The Final Scientific Enlightenment - the completion of Darwin & Einsteins' theories

What are you optimistic about? Why?
by Edge.org
Reposted from:

http://edge.org/q2007/q07_index.html

The Edge Annual Question — 2007

WHAT ARE YOU OPTIMISTIC ABOUT? WHY?

As an activity, as a state of mind, science is fundamentally optimistic. Science figures out how things work and thus can make them work better. Much of the news is either good news or news that can be made good, thanks to ever deepening knowledge and ever more efficient and powerful tools and techniques. Science, on its frontiers, poses more and ever better questions, ever better put.

What are you optimistic about? Why? Surprise us!

RICHARD DAWKINS
Evolutionary Biologist, Charles Simonyi Professor For The Understanding Of Science, Oxford University; Author, The God Delusion

The Final Scientific Enlightenment

I am optimistic that the physicists of our species will complete Einstein's dream and discover the final theory of everything before superior creatures, evolved on another world, make contact and tell us the answer. I am optimistic that, although the theory of everything will bring fundamental physics to a convincing closure, the enterprise of physics itself will continue to flourish, just as biology went on growing after Darwin solved its deep problem. I am optimistic that the two theories together will furnish a totally satisfying naturalistic explanation for the existence of the universe and everything that's in it including ourselves. And I am optimistic that this final scientific enlightenment will deal an overdue deathblow to religion and other juvenile superstitions.

See more responses from other Edge.org contributors here:
http://edge.org/q2007/q07_index.html

Templeton Prize

Chris Street edits in bold.

The Templeton Prize (wikipedia) awarded annually is currently £795,000. A Nobel Prize awards ten million Swedish Kronor, £745,000. The monetary value of the prize is adjusted so that it exceeds that of the Nobel Prizes. The prize is, as of 2006, the largest single annual financial prize award given to an individual for intellectual merit.

The prize has been criticized by Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion, a British ethologist and atheist, who labeled it "a very large sum of money given (...) usually to a scientist who is prepared to say something nice about religion" (Dawkins 2006).

Hindus, Christians, Jews, Buddhists and Muslims have been on the panel of judges and have been recipients of the price. There have been no Atheist awardees.

A list of recent winners includes some notable scientists: Professor John D. Barrow (2006), Rev. Dr. John C. Polkinghorne (2002), Professor Freeman J. Dyson (2000), Professor Paul Davies (1995) and others: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1983), Rev. Dr. Billy Graham (1982), Mother Teresa (1973).

The purpose of the Templeton Prize.

"If even one-tenth of world research were focused on spiritual realities, could benefits be even more vast than the benefits in the latest two centuries from research in food, travel, medicine or electronics, and cosmology?

• Research and innovation in food products just since 1800 caused over 100 fold more food production per American farmer.
  
  
• Research and innovation in travel methods since 1950, enabled over 100 fold increase in travel by Americans.
  
  
• Research and innovation in medicine just since 1900 caused over 100 fold increase in information about our bodies.
  
  
• Research and innovation in electronics just since 1900 caused over 1000 fold increase in information available to us.
  
  
• In 300 centuries, humans observed less than a million stars; but just in the last two centuries innovations in methods and research has revealed a cosmos of 100 billion times 100 billion stars."
  

— Sir John Templeton

How might humankind's spiritual information and advancement increase by more than a hundredfold? This is the challenge presented by the Templeton Prize. Just as knowledge in science, medicine, cosmology and other disciplines has grown exponentially during the past century, the Templeton Prize honors and encourages the many entrepreneurs trying various ways for discoveries and breakthroughs to expand human perceptions of divinity and to help in the acceleration of divine creativity.

Their various methods, particularly through scientific research, serve to supplement the wonderful ancient scriptures and traditions of all the world's religions. Many honors and titles and prizes have been given for many centuries and will be given in the future for good works, reconciliation, saintliness or for relief of poverty and sickness. But these very worthy endeavors are not the purpose of the Templeton Prize.

Instead, this award is intended to encourage the concept that resources and manpower are needed to accelerate progress in spiritual discoveries, which can help humans to learn more than a hundredfold more about divinity. We hope that by learning about the lives of the awardees, millions of people will be uplifted and inspired toward research and more discoveries about aspects of divinity. The Prize is intended to help people see the infinity of the Universal Spirit still creating the galaxies and all living things and the variety of ways in which the Creator is revealing himself to different people. We hope all religions may become more dynamic and inspirational.

