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The Amazing Light Symposium is
organized by Metanexus Institute.
All inquiries should be directed to:
Metanexus Institute
3624 Market St., Suite 301
Philadelphia, PA 19104
215/789-2200 fax: 215/789-2222
townes.project@metanexus.net



Related Links:

Who's Who


Hosts

Robert J. Birgeneau γ, University of California, Berkeley
Robert C. Dynes γ, University of California, Berkeley
Mark Richards γ, University of California, Berkeley
Marjorie D. Shapiro γφ∞, University of California, Berkeley


Co-Organizers/Co-Editors

Raymond Chiao *θ∞, University of California, Berkeley
William D. Phillips †*θ∞, National Institute of Standards and Technology


Speakers/Panelists/Committee Members

Yakir Aharonov ‡, Tel Aviv University and University of South Carolina
Donald Backer Ω, University of California, Berkeley
Robert Bishop ∞, University of Oxford
Nicolaas Bloembergen ࠰, Harvard University
Raphael Bousso φ∞, University of California, Berkeley
Nancy Cartwright ∞ (invited), London School of Economics
Raymond Chiao *θ∞, Co-Editor, University of California, Berkeley
Hyung S. Choi φ, Metanexus Institute and University of Cambridge
Steven Chu †*‡∞, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Ignacio Cirac ∞, Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics
Claude Cohen-Tannoudji †‡∞, École Normale Supérieure and Collège de France
Marvin L. Cohen φ∞, University of California, Berkeley
Paul C.W. Davies φ∞, Macquarie University
Sidney Drell ‡, Stanford Linear Accelerator, Stanford University
Freeman J. Dyson ‡∞, Institute for Advanced Study
Gerald Edelman †∞, Scripps Research Institute
George F.R. Ellis φ∞, University of Cape Town
Gerald Gabrielse φ∞ (invited), Harvard University
Peter L. Galison *φ∞, Harvard University
Reinhard Genzel φ∞, Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics
Owen Gingerich *φ∞, YSC Chair, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and Harvard University
Joseph Giordmaine φ, Princeton University
Nicolas Gisin φ, Université de Genève
Donald Glaser †∞, University of California, Berkeley
Roy Glauber ∞, Harvard University
David Gross †∞, Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics and University of California at Santa Barbara
Hans Halvorson ∞, Princeton University
Theodor Hänsch *φ∞, Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics
Serge Haroche φ, École Normale Supérieure
John Heilbron ∞, University of California, Berkeley
Russell A. Hulse †‡, Princeton University
Michio Kaku ∞, Graduate Center of the City University of New York
Marc Kamionkowski ∞ (invited), California Institute of Technology
Wolfgang Ketterle †‡∞, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Christof Koch ∞, California Institute of Technology
Adrian Lee ∞, University of California, Berkeley
David M. Lee †‡, Cornell University
Sang-Soo Lee ‡, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology
Tsung-Dao Lee †‡, Columbia University
Anthony Leggett †*‡∞, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Geoffrey Marcy φ, University of California, Berkeley
Fotini Markopoulou φ, Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics
Christopher McKee φ, University of California, Berkeley
Nancey Murphy ∞, Fuller Theological Seminary
William Newsome ∞, Stanford University
Douglas Osheroff †‡∞, Stanford University
Arno Penzias †‡∞, New Enterprise Associates
Saul Perlmutter *φ∞, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
William D. Phillips †*θ∞, National Institute of Standards
John Polkinghorne ‡, University of Cambridge
Norman Ramsey †‡∞, Harvard University
Martin J. Rees ‡, University of Cambridge
Vera Rubin φ, Carnegie Institute of Washington
Robert J. Russell φ∞, Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences
Marlan Scully φ, Texas A&M University
John Searle ∞, University of California, Berkeley
Marjorie D. Shapiro γφ∞, University of California, Berkeley
Koichi Shimoda ‡, University of Tokyo
Vaclav Smil ∞, University of Manitoba
Boris Stoicheff ‡∞, University of Toronto
Horst Störmer †‡, Columbia University
Eleanore Stump ∞ (invited), St. Louis University
Leonard Susskind ∞, Stanford University
Max Tegmark ∞, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Patrick Thaddeus ∞ (invited), Harvard University
Daniel Tsui †‡, Princeton University
Herbert Walther φ, Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics
Frank Wilczek †‡, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Donald York *φ, University of Chicago
Anton Zeilinger *φ∞, University of Vienna
Ahmed Zewail †*‡∞, California Institute of Technology


Program Convenor & Co-Editor

Charles L. Harper *, Executive Director and Senior Vice-President, John Templeton Foundation


Administrative Director

William Grassie, Administrative Director


Administrative Committee

Marcia Carle, Development Director, Metanexus Institute
Pamela Bond Contractor, Developmental Editor and Director, Ellipsis Enterprises
Julia Loving, Director of Communications and Special Programs, Metanexus Institute
Bridget Palombo, Program Associate, Metanexus Institute

† Nobel Laureate
* Executive Program Committee
‡ Honorary Committee
φ Advisory Committee
∞ Speaker
γ Host
θ Co-chair
Ω Session Chair

 

 

Yakir Aharonov, the twenty-fifth Van Vleck Lecturer, holds a joint appointment as professor of physics at Tel Aviv University in Israel and as chair in theoretical physics at the University of South Carolina where he was honored with "The Distinguished Scientist Governor Award of South Carolina" in 1993. Professor Aharonov is a theoretical condensed matter physicist studying non-local and topological effects in quantum mechanics, relativistic quantum field theories and interpretations of quantum mechanics. Aharonov was a co-recipient of the 1998 Wolf Prize for the discovery of the Aharonov-Bohm Effect. Aharonov and the late David Bohm proposed in 1959 that the form of the quantum-mechanical coupling of electromagnetic fields to electrons had some very counterintuitive implications for the behavior of electrons. The controversial AB effect has been observed and, in fact, has become an experimental tool in the domain of mesoscopic physics. Aharonov has also been recognized for this work in the 1995 Hewlett-Packard Europhysics Prize.

 

Donald Backer is Professor of Astronomy, Chairman of the Astronomy Department, and Research Astronomer in the Radio Astronomy Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has been since 1975. He was born in 1943 in Plainfield, New Jersey. He received his undergraduate degree in engineering physics from Cornell University (1966), an M.S. degree in radio astronomy from Manchester University (1968), and a Ph.D. in astronomy from Cornell University (1971). Professor Backer spent two years as a postdoctoral researcher at National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Charlottesville, Virginai and two years as an National Research Council Research Associate at NASA¹s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

His research interests include the death of stars with particular attention to pulsars, the interstellar medium with a focus on small-scale plasma turbulence, and active galactic nuclei that harbor massive black holes. An ongoing research program is the timing of an array of millisecond pulsars for use as celestial clocks. The prototype millisecond pulsar, B1937+21, was discovered in 1982 at the Arecibo Observatory, and this remains the fastest spin period for any neutron star. The long-term goal of the timing-array program is the detection of a stochastic background of gravitational radiation that results from the coalescence of massive black hole binaries in distant galaxies. Models of the origin and evolution of these massive black holes suggest that detection of the background gravitational radiation via pulsar timing is a tantalizing factor of five below our current measurement sensitivity. Another collaborative activity is focused on a deeper understanding of an enigmatic object in our Galactic Center ­ Sgr A* ­ that may be an emission from the atmosphere of a massive black hole. Recently, Professor Backer and NRAO colleagues at the University of Virginia initiated an experiment to detect the hydrogen gas surrounding the first stars in the early universe via the emission of hyperfine quantum (21cm rest wavelength) radiation, which is excited by ultraviolet light from these first stars.

 

Robert J. Birgeneau became the ninth chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, in September 2004. An internationally distinguished physicist, he is a leader in higher education and is well known for his commitment to diversity and equity in the academic community. Before coming to Berkeley, Birgeneau served four years as president of the University of Toronto. Previously, he was dean of the School of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he spent 25 years on the faculty. He is a foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences, has received many awards for teaching and research, and is one of the most cited physicists in the world for his work on the fundamental properties of materials. A Toronto native, Birgeneau received his B.Sc. in mathematics from the University of Toronto in 1963 and his Ph.D. in physics from Yale University in 1966. He served on the faculty of Yale for one year, spent one year at Oxford University, and was a member of the technical staff at Bell Laboratories from 1968 to 1975. He joined the physics faculty at MIT in 1975 and was named chair of the physics department in 1988 and dean of science in 1991. He became the 14th president of the University of Toronto on July 1, 2000. At Berkeley, Birgeneau holds a faculty appointment in the department of physics in addition to serving as chancellor.

