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!
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.
ReplyDeleteAnd 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?
ReplyDeleteAn ontological illusionist, rather than scientific instrumentalist, Gordon.
ReplyDeleteAnd please don't ask me to summarise Leibniz's differential calculus or explain what it was that Heisenberg was so uncertain about...
D.