Bernie

This man is Bernard d’Espagnat. He has a brain the size of a planet. In his extraordinary career, he has worked with other people with brains the size of planets, including Louis de Broglie, Enrico Fermi and Niels Bohr.*

D’Espagnat has just been awarded the 2009 Templeton Prize, which, in the words of the Templeton Foundation, is bestowed on a recipient for ‘progress toward research or discoveries about spiritual realities’, and carries with it a useful £1 million in pocket money.

M. d’Espagnat was given the prize this year for his work in quantum physics, and in particular for his assertions that ‘reality’ (whatever that is) can never be truly known by us in any meaningful sense. Crucially, in regard to the Templeton Prize, his conclusions about what he has discovered in his research veer towards the metaphysical.

From New Scientist:

‘Unlike classical physics,’ d’Espagnat explains, ‘quantum mechanics cannot describe the world as it really is, it can merely make predictions for the outcomes of our observations. If we want to believe, as Einstein did, that there is a reality independent of our observations, then this reality can either be knowable, unknowable or veiled.’

D’Espagnat subscribes to the third view and hypothesizes a ‘‘veiled reality’ that science does not describe but only glimpses uncertainly’. A veiled reality that encompasses what he refers to as a ‘Being’ and ‘a great, hypercosmic God’.

All things considered, I’m happy that the Templeton Foundation is spending their (evidently) vast fortunes in this way (let’s face it – the money could be going to Creationists). John Templeton, the founder of the organization, was the kind of religious person of whom we need many more. As a practising Presbyterian Christian he asked a question that all believers of religion should ask:

Why shouldn’t I try to learn more? Why shouldn’t I go to Hindu services? Why shouldn’t I go to Muslim services? If you are not egotistical, you will welcome the opportunity to learn more.

Indeed.

It puzzles me, however, that M. d’Espagnat, genius that he indisputably is, seems unable to grasp what is apparently too much of a subtlety of his ‘veiled’ reality; if it exists why must it imply the existence of his hypercosmic God, rather than infer instead that our human brains (planet-size or otherwise) may simply not be capable of understanding the true nature of things? This, to me, seems to be a far likelier explanation than the unsupported jump to the notion of a mysterious and inscrutable creator.†

Perplexingly, d’Espagnat himself seems to be within stepping distance of the same conclusion. He said, on receipt of the prize:

I feel myself deeply in accordance with the Templeton Foundation’s great, guiding idea that science does shed light (on spirituality). In my view it does so mainly by rendering unbelievable an intellectual construction claiming to yield access to the ultimate ground of things with the sole use of the simple, somewhat trivial notions everybody has.

It would appear, then, that he is merely replacing a simple (or trivial) faith in God with a complicated one built on the scaffold of a type of physics and mathematics that very few people understand. Sure, it’s not the thunder-and-lightning enemy-smiting God of the Evangelical Christians/Muslims/Hebrews, but it comes from exactly the same irrational place; the hubris of humans and our belief that the Universe revolves around us.

It seems, then, that in this realm we’ve not really made many advances since Copernicus after all.

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*If those names don’t mean anything to you, they should. They are among the brightest and most insightful scientists we have ever known.

†Which, in any case, is a completely simplistic and futile supposition – as I’ve said elsewhere: if you want to make that assessment, then you may as well suppose that you, your world and all your memories were created by that God yesterday, fully formed and intact – how would you ever know? It’s the same kind of intellectual pursuit. From there, a raft of fanciful worlds become possible and reality unravels like ball of wool in the paws of a kitten.

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