 

Robert C. Bishop is currently a Junior Lecturer in Philosophy of Physics and a Fellow of Wolfson College., Oxford University. His research interests born in 1961, studied physics and philosophy at the University of Texas in Austin, Texas (USA), receiving a Bachelors degree in physics in 1984 as well as a Masters in physics in 1986. His Masters thesis was on action-at-a-distance electrodynamics. After working as a research scientist in industry, he studied philosophy at the University of Texas, receiving a Ph.D. in 1999 for his dissertation on chaotic dynamics, indeterminacy and free will. From 1983 to 1985 Dr. Bishop was a research assistant with the Center for Theoretical Physics at The University of Texas at Austin under the direction of Dr. John A. Wheeler. Subsequently he worked as a research scientist for the Applied Plasma Physics and Technology Division, Science Applications International Corporation from 1985 to 1989, then for Austin Research Associates from 1989 to 1991. Dr. Bishop was a National Aeronautics and Space Administration Office of Space Science and Applications Graduate Fellow from 1990 to 1992. While pursuing his Ph.D. in philosophy, he worked as a database and internet programmer for various companies. Since February of 2000 Dr. Bishop has been with the Theory and Data Analysis Department of IGPP as a research postdoc. He has given colloquia at the University of Texas, the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Freiburg, the Max Planck Institute Für Extraterrestrische Physik, Garching, Germany, the Institute for the History and Foundations of Mathematics and the Natural Sciences, Utrecht University as well, as given presentations at several scientific and philosophy meetings, and published in journals. His current areas of research are philosophy of science, conceptual foundations of physics, philosophy of mind and philosophy of social science. His works include: Between Chance and Choice: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Determinism, edited with Harald Atmanspacher.

 

Nicolaas Bloembergen is Gerhard Gade University Professor Emeritus at Harvard University and, since 2001, Professor of Optical Sciences at the University of Arizona. In 1991, he served as president of the American Physical Society. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1981 for his contributions to the development of laser spectroscopy (shared with Arthur L. Schavlow and Kai M. Siegbahn). He is also the recipient the Lorentz Medal of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences in 1978, the National Medal of Science, awarded by the President of the United States in 1974, the Medal of Honor of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, and the Frederick Ives Medal of the Optical Society of America. He is a member of various academies in the United States and abroad. In addition to his service on the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University for four decades, he was also a visiting professor in Paris, Leiden, Bangalore, Munich, Berkeley, and Pasadena. Furthermore, he has served on numerous advisory committees of the U.S. government agencies and of industrial and academic institutions. He is the author of two monographs, "Nuclear Magnetic Relaxation" and "Nonlinear Optics" and has published over 300 papers in various scientific journals. Since 2001, he is a professor of optical sciences at the University of Arizona. Professor Bloembergen's research has included nuclear and electronic magnetic resonance, solid-state masers and lasers, and especially nonlinear optics and spectroscopy. Together with his co-workers, he developed a rigorous theory of nonlinear polarizability, the extension of Maxwell's equations to include source terms and the interaction of multiple waves in the bulk and at the boundaries of nonlinear media. This latter work led to the extension of the laws of reflection and refraction.

 

Raphael Bousso is assistant professor in the Department of Physics of the University of California, Berkeley. He is a theoretical physicist working on cosmology, black holes, and string theory. His contributions include a general formulation of the holographic principle, which describes the information content of the universe, and an approach to understanding the dark energy of the universe. Raphael Bousso received his Ph.D. from Cambridge University in 1998 and went on to become a post-doc at Stanford University. He also worked at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara. In 2002-2003 he was a fellow at the Harvard University physics department and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. In July 2003 he joined the physics department at UC Berkeley.

 

Marcia Carle, Metanexus Development Director, brings entrepreneurial energy to raising the funds needed to implement Metanexus Institute's goals and vision. Her experience includes business development, not-for-profit management, public relations, publishing, and education. Her expertise lies in strategic planning, project leadership, writing, resource development, and creative direction. Most recently, Marcia established and grew a public relations business in the Northwest Indiana/Chicago market. As Carle Communications, her company provided public relations and project management services to government, economic development organizations, business and industry, not-for-profit organizations, and educational institutions. Marcia sold her business in 2003 and moved to the Mid-Atlantic with a family relocation. Prior to life as a business owner, Marcia was executive director of a regional arts center, responsible for fundraising, public relations, program development, and organizational planning. Marcia holds a master's degree in journalism from the Ohio State University and a bachelor's degree in education with a concentration in English and French. She resides with her husband Michael in Greenville, Delaware; her children provide opportunities to visit Dallas, Chicago, and Rochester, New York. Leisure hours are often spent engaged in the science and spirituality of the hammered dulcimer.

 

Nancy Cartwright is the Chair of the Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science and Professor of Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method in the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is also Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego. Her principal interests are philosophy and history of science (especially physics and economics), causal inference and objectivity in science. Her publications include How the Laws of Physics Lie (1983), Nature's Capacities and their Measurement (1989), Otto Neurath: Philosophy between Science and Politics [co-author] (1995), and The Dappled World: A Study of the Boundaries of Science (1999). Nancy Cartwright is a Fellow of the British Academy and a member of the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.

 

Raymond Y. Chiao is a professor in the Department of Physics at theUniversity of California, Berkeley. He received his B.A. from Princeton University in 1961 and his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1965. Chiao taught at MIT for two years before joining the department at UC Berkeley in 1967. His research is in the area of experimental and theoretical studies in nonlinear and quantum optics, and more recently, in the interaction of matter waves with gravity waves. He discovered the stimulated Brillouin effect, and predicted the self trapping of light in a nonlinear optical medium as the "sech" soliton. He predicted and observed a Berry phase for a photon propagating in helical optical fibers, which arises from the helicity of the photon. He discovered that photons tunnel superluminally through photonic tunnel barriers. He is the author of numerous professional papers and was the editor of Amazing Light, a book honoring Charles Townes on his 80th birthday. He was an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow from 1967-1973, is presently a fellow of both the American Physical Society the Optical Society of America, and is a member of the Royal Society of Norway.

 

Hyung S. Choi is Director for Research and Programs in the Natural Sciences at the Metanexus Institute. He is also a Visiting Fellow at St. Edmund's College, Cambridge University. Prior to coming to Metanexus in 2003, Choi was the director of the Canyon Institute for Advanced Studies in Phoenix, Arizona. He was also a Witherspoon Fellow at the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences in Berkeley from 1994-1996. Dr. Choi is a recipient of many honors and awards for his research and teaching. His areas of expertise include foundational issues in quantum physics, quantum theory of light, philosophy of science, and the interdisciplinary area between science and religion. Dr. Choi received both his M.Phil. and Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the Graduate Center of CUNY and his M.Div. from Princeton Theological Seminary. Before he came to the United States in 1979, he studied undergraduate physics at Kyung Hee University and theoretical particle physics at Seoul National University in South Korea.

 

Steven Chu is the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a professor of physics and cellular and molecular biology of the University of California, Berkeley. Professor Chu's research is in atomic physics, polymer and biophysics. His thesis and postdoctoral work at Berkeley (1970-1978) was the observation of parity non-conservation in atomic transitions, one of the earliest confirmations of the Weinberg-Salam-Glashow theory that unifies the weak and electromagnetic forces. While at Bell Laboratories he and A. Mills did the first laser spectroscopy of positronium and muonium. Chu and his group showed how to first cool and then trap atoms with light. The optical trap was also used to trap microscopic particles in water and is now widely used in biology. Since joining Stanford in 1987, Chu and co-workers developed the accepted theory of laser cooling (also done independently by Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and Jean Dalibard), constructed the first atomic fountain clock that led to the current time standard, and have introduced the most precise atom interferometers to date. Chu invented methods to simultaneously visualize and manipulate single bio-molecules in 1990 and in 1997 received the Nobel Prize in Physics with Claude Cohen Tannoudji and William D. Phillips for developing methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light. His group has also applied methods such as fluorescence energy transfer, optical tweezers and atomic force microscope methods to study biology at the level of a single molecule.

 

J. Ignacio Cirac has been director of the Theory Division at the Max-Planck Institute for Quantum Optics since December 2001. His main areas of research are the theoretical description of atomic systems interacting with light, as well as the development of a theory of Quantum Information. In those fields he has proposed several ways of constructing quantum computers, quantum simulators and quantum repeaters using ions, atoms and photons. Dr. Cirac was originally trained in Theoretical Physics at the University Complutense of Madrid (B.S. 1988) and obtained his PhD in Theoretical Quantum Optics in 1991 at the same university. He was Professor Titular at the University of Castilla-La Mancha (Spain) from 1991 to 1996, and carried out a postdoc at the same time at the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics (University of Colorado). He then moved to the University of Innsbruck (Austria) as a professor of theoretical physics. He is also honorary professor at the Technical University of Munich (Germany). Dr. Cirac is associate editor of Review of Modern Physics, and a founding managing editor of Quantum Information and Computation. His scientific publications include more than two hundred research articles in scientific journals, including Nature, Science, and Physical Review Letters. Dr. Cirac is a correspondent member of the Spanish and Austrian Academies of Science, and Fellow of the American Physical Society. He also holds the Felix Kuschnitz Prize 2001 of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and the National Prize for Young Investigators (1993) and the Medal (2003) of the Spanish Royal Physical Society.

