen

French physicist d’Espagnat wins prestigious Templeton Prize

The Templeton Foundation awarded its $1.42 million prize this year at the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization [UNESCO] in Paris to French physicist and philosopher Bernard d’Espagnat for his work in quantum physics that, d’Espagnat says, reveal a reality beyond science that spirituality and art could help to grasp.

d’Espagnat is a former senior physicist at the CERN particle physics laboratory in Geneva and professor. He has argued in his books that modern quantum physics demonstrates that ultimate reality cannot be described.

“Mystery is not something negative that has to be eliminated. On the contrary, it is one of the constitutive elements of being.”

We members of the public who like science very much and try hard to follow developments in the fields are sometimes confused by the philosophical aspects that seem to so often play a role in what theories become ‘consensus’ and what remains on the fringe. Science is of course an ‘adversarial’ enterprise, where each discovery or interpretation must jump some hefty hoops of peer review and extended debate – sometimes quite heated – over methodologies, interpretations, data points, theoretics, etc. Which often tends to make a mockery of the scientific tendency to assert authority or argue to authority, since so many other scientists in the same fields believe something else entirely. We who are not scientists ourselves must instead just try to understand what the controversies are and what progress is being made to resolve them.

The philosophical issues related to quantum physics over the past century since its inception have to do with the challenge that the weird sub-atomic realm presents to notions of absolute determinism that science embraced with relish upon the work of Sir Isaac Newton and his “clockwork universe.” This determinism underpins the philosophy of materialism, which is widespread among scientists. Materialism postulates that we – and all other things in existence – are completely explained by various combinations of material things like atoms and molecules and interacting fields, that there is nothing in existence that cannot be entirely reduced to these things and made 100% predictable if we just knew all the factors involved in their forms and behaviors.

Quantum physics demonstrates that this materialism simply does not explain reality at its most basic level. Where things are intimately connected across vast distances, may pop into and out of existence for no apparent reason just under our ability to view or know, and cannot be described as anything physically material at all.

John Templeton, Jr., the president of the foundation, said at the awards ceremony that d’Espagnat had “explored the unlimited, the openings that new scientific discoveries offer in pure knowledge and in questions that go to the very heart of our existence and humanity.” Previous winners of the prize include Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, evangelist Billy Graham, and Mother Teresa.