Cosmologist wins religion prize

John Barrow, a cosmologist at the University of Cambridge, has won the 2006 Templeton Prize for Progress Toward Research or Discoveries about Spiritual Realities. Founded by global financier John Templeton, his foundation says the prize is intentionally larger than the Nobel Prize “to underscore that research and advances in spiritual discoveries can be quantifiably more significant than disciplines recognized by the Nobels”; this year the purse is about $1.4 million.

The focus of Barrow’s current research is on possible time variations in the fine-structure constant. “I am primarily engaged in developing self-consistent theories in which the fine-structure constant and the electron–proton mass ratio and other traditional constants are actually varying,” he says. One consequence of a varying fine-structure constant, he adds, would be violation of the equivalence principle: “If you drop two different materials in a gravitational field, they will accelerate at slightly different rates.”

Astronomy, Barrow says, “breathes new life into so many religious questions of ultimate concern and never-ending fascination. Many of the deepest and most engaging questions that we grapple with … about the nature of the universe have their origins in our purely religious quest for meaning.”

Beginning in 1983 with The Left Hand of Creation: The Origin and Evolution of the Expanding Universe (Heinemann), Barrow has published a total of 17 books. “I have written, for example, about all aspects of infinity and of nothing, the void, zero. These ideas cover mathematical, physical, theological, philosophical, literal aspects,” he says.

“One doesn’t want to turn science into a religious quest,” Barrow says. “But people are interested in whether the view they have of the universe is inconsistent with a religious view they might have of the universe.” In physics and astronomy, he adds, “it’s not.”

The Templeton Prize was created in 1973. Among past laureates are Mother Teresa and Billy Graham; 6 of the last 10 winners have been physicists.