 

Claude Cohen-Tannoudji is professor of physics at École Normale Supérieure. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997 with Steven Chu and William D. Phillips for their development of techniques that use laser light to cool atoms to extremely low temperatures. At such temperatures atoms move slowly enough to be examined in detail. Cohen-Tannoudji was educated at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS), Paris, receiving his doctorate in 1962. After graduating he continued to work as a research scientist in the department of physics at ENS, while also teaching at the University of Paris VI from 1964 to 1973 and at the Coll&ecaute;ge de France from 1973. Cohen-Tannoudji and his colleagues at ENS expanded on the work of Chu and Phillips, successfully explaining a seeming discrepancy in theory and devising new mechanisms for cooling and trapping atoms with laser light. In 1995 they cooled helium atoms to within eighteen-millionths of a degree above absolute zero (-273.15 C, or -459.67 F), with a corresponding speed of about two centimeters per second. Their work, and that of Chu and Phillips, furthered scientists' understanding of how light and matter interact. Among other practical applications, the techniques they developed can be used to construct atomic clocks and other instruments capable of an extremely high degree of precision.

 

Marvin L. Cohen is University Professor in the department of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. Born in Montréal, Canada, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He was a member of the technical staff at Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey, from 1963-64 before joining the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley. Professor Cohen is a preeminent figure in the field of theoretical condensed matter physics. Most recently, he has been at the forefront of the nano revolution, having successfully predicted a semi-conducting boron nitride nanotube that was subsequently synthesized. He is a founding scientist of Nanomix, Inc. and also serves as a Senior Scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. In a career that has seen him accurately predict the properties of numerous semiconductors and superconductors, what happens to materials under intense pressure, and the possibility of a carbon nitride compound that is harder than diamond - for which he was awarded a patent - Marvin Cohen's single most important contribution might well be his "pseudopotential" model. This model enables theorists to put atoms in different arrangements and predict which will be the most stable based on the resulting energies. He is the author of many scientific papers as well as a textbook on solid-state theory and has been formally recognized as the most cited condensed matter theorist of the past 30 years. Professor Cohen is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and co-president of the American Physical Society. The recipient of numerous scientific awards, he received the National Medal of Science from President Bush in 2002 and the Foresight Institute Feynman Prize (2003).

 

Pamela Bond Contractor, Founder and Director of Ellipsis Enterprises, Inc.

 

Paul C.W. Davies is an internationally acclaimed physicist, writer and broadcaster, who holds the position of Professor of Natural Philosophy in the Australian Centre for Astrobiology at Macquarie University, Sydney. He has held previous academic appointments at the Universities of Cambridge, London, Newcastle upon Tyne and Adelaide. His research interests are in the fields of cosmology, quantum field theory, and astrobiology. He is the author of over twenty books, including The Mind of God, Other Worlds, God and the New Physics, The Edge of Infinity, The Cosmic Blueprint, Are We Alone? The Fifth Miracle, The Last Three Minutes, About Time, and How to Build a Time Machine. Davies's talent as a communicator of science has been recognized in Australia by an Advance Australia Award and two Eureka Prizes, and in the UK by the 2001 Kelvin Medal and Prize by the Institute of Physics, and the 2002 Faraday Prize by The Royal Society. For his contributions to the deeper implications of science, Davies received the Templeton Prize in 1995.

 

Sidney D. Drell is professor of theoretical physics and deputy director emeritus of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, Stanford University, and Senior Fellow (by courtesy) of the Hoover Institute. A physicist and arms control specialist, he has been active since 1960 in providing technical advice to the government on national security issues, most recently as a member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. He currently serves as an adviser to the Los Alamos National Lab and is an active member of JASON, a group of academic scientists who act as government consultants. Sidney Drell earned his B.A. degree from Princeton University, and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Illinois. He has been a faculty member of Stanford University since 1956. He retired as deputy director of SLAC in 1998. Among many honors Drell received a MacArthur Foundation prize fellowship, the Enrico Fermi Award, and the Heinz R. Pagels Human Rights of Scientists Award. In 2001 he was presented the National Intelligence Distinguished Service Medal, the highest award bestowed by the U.S. Intelligence Community. He is also one of 10 scientists honored by the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office as "founders of national reconnaissance as a space discipline." Drell is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and of the American Philosophical Society. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and was its president in 1986. His most recent book The Gravest Danger: Nuclear Weapons, co-authored with Ambassador James Goodby, was published by the Hoover Institute Press in 2003.

 

Robert C. Dynes, a physicist and an expert on semiconductors and superconductors, is the eighth president of the University of California, having assumed those responsibilities in October 2003. Since 1996, he had served as chancellor of UC's San Diego campus. Dynes came to UC San Diego in 1991 after a 22-year career at AT&T Bell Laboratories, where he served as department head of semiconductor and material physics research and director of chemical physics research. His numerous scientific honors include the 1990 Fritz London Award in Low Temperature Physics and his 2001 election to the Council of the National Academy of Sciences, a society to which he was originally elected in 1989. Joining UC San Diego as professor of physics, Dynes founded an interdisciplinary laboratory where chemists, electrical engineers, and private industry researchers investigate the properties of metals, semiconductors, and superconductors. He subsequently became chairman of the physics department and then senior vice chancellor for academic affairs. Along with his duties as chancellor and his ongoing physics research, Robert Dynes was active in the national scientific arena and in San Diego civic organizations. He was vice-chair of the University of California President's Council on the National Laboratories, a member of the National Security Panel, and Councilor of the National Academy of Sciences. His San Diego community affiliations included membership on the San Diego Regional Economic Development Corporation Board, the San Diego Science Alliance Board, the San Diego Performing Arts League Advisory Council, and the Children's Hospital and Health Center Board. A native of the city of London in Ontario, Canada, and a naturalized United States citizen, Dynes holds a bachelor's degree in mathematics and physics from the University of Western Ontario and master's and doctorate degrees in physics and an honorary doctor of science degree from McMaster University. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the Canadian Institute of Advanced Research, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. President Dynes is married to Frances Dynes Hellman, a professor of physics at UC Berkeley.

 

Freeman Dyson is now retired, having been for most of his life a professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He was born in England and worked as a civilian scientist for the Royal Air Force in World War 2. He graduated from Cambridge University in 1945 with a BA degree in mathematics. He went on to Cornell University as a graduate student in 1947 and worked with Hans Bethe and Richard Feynman. His most useful contribution to science was the unification of the three versions of quantum electrodynamics invented by Feynman, Schwinger and Tomonaga. Cornell University made him a professor without bothering about his lack of Ph.D. He subsequently worked on nuclear reactors, solidstate physics, ferromagnetism, astrophysics and biology, looking for problems where elegant mathematics could be usefully applied. He has written a number of books about science for the general public. "Disturbing the universe" (1974) is a portrait-gallery of people he has known during his career as a scientist. "Weapons of Hope" (1984) is a study of ethical problems of war and peace. "Infinite in all directions" (1988) is a philosophical meditation based on Dyson's Gifford Lectures on Natural Theology given at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. "Origins of Life" (1986, second edition 1999) is a study of one of the major unsolved problems of science. "The sun, the Genome and the Internet" (1999) discusses the question of whether modern technology could be used to narrow the gap between rich and poor rather than widen it. Dyson is a fellow of the American Physical Society, amember of the US National Academy of Sciences, and a fellow of the Royal Society of London. In 2000 he was awarded the Templeton Prize for progress in Religion.

 

Gerald Edelman is Director of The Neurosciences Institute and President of Neurosciences Research Foundation, a publicly supported not-for-profit organization that is the Institute's parent. Separately, he is Professor at The Scripps Research Institute and Chairman of the Department of Neurobiology at that institution. His early studies focused on the structure and diversity of antibodies. His subsequent work led to the discovery of cell adhesion molecules (CAMs), which have been found to guide the fundamental processes by which an animal achieves its shape and form, and by which nervous systems are built. Dr. Edelman has formulated a detailed theory to explain the development and organization of higher brain functions. This theory was presented in his 1987 volume Neural Darwinism. In 1972, he received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on the structure and function of antibodies.

