Polish physicist, philosopher and Roman Catholic priest Michael Heller, has just been awarded the £820,000 Templeton Prize. Michael invited me to Krakow in 2006 and 2007 to deliver a couple of papers, and I honestly can't think of a more deserving recipient. Michael will be investing all his Templeton prize-winning money in the Copernicus Centre in Krakow, an institute whose raison d'etre will be 'philosophy in science', rather than 'philosophy of science'. I have remarked before that most physicists seem to be happy to write about philosophical issues, but do so without having first familiarised themselves with the relevant philosophical literature. As a consequence, they commit the same egregious philosophical errors over and over again. It would be nice, then, to think that something can be done to ameliorate this phenomenon.
Congratulations Michael!
3 comments:
Michael Heller: One of my heroes is Leibniz, the great philosopher of the 17th century: “When God calculates and thinks things through, the world is made.” My philosophy is encapsulated in that.
And my own philosophy - a sort of sub-miracle category - is encapsulated in the concept of the atom. A functional mathematical instrument which the physicist, with the scanty furnishings of fact, has adapted to the specifications of a carefully conceived design: "Unreal, perhaps, but not illusory," as Leibniz said of another matter...
Dreamy
A scientific instrumentalist rather than a realist, then, Selena?
An ontological illusionist, rather than scientific instrumentalist, Gordon.
And please don't ask me to summarise Leibniz's differential calculus or explain what it was that Heisenberg was so uncertain about...
D.
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