John Polkinghorne

A senior professor specializing in particle physics at Cambridge, Polkinghorne learnt his quantum mechanics from the great PaulDirac in the early 1950s, with RogerPenrose, with whom he remains on friendly terms. Like most practising quantum physicists Polkinghorne is a robust realist (not accepting the Copenhagen interpretation of QuantumTheory) and his wife eventually gave him a T shirt with one of his favorite phrases on it: "Epistemology entails ontology". (I think it grows on you if you think hard enough with a dictionary close by.)

Polkinghorne recently became an ordained minister of the Anglican (Episcopalian) church and has written extensively on the overlap between modern physics, philosophy and theology. He recently interviewed RogerPenrose on the philosophical and spiritual implications of Penrose's recent speculations on quantum gravity and the human mind.

Polkinghorne commented to me a few weeks ago: "The amusing thing is that Roger believes that everything he's ever worked on comes together to explain all these extremely difficult things. In my opinion he's very very clever ... but not quite that clever!". He's not convinced yet that the order of magnitude is anything like right for gravitational energy differences to play the role Penrose proposes in triggering reduction of the state vector, whether inside Penrose's brain or anywhere else in the universe! -- RichardDrake

Ye gods and little fishes! The above's been copied to WhyClublet today by RichardDrake!

CategoryScientist