 

George F.R. Ellis, Ph.D., is professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Cape Town. After completing his Ph.D. at Cambridge University with Dennis Sciama as supervisor, he lectured at Cambridge and has been visiting Professor at Texas University, the University of Chicago, Hamburg University, Boston University, the University of Alberta, and Queen Mary College (London University). He has written many papers on relativity theory and cosmology, among them The Large Scale Structure of Space Time co-authored with Stephen Hawking (Cambridge University Press,1973); Before the Beginning: Cosmology Explained (Merion Boyars, 1993); Is the Universe Open or Closed? The Density of Matter in the Universe with Peter Coles (Cambridge University Press, 1997); and Dynamical Systems in Cosmology with John Wainwright. He has also written on science policy and developmental issues, science education, and science and religion issues. He is co-author with Nancey Murphy of On the Moral Nature of the Universe (Fortress Press, 1996) and editor of The Far-flung Universe: Eschatology from a Cosmic Perspective (Templeton Foundation Press, 2002). He is past president of the International Society of General Relativity and Gravitation and of the Royal Society of South Africa and fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications. Among the prizes and honorary degrees he has received are the Claude Harris Leon Foundation Achievement Award, the Gold Medal of the South African Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Star of South Africa Medal, which was presented to him in 1999 by President Nelson Mandela. He is the recipient of the 2004 Templeton Prize.

 

Gerald Gabrielse is George Vasmer Leverett Professor of Physics at Harvard were he has been since 1987. Currently Prof. Gabrielse leads the international ATRAP Collaboration whose goal is accurate laser spectroscopy with trapped antihydrogen atoms. A graduate of Calvin College in 1973, he received a faculty research scholarship and served as a teaching assistant working under the supervision of Vernon Ehlers. He also built an apparatus to measure the density and fermi levels of high reactive liquid alkaline earth metals, working under the supervision of John Van Zytveld, which led to his first physics publication. Awarded a Danforth Graduate Fellowship to pursue graduate studies at a university of his choice, he received both his M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. His thesis focused on the production of hydrogen as fast protons traversed thin targets and on the use of time reversal symmetry to classify hydrogenic observables. He was awarded an Argonne Graduate Fellowship and did postdoctoral research at the University of Washington in 1978 under the supervision of Hans Dehmelt. Gabrielse was later awarded a Chaim Weizmann Postdoctoral Fellowship. Gabrielse joined the faculty of the University of Washington in 1985, leaving in 1987 for Harvard University. Professor Gabrielse has taught and served as the Scientist in Residence at a local high school, and is currently a member of the board of trustees of Calvin College. He has served on the executive committees of both APS DAMOP and the APS Topical Group on Precision Measurement. He has given many invited talks and is the author of more than 100 scientific publications. He and particle theorist Lowell Brown have published a number of theoretical papers, including a major review that still serves as the standard reference work on particle trapping. He was awarded the Levenson Teaching Award for a senior faculty member at Harvard for his "Reality Physics" course for non-science students, and was awarded the 2002 Davisson-Germer Prize by the American Physical Society "for pioneering work in trapping, cooling, and precision measurements of the properties of matter and antimatter in ion traps."

 

Peter L. Galison is Mallinckrodt Professor of the History of Science and of Physics at Harvard University. In 1997, he was named a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellow; in 1999, he was a winner of the Max Planck Prize given by the Max Planck Gesellschaft and Humboldt Stiftung. Galison is interested in the intersection of philosophical and historical questions such as: What, at a given time, convinces people that an experiment is correct? How do scientific subcultures form interlanguages of theory and things at their borders? More broadly, Galison's main work explores the complex interaction between the three principal subcultures of twentieth century physics--experimentation, instrumentation, and theory. The volume on experiment (How Experiments End, 1987) and that on instruments (Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics, 1997) are to be followed by the final volume - Theory Machines - that is still under construction. Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps (2003) begins the study of theory by focusing on the ways in which the theory of relativity stood at the crossroads of technology, philosophy, and physics. Image & Logic won the Pfizer Award from the History of Science Society in October 1998.

 

Reinhard Genzel has been professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley since 1999. He is also currently director at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany. Dr. Genzel received his Ph.D. in physics and astronomy from the University of Bonn in 1978 and was a Center for Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellow at Cambridge Massachusetts until 1980. In 1980, he received the Otto Hahn Medal of the Max Planck Society for the year 1978 and the Miller Fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Genzel was also a recipient of the Newton Lacy Pierce Prize in 1986 and the Leibniz Prize of the German Science Foundation in 1989. In 2003, he also received the Balzan International Prize for Infrared Astronomy, Switzerland/Italy and the Petrie Prize from the Canadian Astronomical Society in 2005. Dr. Genzel was Lyman Spitzer Lecturer at Princeton University in 1998 and Sackler Lecturer, also in Princeton, in 2000. In 2004, he was Iben Lecturer, University of Illinois, and in 2005 was Rossi Lecturer at the Osservatorio Arcetri in Florence, Italy and also Herschell Lecturer at Oxford University. Reinhard Genzel's research interests currently include massive black holes and star formation in galaxies, galactic center, galaxy formation and evolution, infrared/submillimeter/mm spectroscopy and high-resolution imaging and spatial interferometry. In 2002, Genzel came up with the decisive proof that Sagittarius A*, a mysterious radio force at the centre of the Galaxy and a candidate for the role for some time, is none other than the "Great Annihilator."

 

Owen Gingerich is a senior astronomer emeritus at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and research professor of astronomy and of the history of science at Harvard University. He is co-author of two successive standard models for the solar atmosphere, and the first to take into account rocket and satellite observations. He has been vice president of the American Philosophical Society and he has served as chairman of the US National Committee of the International Astronomical Union. Professor Gingerich is a leading authority on Johannes Kepler and on Nicholas Copernicus. His annotated census of Copernicus' De revolutionibus was published in 2002 followed by a memoir of his Copernican adventures, The Book Nobody Read. He has written nearly 600 technical or educational articles and reviews. Two anthologies of his essays have appeared, The Great Copernicus Chase and Other Adventures in Astronomical History, and The Eye of Heaven: Ptolemy, Copernicus, Kepler. He was awarded the Polish government's Order of Merit in 1981, and more recently an asteroid has been named in his honor. He won the annual education prize of the American Astronomical Society in 2004. His lecture "Modern Cosmogony and Biblical Creation" has been presented in more than 40 venues, and he has given two Advent sermons at the U.S. National Cathedral.

 

Joseph A. Giordmaine is senior vice president emeritus at NEC Laboratories America in Princeton, NJ. Dr. Giordmaine received his B.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Toronto and Columbia University respectively. At Bell Laboratories from 1961 to 1988 he was a member of the technical staff and also served as Director of Solid State Electronics Research and other R&D laboratories. From 1988 to 1998 he was responsible for the startup and organization of physical sciences research at the NEC Research Institute; this period was marked by the institute's growth as a leading center for fundamental research in the physical and computer sciences. From 1998 to the present he has also held faculty and research positions at Princeton and Texas A&M Universities, where he has applied new nonlinear optical techniques to soliton generation and to real-time detection of atmospheric contaminants. Earlier work of Dr. Giordmaine and his collaborators included the first demonstration of the optical parametric oscillator, first use of phase matching in nonlinear optics, new techniques for ultrafast light pulse generation and measurement, discovery of the nonlinear optical properties of chiral liquids, first use of low-noise maser detection in radio astronomy, and characterization of molecular beam formation by tubular flow. His awards include the R. W. Wood Prize of the Optical Society of America and the Distinguished Lecturer Award of the IEEE MTT Society. He is a Fellow of the APS, IEEE, ASA, AAAS, and NYAS. He has served on numerous academic, government and professional society committees. He has published extensively in scientific and engineering journals.

 

Nicolas Gisin is head of the optics section of the group of applied physics at the University of Geneva where he has been since 1988. He was born in 1952 in Geneva, Switzerland. After a master's in physics and a degree in mathematics, he received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Geneva in 1981 for his dissertation in quantum and statistical physics. The "Fondation Louis de Broglie" recognized this work with an award. After a post-doc at the University of Rochester, NY, he joined a start-up company, Alphatronix, dedicated to fiber instrumentation for the telecommunication industry. At the University of Geneva, the optics section under Gisin's leadership has developed three research directions: telecom, optical sensors and quantum optics. The telecom and the sensing activities led to many patents and technological transfers to Swiss and international industries. Several products met with commercial success. The quantum optics activities are orientated more towards fundamental research. The main themes, quantum cryptography and long distance quantum entanglement, received great attention from the international scientific community as well as from the mass media. In February 2003, this was recognized by the MIT Technology Review, which selected this work as one of the 10 technologies that should "change the world."

