Essay

Once I wrote a book six times, about three hundred pages per draft. Every time I started over, I cried. I took some comfort from knowing that I would stick with the project until it got published and that its success would make the enormous effort worth it. The agent who’d sold the book “One…

You’re deadlocked. He thinks it’s your problem; you think it’s his. You’ve been going over what happened, how it started and who started it. But neither of you will give an inch. So forget the past. Move on to right now. You’re upset. But then he says he is too. You feel really put out,…

Continuation from Part II. Indeed, the journey into self-knowledge is integral part of our essential humanity, and not only as individual human beings, but also as people, nations and even entire civilizations and as humankind as a whole. The microcosm reflects the macrocosm but the contrary is also true. This can only be so if…

Dialogues between science and religion have ranged from friendly exchanges with mutual respect to unhappy confrontations bordering on mutual contempt. The latter have generally been between scholars: some scientifically inclined thinkers on the one hand and some religiously committed theologians on the other. Millions of words are spoken and written on either side, and there…

You’re standing in line for tickets to a concert. Some guy in sunglasses wedges himself into line right in front of you. You’re furious. Someone behind you sees your reaction and says, “Relax. He’s blind. He doesn’t know what he’s doing.” You suddenly feel ashamed. But then someone else in line says, “He’s not blind….

Continued from Part I. All of these essays issued out of a series of reflections. Some were at first jutted down as diary entries, others became articles of various length, and several of them became full length essays (such as the very first one or the 14th on the Janus-like face of Europe), still others…

Alain Aspect, Ph.D. – Atom Optics Group, Institut d’Optique, Palaiseau, France In 1974, at a time when it was not fashionable to work on the foundations of quantum mechanics, I learned from Bernard d’Espagnat many subtleties about the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen problem, Bell’s inequalities, and quantum non-locality. This played a crucial role in my decision to embark…

PARIS, MARCH 16 – Bernard d’Espagnat, a French physicist and philosopher of sciencewhose explorations of the philosophical implications of quantum physics have opened new vistas on the definition of reality and the potential limits of knowable science, has won the 2009 Templeton Prize. From the mid-1960s through the early 1980s, d’Espagnat, 87, was a philosophical…

Ladies and Gentlemen: First of all let me express my most heartfelt thanks to the John Templeton Foundation and let me tell President Templeton how deeply I feel honored at having received this prestigious prize, aimed at rewarding a significant contribution to affirming life’s spiritual dimension. Honored and, at the same time, feeling very humble…