Monday, March 16, 2009

Templeton Prize for d'Espagnat for Saying the World is Unknowable

Bernard d'Espagnat, 87, a leading quantum physicist has been awarded the  £1 million Templeton Prize for his contribution to religious thought. He has worked with Enrico Fermi and Niels Bohr, so he is certainly not a lightweight.

In Wikipedia, I find that he has derived some equation called Wigner-d'Espagnat inequality which has to be satisfied by the results of simultaneous trials. As it is, this has not been done- so this is taken to mean that Einstein's idea of local realism is disproved. So, d'Espagnat is someone notable, not a nonentity.

Despite what the rationally minded would say, it is good that someone is giving money for undertaking genuine research and looking  into questions that are reserved for religion.

Times Online reports that d'Espagnat believes that science alone cannot explain the ultimate reality, the nature of being. He says, "Mystery is not something negative that has to be eliminated. On the contrary, it is one of the constitutive elements of being."

Every scientist of repute says that he is filled with wonder as he ponders on the nature of the world, but we who read about science, usually find that the explanations desiccate reality of any mystery. We have found a substitute in explanations- whatever you say about how things are  does not explain why things have to be.

Dr. d'Espagnat is a Roman Catholic, who believes that there is a deeper reality beyond what we know- "... it cannot be conceptualised for the very reason that this ultimate reality is beyond any concept we can construct", he says.

It seems that he has developed a concept called, "veiled reality", which posits that there is a reality that is beyond time, space, matter and energy that are perceived.

Merk Vernon, at guardian, writes that d'Espagnat says observing the world is like looking at a rainbow: though it looks real, how it looks depends on where we are and what we can see. We cannot really know the world as it is in itself. He writes that this is something similar to what Kant suggested- the world is a mystery that can never be mastered.

I think there are two points of view about quantum physics- one is that you have to leave it with the numbers and equations, they are not to be used to draw conclusions about the reality about the world. d'Espagnat, obviously does not belong to that school of thought, and he deserves this award for his courage.

I like this quote of his: "The doctrine that the world is made up of objects whose existence is independent of human consciousness turns out to be in conflict with quantum mechanics and with facts established by experiment." 

4 comments:

  1. Bas, your write up was graceful. I should have stopped there, but I tried to dig in to that wiki link.
    Got headache.

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  2. Thanks siva.

    I should have warned about the equations- did you try to work that out?

    I just skipped that part.

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  3. Here is a link to some quotes by leading scientists on d'Espagnat- the global spiral. It includes an astounding quote by Alain Aspect: "Without visionary thinkers like Bernard d’Espagnat, the field of quantum information would certainly not have emerged as it did. I am happy to congratulate him and to have this opportunity to tell how much I owe him." Aspect devised the experiment that showed action at a distance- something happening to a photon here could affect its companion elsewhere, anywhere in the universe. Think of the implications, please. Awesome is the word.

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  4. Update on d'Espagnant:

    I found an article by d'Espagnat at The Guardian, where he makes these points:

    "...the basic components of objects – the particles, electrons, quarks etc. – cannot be thought of as "self-existent":"...underlying this empirical reality is a mysterious, non-conceptualisable "ultimate reality", not embedded in space and (presumably) not in time either."

    And in discussing Entanglement at a distance, he says the proof that this happens "... proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that some of our most engrained notions about space and causality should be reconsidered."

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