 

Donald Glaser holds joint appointments as professor in the physics and molecular biology departments at the University of California, Berkeley where he has taught since 1959. After graduating from Case Institute of Technology in Cleveland in 1946, Glaser attended California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, where he received his Ph.D. in physics in 1949. He then began teaching at the University of Michigan, where he was professor of physics until 1959. While there he conceived the idea for the bubble chamber, which has become a widely used instrument because it allows precise measurement of the paths of subatomic particles. Glaser was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1960 for this invention. His current research interests are in the construction of computational models of the human visual system, which explain its performance in terms of its physiology and anatomy.

 

William "Billy" Grassie, Ph.D., is founder and executive director of the Metanexus Institute on Religion and Science. Metanexus currently runs some 300 projects at universities in 36 countries. Grassie also serves as executive editor of the Institute's online magazine and discussion forum with over 140,000 monthly page views and over 6000 regular subscribers in 57 different countries. He has taught in a variety of positions at Temple University, Swarthmore College, and the University of Pennsylvania. Grassie received his doctorate in religion from Temple University in 1994 and his BA from Middlebury College in 1979. Prior to graduate school, Grassie worked for ten years in religiously-based social service and advocacy organizations in Washington, D.C; Jerusalem, Israel; Berlin, Germany; and Philadelphia, PA. He is the recipient of a number of academic awards and grants from the American Friends Service Committee, the Roothbert Fellowship, and the John Templeton Foundation. He is a member of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers).

 

David J. Gross is Frederick W. Gluck Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) and director of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics also at the University. He joined the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara in January 1997. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1966 and then was a Junior Fellow at Harvard. In 1969 he went to Princeton where he was appointed Professor of Physics in 1972, and later Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics, and Thomas Jones Professor of Mathematical Physics.

Dr. Gross was an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow (1970-74), was elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1985, Member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1986 and Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1987. He is the recipient of the J. J. Sakurai Prize of the American Physical Society in 1986, a Macarthur Foundation Fellowship Prize in 1987, the Dirac Medal in 1988, the Oscar Klein Medal in 2000, and the Harvey Prize of the Technion in 2000. He has received two honorary degrees. In 2004, he was selected to receive France’s highest scientific honor, the Grande Médaille D’Or, for his contributions to the understanding of fundamental physical reality. He received the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics for solving in 1973 the last great remaining problem of what has since come to be called "the Standard Model" of the quantum mechanical picture of reality. He and his co-recipients Frank Wilczek and H. David Politzer discovered how the nucleus of atoms works.

 

Hans Halvorson is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy, Princeton University. Professor Halvorson graduated in 1995 from Calvin College with a degree in philosophy. That was followed by masters degrees in philosophy and mathematics from the University of Pittsburgh in 1997 and 1998, respectively, and a PhD in philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh in 2001. He became Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Princeton in 2001, and received tenure in 2005. At Princeton, Professor Halvorson teaches primarily in philosophical logic and philosophy of science; he also advises independent work in metaphysics, philosophy of science, and philosophy of religion. Professor Halvorson's research focuses on the conceptual and mathematical foundations of contemporary physics, especially quantum field theory and quantum information theory. His articles have appeared in British Journal for Philosophy of Science, Foundations of Physics, Journal of Mathematical Physics, Journal of Philosophical Logic, Quantum Information and Computation, Physical Review, Letters in Mathematical Physics, Philosophy of Science, and Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics. In both 2001 and 2002, his articles were chosen by the Philosopher's Annual as among the "ten best philosophy articles of the year"; and in 2002 another one of his articles was named "the best article of the year by a recent PhD" by the Philosophy of Science Association. In 2004, Professor Halvorson was awarded the first annual Cushing Memorial Prize in the History and Philosophy of Physics.

 

Serge Haroche is professor of quantum physics at the Collége de France where he has been since 2001. He also directs the group of electrodynamics of simple systems within the Kastler Brossel Laboratory of the department of physics of the ENS (École Normales Superieure), where he was originally a student. He was a researcher at CNRS, lecturer at the Polytechnic School, professor at the University Paris VI and member of Insitut Universitaire of France. He taught during several years at Yale University and visited, as researcher or invited professor, several other universities including Stanford, Harvard, MIT and the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. He directed the department of physics of the ENS for a five-year term. Dr. Haroche is a specialist in atomic physics and quantum optics. After a thesis carried out (1967-71) under the direction of Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, he later developed new methods of laser spectroscopy based on the study of quantum beats and superradiance.

 

Charles L. Harper, Jr. has been Executive Director and Senior Vice President of the John Templeton Foundation since July 1996. His primary responsibilities are in the areas of strategic planning, program design and development, vision casting, and worldwide talent scouting in areas relevant to the foundation's activities. Dr. Harper has worked to transform philanthropy by developing innovative entrepreneurial practices in grant making. He has created more than $100 million in new grant programs ranging widely from the study of forgiveness and reconciliation to projects on foundational questions in physics and cosmology, topics in chemistry, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, medicine, and the philosophy of science. Dr. Harper was originally trained in engineering at Princeton University (B.S.E. 1980) and obtained his D.Phil. in planetary science from the University of Oxford for a thesis on the nature of time in cosmology (1988). He also holds the Diploma in Theology from Oxford (1988) and a Certificate of Special Studies in Management and Administration from Harvard University (1997). Dr. Harper was a National Research Council fellow at the NASA Johnson Space Center from 1988 to 1991. He also was a research scientist in the department of earth and planetary sciences at Harvard University. Dr. Harper is co-editor of Science & Ultimate Reality: Quantum Theory, Cosmology and Complexity (Cambridge University Press, 2004). His scientific publications include more than fifty research articles in scientific journals, including Nature, Science, and the Astrophysical Journal.

 

John L. Heilbron is Professor of History and The Vice Chancellor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. His most recent books are Geometry Civilized: History, Culture, and Technique (1998); The Sun in the Church: Cathedrals as Solar Observatories (1999); Rutherford and the Explosion of Atoms (2003); and, as editor in chief, The Oxford Companion to the History of Modern Science (2003). His current research interests include relations between science and religion in the 17th and 18th centuries, physics and its institutions in the 20th century, and the use of history of science in the teaching of science. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

 

Russell A. Hulse is a visiting professor at The University of Texas at Dallas and a Principal Research Physicist and Distinguished Research Fellow at Princeton University's Plasma Physics Laboratory. In 1993, he and Joseph H. Taylor, Jr. received the Nobel Prize in Physics for the first binary pulsar, a discovery of great significance for astrophysics and gravitational physics research. A binary pulsar is a small and dense neutron star with two heavy bodies that rotate around each other at high speed and emit regular pulses of polarized radiation. The significance of this discovery is that the behavior of these two bodies deviates greatly from what classical Newtonian mechanics predicts. The behavior of this system has been studied closely and used to verify Einstein's general theory of relativity, especially the existence of gravitational radiation. Since receiving the Nobel Prize, he has made a strong commitment to improving science education. Through an ongoing collaboration with The College of New Jersey's School of Education, he is working to improve the science education skills of pre-service teachers and develop new educational approaches for use in the K-12 classroom. Another partnership with the Plainsboro Public Library has resulted in the creation of "Contact Science" - an initiative to create traveling science center exhibits with associated hands-on projects and mentoring programs in public libraries. Hulse has also been honored as a Fellow at both the American Physical Society and the Institute of Physics. He received an honorary Doctor of Science degree from the University of Massachusetts and the Gano Dunn Alumni Award for Achievement in Science from The Cooper Union. In addition, Hulse is a member of the American Astronomical Society, American Physical Society, American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Institute of Physics and the IEEE Computer Society. Hulse was born in the Bronx, New York and graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in 1966. He received his B.S. degree in physics in 1970 from The Cooper Union. He received is Ph.D. in physics from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1975.

 

Theodor W. Hänsch has been a professor of physics at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich and a director at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, since 1986. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Heidelberg, Germany, in 1969. In 1970, he came to the U.S. to work as a postdoc with Arthur L. Schawlow at Stanford University. Two years later he joined the Stanford physics faculty, first as an associate professor, and since 1975 as a full professor. His current research interests include the quantum physics of ultra-cold atoms and the exploration of novel techniques for ultra-precise laser spectroscopy. His early work includes the first narrowband tunable dye laser, the invention of commonly used techniques of Doppler-free spectroscopy, precise laser spectroscopy of the hydrogen atom for accurate measurements of fundamental constants, and the first proposal for laser cooling of atomic gases. Professor Hänsch is a member or fellow of many scientific societies and academies, including the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1983-), the Bavarian Academy of Science (1991-), the U.S. National Academy of Science (2001-), and the Accademia Nazionale die Lincei, Italy (2002-). His numerous prizes and awards include the Cyrus B. Comstock Prize (U.S. National Academy of Science, 1983), the Arthur L. Schawlow Prize for Laser Science (American Physical Society, 1996) and the Stern-Gerlach Medal (German Physical Society, 2000). He has authored and co-authored more than 450 papers in scientific journals including Nature and Physical Review Letters, and he holds more than 20 patents.