The Templeton Prize is awarded annually to a living person. The Templeton Prize does not encourage syncretism but rather an understanding of the benefits of diversity. It seeks to focus attention on the wide variety of endeavors toward discoveries or spiritual realities research. It does not seek a unity of denominations nor a unity of world religions; but rather it seeks to encourage understanding of the benefits of diversity. There is no limitation of race, creed, sex, or geographical background.

Objective

Progress is needed in spiritual discovery as in all other dimensions of human experience and endeavor. Progress in religion needs to be accelerated as rapidly as progress in other disciplines. A wider universe demands deeper awareness of the aspects of the Creator and of spiritual resources available for humankind, of the infinity of God, and of the divine knowledge and understanding still to be claimed.

The Templeton Prize serves to stimulate this quest for deeper understanding and pioneering breakthroughs in religious concepts and knowledge by calling attention annually to achievements in this area. It is hoped that there will result from this enterprise expanded spiritual awareness on the part of humankind, a wider understanding of the purpose of life, heightened quality of devotion and love, and a greater emphasis on the kind of research and discovery that brings human perceptions more into concert with the divine will.

Criteria

The judges consider a nominee's contribution to progress made either during the year prior to his selection or during his or her entire career. The qualities sought in awarding the Prize are: freshness, creativity, innovation and effectiveness. Such contributions may involve new concepts of divinity, new organizations, new and effective ways of communicating God's wisdom and infinite love, creation of new schools of thought, creation of new structures of understanding the relationship of the Creator to his ongoing creation of the universe, to the physical sciences, and the life sciences, and the human sciences, the releasing of new and vital impulses into old religious structures and forms.

Award

The Prize, a sum in the amount of £795,000 sterling.

Nominations

The Templeton Prize is awarded annually on the decision of a panel of judges from the major religions of the world today.

Nominations are sought from all people everywhere. Leaders of theological and religious institutions and those engaged in innovative and creative research are especially invited to submit nominations. Persons desiring to nominate should write to the Templeton Prize, Canyon Institute for Advanced Studies, 3300 W. Camelback Road, Phoenix, AZ 85017. To serve as guides for nominators, copies of nominations of earlier winners can be requested.

In some years nominations sent to judges may be limited to encourage a wide diversity of recipients from different races, sexes and religions. It is hoped that the recipients can serve as examples of the wide variety of possible ways to increase more than 100 fold the spiritual information, spiritual principles and concepts of divinity. Nominations are sought for potential recipients from all nations and religions of the world.

Where Science and Ethics Meet

Chris Street edits in bold.

The Scientist as Rebel (New York Review Books Collection)
by Freeman Dyson

Where Science and Ethics Meet
A Review by Gregory M. Lamb

Throughout history scientists from Galileo to Andrei Sakharov have been persecuted for challenging the orthodoxy of their societies. But in The Scientist as Rebel, Freeman Dyson advocates rebellion of a broader kind.

Science, the theoretical physicist writes, should rebel "against poverty and ugliness and militarism and economic injustice." Benjamin Franklin is Dyson's ideal of the scientific rebel, one who embodied "thoughtful rebellion, driven by reason and calculation more than by passion and hatred." If science ever stops rebelling against authority, Dyson insists, it won't deserve to be pursued by our brightest children.

In this highly readable compilation of previously published essays and book reviews written over nearly four decades, Dyson also rebels against the idea that scientists should only concern themselves with the problems of the laboratory.

In one chapter he asks "can science be ethical?" In another he explores the uneasy relationship between science and religion ("Is God in the lab?"). He considers the qualities of mind expressed by the great scientists of the past in essays such as "In Praise of Amateurs" and "Seeing the Unseen."

What is science? Dyson quotes from biologist J.B.S. Haldane: "It is man's gradual conquest, first of space and time, then of matter as such, then of his own body and those of other living beings, and finally the subjugation of the dark and evil elements in his own soul."

Dyson, a professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, has made his own share of contributions to the advancement of scientific knowledge, in fields from nuclear physics to quantum electrodynamics. But here he also proves himself an adept essayist on ethical issues less obviously connected with science.

Dyson also stands opposed to the "reductionist" view of science, the concept that all knowledge, whether history, the arts, or ethics, "can be reduced to science." Dyson argues for a wider definition of knowledge that comes from a broader array of sources, including artistic values and religion, "parts of a human heritage that is older than science and perhaps more enduring."

Science and religion need not be seen as foes, argues Dyson, who finds the roots of modern science, with its demand for logical thinking and "scientific method," in a millennium of Christian theological disputes in Europe that had the effect of sharpening minds. The contentiousness sometimes felt between Christianity and modern science actually springs from their common roots, he says.

"Science is a particular bunch of tools that have been conspicuously successful for understanding and manipulating the material universe," Dyson concludes. "Religion is another bunch of tools, giving us hints of a mental or spiritual universe that transcends the material universe."

To those who see the world evolving toward a post-religious era, Dyson offers the words of his mother, whom he describes as "a skeptical Christian, like me." She used to tell him, "You can throw religion out of the door, but it will always come back through the window."

For Dyson, scientists are neither secular saints who have an answer for every human need nor irresponsible devils without regard for human values. Science, for example, doesn't have solutions to the great issues of war and peace. But scientists can be advocates for international understanding and cooperation by serving as models of those values themselves, he says.

Science needs both its revolutionaries and conservatives, Dyson explains -- those eager to abandon past views and those who defend them. It also needs both hedgehogs and foxes, scientists who dig deeply at a few fundamental problems (hedgehogs include Albert Einstein) and those who have wide interests and move quickly from problem to problem (foxes include Dyson's mentor, Richard Feynman).

The Scientist as Rebel does not include a single equation or technical diagram. When scientific concepts do arise, as in an essay on the wonders of string theory, they are described in clear layman's language. What really fills this book is wisdom -- wisdom that helps us understand how scientists think and work and how science, properly understood, can help us make better sense of our world.

Gregory M. Lamb is a Monitor staff writer.

Read more about this book

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No religion and an end to war: how thinkers see the future

Chris Street edits in bold

Alok Jha, science correspondent
Monday January 1, 2007
The Guardian

People's fascination for religion and superstition will disappear within a few decades as television and the internet make it easier to get information, and scientists get closer to discovering a final theory of everything, leading thinkers argue today.

The web magazine Edge (www.edge.org) asked more than 150 scientists and intellectuals: "What are you optimistic about?" Answers included hope for an extended human life span, a bright future for autistic children, and an end to violent conflicts around the world.

Philosopher Daniel Denett believes that within 25 years religion will command little of the awe it seems to instil today. The spread of information through the internet and mobile phones will "gently, irresistibly, undermine the mindsets requisite for religious fanaticism and intolerance".

Biologist Richard Dawkins said that physicists would give religion another problem: a theory of everything that would complete Albert Einstein's dream of unifying the fundamental laws of physics. "This final scientific enlightenment will deal an overdue death blow to religion and other juvenile superstitions."

Part of that final theory will be formulated by scientists working on the Large Hadron Collider, a particle accelerator at Cern in Geneva, which is to be switched on this year. It will smash protons together to help scientists understand what makes up the most fundamental bits of the universe.

Steven Pinker, a psychologist at Harvard University, highlighted the decline of violence: "Most people, sickened by the bloody history of the 20th century, find this claim incredible. Yet, as far as I know, every systematic attempt to document the prevalence of violence over centuries and millennia (and, for that matter, the past 50 years), particularly in the west, has shown the overall trend is downward."

John Horgan, of the Stevens Institute of Technology, New Jersey, was optimistic "that one day war - large-scale, organised group violence - will end once and for all".

This will also be the year that we get to grips with our genomes. George Church, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School, believes we will learn "so much more about ourselves and how we interact with our environment and fellow humans".

Simon Baron-Cohen, a psychologist at Cambridge University, focused on autistic children, saying their outlook had never been better. "There is a remarkably good fit between the autistic mind and the digital age," he said. "Many develop an intuitive understanding of computers, in the same way other children develop an intuitive understanding of people."

Leo Chalupa, a neurobiologist at the University of California, Davis, predicted that, by the middle of this century, it would not be uncommon for people to lead active lives well beyond the age of 100. He added: "We will be able to regenerate parts of the brain that have been worn out. So better start thinking what you'll be doing with all those extra years."