 

Michio Kaku is Henry Semat Professor of Theoretical Physics at the City College of new York. Dr. Kaku is an internationally recognized authority in theoretical physics and the environmental issues. His most popular and best selling books include "Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps and the Tenth Dimension" and "Visions: How Science Will Revolutionize the 21st Century", which have been widely translated in different languages. He has also written numerous Ph.D. level textbooks which have become required reading at many of the top physics laboratories. Over 70 articles have been published in physics journals by Dr. Michio Kaku. The topics are as varied as his expertise, of which include superstring theory, supergravity, supersymmetry, and hadronic physics. One of the first papers on conformal supergravity and the breakdown of supersymmetry at high temperatures, was also published by Dr. Kaku. He hosts Explorations, a weekly radio program on science, which is carried on many stations across the country.

 

Marc Kamionkowski was born in 1965 in Cleveland, Ohio. He received a B.A. degree in 1987 from Washington University in St. Louis and a Ph.D. in 1991 from the University of Chicago. After three years of postdoctoral study at the Institute for Advanced Study, he joined the faculty of Columbia University in 1994 as an Assistant Professor of Physics. In 1999, Kamionkowski joined the faculty of the California Institute of Technology as Professor of Theoretical Physics and Astrophysics, his current position. Kamionkowski is a theoretical physicist who specializes in cosmology. His work on the cosmic microwave background showed how the geometry of the Universe and cosmological parameters could be determined, and how CMB polarization experiments can be used to probe the epoch of inflation. He has also done considerable work on the hypothesis that the mysterious dark matter that holds galaxies together may be a new elementary particle. Kamionkowski has also published articles on galaxy formation, galaxy clusters, the large-scale structure of the Universe, nuclear and neutrino physics and astrophysics, stellar astrophysics, and the accelerated cosmological expansion. Kamionkowski is a member of the American Astronomical Society and American Physical Society. As a postdoc he received an SSC National Fellowship (1991) and as an assistant professor an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship (1996) and an Outstanding Junior Investigator Award from the Department of Energy (1998). In 1998 he was awarded the Helen B. Warner Prize of the American Astronomical Society. Kamionkowski is the Astrophysics Editor for Physics Reports, formerly a receiving editor for the Journal of High Energy Physics and the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics. He has served on a number of NASA, NSF, DoE, and NRC committees, and on the external advisory panels for several physics and astronomy departments and research institutes.

 

Wolfgang Ketterle is John D. MacArthur Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He received a diploma (equivalent to master's degree) from the Technical University of Munich in 1982, and the Ph.D. in physics from the University of Munich in 1986. After postdoctoral work at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching, the University of Heidelberg and MIT, He joined the physics faculty at MIT in 1993. He does experimental research in atomic physics and laser spectroscopy and focuses currently on Bose-Einstein condensation in dilute atomic gases. He was among the first scientists to observe this phenomenon in 1995, and realized the first atom laser in 1997. His earlier research was in molecular spectroscopy and combustion diagnostics. Wolfgang Ketterle is a fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Institute of Physics (IOP), a member of the German physical society (DPG), the Optical Society of America, the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, the Academy of Sciences in Heidelberg, the European Academy of Arts, Sciences, and Humanities, the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, and a foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences. He was awarded the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics along with Eric A. Cornell and Carl E. Wieman for the achievement of Bose-Einstein condensation in dilute gases of alkali atoms, and for early fundamental studies of the properties of the condensates. His other physics awards include a David and Lucile Packard Fellowship (1996), the Rabi Prize of the American Physical Society (1997), the Gustav-Hertz Prize of the German Physical Society (1997), the Discover Magazine Award for Technological Innovation (1998), the Fritz London Prize in Low Temperature Physics (1999), the Dannie-Heineman Prize of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Germany (1999), the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics (2000), the Medal of Merit of the State of Baden-Würtemberg (2002), and the Knight Commander's Cross (Badge and Star) of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (2002). He was also selected Distinguished Traveling Lecturer of the Division of Laser Science of the American Physical Society (1998-99).

 

Christof Koch is Professor of Computation and Neural Systems at Caltech, running K-Lab as well as being the Executive Officer of CNS. He studied Physics and Philosophy in Tübingen, Germany, and was awarded Master of Physics in 1980 and my PhD (Nonlinear information processing in dendritic trees of arbitrary geometry) from the Max-Planck-Institut for Biological Cybernetics in T&uum;bingen in 1982. After four years as a post-doctoral fellow at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and at the Department of Psychology at MIT, He joined Caltech's newly started Computation and Neural Systems option in 1986. His major intellectual interests include: Finding out how consciousness arises out of the brain. The long-term goal is to discover and characterize the neuronal correlates of consciousness (the NCC). He collaborated for 16 years in this endeavor with the late Francis Crick at the Salk Institute. This research has made its way into a book for a general scientific audience, The Quest for Consciousness: A Neuroscientific Approach. The book discusses the Crick-Koch framework for how consciousness, the subjective mind, arises out of the flickering interactions within the neurons of the cerebral cortex and related structures.

 

Antoine Labeyrie is professor and chair of observational astrophysics at the Collège de France and director of the Observatory of Haute-Provence. He received his Ph.D. from the Université de Paris. He is the recipient of many prizes including the Prix Stroobant de l'Académie Royale de Belgique, the Prix de la "International Commission for Optics," Prix du Rayonnement Français, the Rank Prize, and the Tinsley Prize of the American Astronomical Society.

 

Adrian Lee is associate professor in the Department of Physics at University of California, Berkeley where he has been since July 2000. He received his B.A. in physics from Columbia University in 1986 and his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1993. At Stanford, he worked with Blas Cabrera on the early development of an experiment to detect non-baryonic dark matter. Following graduate school, Lee became a post-doctoral fellow at Stanford Medical School, where he worked on mapping functions in the human brain using magnetic resonance imaging. Subsequently, from 1994 to 2000, he did post-doctoral work at U.C. Berkeley with Paul Richards measuring spatial anisotropy in the 2.7 K cosmic microwave background.

 

David M. Lee has spent 46 years on the physics faculty of Cornell University where he is now the James Gilbert White Distinguished Professor of the Physical Sciences. He received his early education in the public schools of Rye, New York followed by three and one half years at Harvard University where he earned a B.A. degree cum laude in 1952. Following two years of military service, he enrolled in graduate work in physics. He obtained an M.S. degree at the University of Connecticut and a Ph.D. in physics at Yale in 1959. As a graduate student at Yale, he was a Dupont Fellow. His research has been in experimental low temperature physics, with emphasis on liquid and solid helium, spin polarized hydrogen gas, superconductivity, and matrix trapping of free radicals. His most important scientific achievement has been the discovery of superfluid helium-3 with colleagues Douglas D. Osheroff and Robert C. Richardson. On the basis of this work Osheroff, Richardson, and Lee were awarded the 1996 Nobel Prize in Physics as well as the Simon Prize of the British Institute of Physics and the Oliver Buckley Prize in Condensed Matter Physics of the American Physical Society. Professor Lee, along with his colleagues and students, also made the first observation of spin waves in spin polarized hydrogen gas and the tricritical point of liquid helium-3 helium-4 solutions. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has recently been elected foreign member of the Russian Academy of Science. Professor Lee has published well over 100 articles in several journals, including the Physical Review, Physical Review Letters, the Journal of Low Temperature Physics, Physica and Reviews of Modern Physics.

 

Sang-Soo Lee is professor emeritus of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) and a prominent member of the Korean Academy of Sciences. He is a fellow of TWAS (now known as "The Academy of Sciences for the Developing World"), Trieste, and president emeritus of the Optical Society of Korea. Professor Lee was the founding president of KAIST, and director of the Nuclear Research Institute. He was also president of both the Korean Physical Society and Optical Society of Korea. For his contribution to scientific advances - including developments of various lasers, holography, and other quantum electronics - Professor Lee has received a number of national medals and honors. He is a graduate of Seoul National University and has studied at the Imperial College of London. He received his doctoral degree from the University of London and was a research fellow at Harvard University. Professor Lee has authored a number of books related to optics, lasers and holograms, and more than 227 research papers mainly in the areas of optics, lasers and quantum electronics.

 

Tsung-Dao Lee is university professor in the department of physics at Columbia University. He and Chen Ning Yang received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1957 for their work in discovering violations of the principle of parity conservation (the quality of space reflection symmetry of subatomic particle interactions), thus bringing about major refinements in particle physics theory. Lee immigrated to the United States in 1946 and, although he had no undergraduate degree, entered the graduate school in physics at the University of Chicago, where he began his collaboration with Yang. After working briefly at the University of California at Berkeley, and for two years with Yang at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, Lee was appointed assistant professor of physics at Columbia University in 1953. In 1956 Lee and Yang concluded that the theta-meson and tau-meson, previously thought to be different because they decay by modes of differing parity, are in fact the same particle (now called the K-meson). Because the law of parity conservation prohibits a single particle from having decay modes exhibiting opposite parity, the only possible conclusion was that for weak interactions, at least, parity is not conserved. They suggested experiments to test their hypothesis, and in 1957 Wu Chien-hsiung, working at Columbia University, experimentally confirmed their theoretical conclusions. (See also CP violation.) In 1960 Lee was appointed professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study, and three years later he returned to Columbia to assume the first Enrico Fermi Professorship in Physics. From 1964 he made important contributions to the explanation of violations of time-reversal invariance, which occur during certain weak interactions. In 1997, he was honored by Mayor Giuliani with an Excellence in Science and Technology Award for his groundbreaking work in high-energy physics, statistical mechanics, nonconservation of parity and high temperature superconductivity.

 

Anthony J. Leggett is John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was 2003 Nobel Prize winner with Alexei A. Abrikosov and Vitaly L. Ginzburg for pioneering contributions to the theory of superconductors and superfluids. He attended Balliol College, Oxford where he majored in Literae Humaniores (classical languages and literature, philosophy, and Greco-Roman history) and thereafter Merton College, Oxford where he took a second undergraduate degree in Physics. He completed a D.Phil.(Ph.D.) degree in theoretical physics under the supervision of D. ter Haar. After postdoctoral research in Urbana, Kyoto and elsewhere, he joined the faculty of the University of Sussex (UK) in 1967, being promoted to reader in 1971 and to professor in 1978. In 1983, he joined the faculty of the University of Illinois. His principal research interests lie in the areas of condensed matter physics, particularly high-temperature superconductivity, glasses and ultra cold atomic gases, and the foundations of quantum mechanics. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Russian Academy of Sciences (foreign member), and is a Fellow of the Royal Society (U.K.), the American Physical Society, and the American Institute of Physics. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Physics (U.K.).

 

Julia Loving, Metanexus Institute, Director of Communications and Special Programs

 

Geoffrey W. Marcy is a professor of astronomy at the University of California at Berkeley where he also serves as director of the Center for Integrative Planetary Science. He has been at Berkeley since 1999. He is a leading discoverer of planetary systems around other stars. His major accomplishments include the discovery of the first system of multiple planets around a normal star, discovery of the first transiting planet, discovery of the first Saturn-mass planet, and discovery of the first Neptune-mass planet. He has received many awards including membership to the National Academy of Sciences, the NASA Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement, the Beatrice Tinsley Prize from the American Astronomical Society, and the Henry Draper Medal from National Academy of Sciences. His education included a double bachelor's degree from UCLA in physics and astronomy (Phi Beta Kappa), and a Ph.D. in astrophysics from the University of California Santa Cruz in 1982. He was a Carnegie Fellow from 1982-84, and professor of physics and astronomy at San Francisco State University between 1984 and 1996, where he was awarded the position of Distinguished University Professor. Dr. Marcy is the author of well over 100 research articles in peer-reviewed journals.

 

Fotini Markopoulou is as adjunct professor in the physics department at the University of Waterloo, Canada. A native of Greece, she is considered one of the world's most promising young physicists. Markopoulou is trying to unite Einstein's theory of general relativity with quantum theory, in an attempt to explain the nature of space and time. According to her "causal spin networks theory" the universe is like a giant quantum computer; this could forever change the way we think about the structure of space. Her foundational work in quantum physics has been compared to Cantor's foundational work on the theory of the continuum. Markopoulou was recognized for a new formulation of quantum cosmology in which quantum theory is applied to a system that contains its own observers, such as the whole universe. She has also explored the role of causality in the quantum theory of gravity and developed methods to study the relationship between the quantum and classical theories of gravity. In her paper "The Internal Description of a Causal Set: What the Universe Looks Like from the Inside" Fotini Markopoulou instantiates some abstract terms from mathematical category theory to develop straightforward models of space-time. It proposes simple quantum models of space-time based on category-theoretic notions of a topos and its subobject classifier (which has a Heyting algebra structure, but not necessarily a Boolean algebra structure). The diagrams in Markopoulou's papers are straightforward presentations of possible models of space-time. They are intended as meaningful and provocative, not just for specialists but also for newcomers.

 

Christopher F. McKee is a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley. He received the Ph.D. in physics at Berkeley under the supervision of George Field in 1970. After a brief stay at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, he spent a year as a postdoctoral fellow in theoretical astrophysics at Caltech. He was an assistant professor of astronomy at Harvard from 1971-1974 before returning to Berkeley in 1974. At Berkeley, he helped to establish the Theoretical Astrophysics Center, and served as the director of the Space Sciences Laboratory from 1985-1998. He chaired the physics department from 2000-2004 and co-chaired the 2000 Astronomy and Astrophysics Survey Committee, which conducted the most recent decadal survey in astronomy and astrophysics. Much of his research focuses on the theory of physical processes in the interstellar medium, the diffused gas between the stars. He and Jerry Ostriker developed the three-phase model of the interstellar medium, which has been widely used to organize and interpret observations of the diffuse interstellar medium. With his colleagues and students, he has worked on the theory of the evaporation of clouds by both hot gas and ionizing radiation, the evolution of supernova remnants and stellar wind bubbles, the structure and emission spectrum of interstellar shocks, the evolution of interstellar dust grains, the structure of molecular clouds, and the theory of photoionization-regulated star formation. Some of his research has focused on active galactic nuclei, particularly the study of reverberation mapping and of Compton-heated coronae and winds above accretion disks. With Richard Klein he established the Berkeley Astrophysical Fluid Dynamics Group to develop the technique of adaptive mesh refinement for numerical simulations of astrophysical fluid dynamics.

 

Nancey Murphy, Ph.D., Th.D. is professor of Christian philosophy at Fuller Theological Seminary. She joined the Fuller faculty in 1989. She is highly sought as a speaker at international conferences on the relationship between theology and science. Murphy also serves on the boards of the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences at Berkeley, and is a member of the Planning Committee for conferences on science and theology, sponsored by the Vatican Observatory. Also a prolific writer, her book, written with Warren Brown and Newt Malony, Whatever Happened to the Soul? was awarded the 1999 Prize for Outstanding Books in Theology and the Natural Sciences from the Templeton Foundation. Her 1990 book Theology in the Age of Scientific Reasoning received awards from the Templeton Foundation and the American Academy of Religion. Murphy also serves as a corresponding editor for Christianity Today and is an ordained minister in the Church of the Brethren. Her areas of interest and research are theology and science, Anglo-American postmodern philosophy, and divine action.

 

Bill Newsome is an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Professor of Neurobiology at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He received a B.S. degree, summa cum laude, in physics from Stetson University and a Ph.D. in biology from the California Institute of Technology. Dr. Newsome served on the faculty of the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at SUNY Stony Brook before moving to Stanford in 1988. Dr. Newsome is a leading investigator in the fields of sensory and cognitive neuroscience. He has made fundamental contributions to our understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying visual perception and simple forms of decision making. Among his honors are the Rank Prize in Optoelectronics, the Spencer Award for highly original contributions to research in neurobiology, the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association, and most recently, the Dan David Prize in 2004. He delivered the 13th Annual Marr Lecture at the University of Cambridge and the King Solomon Lectures in Mechanisms of Animal Behavior at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In 2000, he was elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences.

 

Douglas D. Osheroff is the G. Jackson and C.J. Wood Professor of Physics and Applied Physics at Stanford University. He was awarded the 1996 Nobel Prize in Physics, which he shares with Robert C. Richardson and David M. Lee for their discovery of superfluidity in helium-3. Dr. Osheroff received his B.S. from the California Institute of Technology and his Ph.D. from Cornell. Dr. Osheroff was a member of the technical staff at the Department of Solid State and Low Temperature Research at Bell Laboratories in the 1970s. It was as a graduate student at Cornell that Osheroff and his thesis advisors, David M. Lee and Robert C. Richardson, discovered the first of three superfluid phases of liquid helium-3, at a temperature only about two-thousandths of a degree above absolute zero. Osheroff is a leader in the study of superfluidity and of the properties of thin superconducting films. He served as chairman of the physics department from 1993 until August 1996. The Nobel Prize caps a long list of awards Osheroff has received. A member of the National Academy of Sciences, he has won the Simon Memorial Prize, the Oliver Buckley Prize, and was named a MacArthur Fellow. Osheroff also won a Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching.

 

Arno Penzias is currently a venture partner with New Enterprise Associates, which he joined in 1997 from Bell Labs where he headed its research organization and served as its chief scientist. At Bell Labs, he also served at a Senior Technology advisor of Lucent Technologies, Bell Labs Innovations and as Vice President and Director. Born in 1933 in Munich, he and his family moved to England and then to New York City in 1940. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University where he studied with Charles Townes. He began his scientific career in 1961 when he first joined Bell Laboratories as a member of the technical staff. He conducted research in radio communication and took part in the pioneering Echo and Telstar communications satellite experiments. As a scientist, he is best known for his work in radio astronomy, winning a Nobel Prize in 1978 with his colleague Robert Wilson for their discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation of the Big Bang. He retired from Lucent/Bell Labs in May 1998.

 

Saul Perlmutter is Professor of Physics at the University of California , Berkeley and Senior Scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He is also the leader of the Supernova Cosmology Project, an international collaboration of research teams from seven countries measuring the expansion history of the universe, as well as leader of the proposed Supernova Acceleration Probe, a space telescope satellite project. Professor Perlmutter received his A.B. from Harvard University in 1981 and his Ph.D. in physics from UC Berkeley in 1986. He has been honored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which named the measurements indicating an accelerating universe “ Science Magazine's 1998 Breakthrough of the Year.” He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and has received the E.O. Lawrence Award in Physics and the American Astronomical Society's Henri Chrétien Award. Professor Perlmutter is the author of more than 100 papers in the fields of physics, astrophysics, and cosmology, in which he has addressed such topics as the cosmological constant, dark energy, supernovae, pulsars, gravitational lenses, massive compact halo objects, and advanced detector systems for astrophysics. He has written numerous articles for both academic and popular publications, is a frequently invited lecturer and author, and has appeared in PBS and BBC cosmology documentaries.

 

William D. Phillips, a leading researcher in laser cooling of atoms at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, was elected to the National Academy of Sciences on in 1997. The NAS was established in 1863 by a congressional act of incorporation, signed by Abraham Lincoln, that calls on the academy to act upon request as an official advisor to the federal government in any matter of science or technology. Phillips, a resident of Gaithersburg and a NIST Fellow since 1996, is internationally known for advancing basic knowledge and new techniques to chill atoms to extremely low temperatures. The cooling and trapping of atoms, a discipline that emerged in the mid-1970s with the advent of laboratory lasers, has allowed scientists to observe and measure quantum phenomena in atoms that seem to defy the physical principles governing our tangible room-temperature realm. After earning his Ph.D. in physics and completing post-doctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Phillips came to NIST (then the National Bureau of Standards) in 1978 to work in the Electricity Division. While at MIT, Phillips had completed two thesis experiments, one in the well-established area of magnetic resonance and the other with newly available tunable laboratory lasers. His official duties at NBS were originally related to his first thesis experiment, involving precision electrical measurements. However, he explains, he was allowed to use "stolen moments to dabble in laser-cooling" with lab equipment he brought from MIT. With encouragement from NBS management, he continued experiments and demonstrated that a beam of neutral atoms could be slowed and cooled with radiation pressure from a laser. NIST's accomplished and internationally recognized laser cooling and trapped atom research program grew out of these early experiments. Phillips and the team he built have made numerous pivotal contributions to the field. Their work has paved the way for scientists seeking to create Bose-Einstein condensation, an exotic new form of matter in which atoms all fall into their lowest energy levels and merge into a single quantum state. Phillips and his team are continuing to study ultra-cold trapped atoms with spin-off applications for improved accuracy in atomic clocks and in fabrication of nanostructures. For the latter, Phillips envisions using light to focus an atom laser to create what might be the basis of a next generation of ultra-small structures for electronic circuits.

 

John Polkinghorne is a Fellow of Queen's College, Cambridge and Canon Theologian of Liverpool. He did his undergraduate and postgraduate work at Trinity College, Cambridge, taking the Ph.D. degree in 1955. For 25 years, Polkinghorne worked as a theoretical physicist, focusing on theories of elementary particle physics. From 1968 to 1979 he was professor of mathematical physics at Cambridge, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1974. He then resigned his chair and studied for the ministry of the Church of England at Westcott House, receiving ordination in 1982. After a few years in parochial ministry, Polkinghorne returned to Cambridge to be Dean of Chapel at Trinity Hall, 1986-89. He then became the President of Queens' College, Cambridge, a position from which he retired in 1996. In 1997 he was made a Knight of the British Empire. In addition to two technical monographs on particle theory, John Polkinghorne has written five books on science for the general reader and fifteen books on aspects of the relationship between science and religion. The latter include Science and Christian Belief (SPCK/Fortress 1994), Belief in God in an Age of Science (Yale University Press 1998), The God of Hope and the End of the World (SPCK/Yale 2002), and most recently, Science and the Trinity (SPCK/Yale 2004). He has also edited two books of essays on similar themes. Polkinghorne has been a member of the BMA Medical Ethics Committee, the General Synod of the Church of England, the Doctrine Commission, and the UK Human Genetics Commission. He has given the Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh, the Terry Lectures at Yale and the Warfield Lectures at Princeton Seminary. In 2002 he was awarded the Templeton Prize.

 

Norman F. Ramsey is Higgins Professor of Physics (emeritus) at Harvard University. He has earned five degrees in physics including the Ph.D. (Columbia 1940) and the D.Sc. (Cambridge, 1964). Ramsey's scientific research has focused on the properties of molecules, atoms, nuclei and elementary particles and includes key contributions to the knowledge of magnetic moments, the structural shape of nuclear particles, the nature of nuclear forces, the thermodynamics of energized populations of atoms and molecules (e.g. those in masers and lasers) and spectroscopy. Ramsey has not only contributed to basic advances in the theoretical understanding of physics, but has also made pioneering advances in the methods of investigation. In particular, he has contributed many refinements of the molecular beam method for the study of atomic and molecular properties, has invented the separated oscillatory field method of exciting resonances and, with the collaboration of his students, was the principal inventor of the atomic hydrogen maser. During World War II, Ramsey joined the MIT Radiation Laboratory where he headed the groups that developed the first three-centimeter wavelength magnetrons and the related radar systems. Later he became a group leader at the Los Alamos Laboratory. After the war, Ramsey returned to Columbia University until 1947 when he joined the faculty at Harvard; he became Higgins Professor of Physics in 1966. Ramsey was the executive secretary of the group that established Brookhaven National Laboratory and he became the first Chairman of the Brookhaven Physics Department. He served as the first Science Adviser to the Secretary General of NATO from 1958-1959. He was a founding Trustee of Universities Research Association for the construction of the 200 Gev accelerator at Batavia, Illinois and he served as president of the Association from 1966 to 1972. He was President of the American Physical Society in 1978-1979. Ramsey has been recognized for his contributions with many prestigious awards including the Presidential Certificate of Merit (1947), the E. O. Lawrence Award (1960), the Davisson-Germer Prize (1974) and the Columbia Award for excellence in science (1980). He received the IEEE Medal of Honor in 1984, "for fundamental contributions to very high accuracy time and frequency standards exemplified by the cesium atomic clock and hydrogen maser oscillator." In 1989, with fellow physicists Hans G. Dehmelt and Wolfgang Paul, Ramsey received the Nobel Prize in Physics for contributions of importance for the development of atomic precision spectroscopy. Ramsey's resonance method using separated oscillatory fields forms the basis of the cesium atomic clock, which is our present time standard. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Ramsey has written and published five books and he is the author or co-author of more than 300 scientific papers. He was married to the late Elinor Jameson on June 3, 1940, with whom he has four daughters.

 

Martin Rees is professor of cosmology and astrophysics and master of Trinity College at the University of Cambridge. He holds the honorary title of Astronomer Royal and also Visiting Professor at Imperial College London and at Leicester University. After studying at the University of Cambridge, he held post-doctoral positions in the UK and the USA, before becoming a professor at Sussex University. In 1973, he became a fellow of King's College and Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy at Cambridge (continuing in the latter post until 1991) and served for ten years as director of Cambridge's Institute of Astronomy. From 1992 to 2003 he was a Royal Society Research Professor. He is a foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is an honorary member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Pontifical Academy, and several other foreign academies. His awards include the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, the Balzan International Prize, the Bruce Medal of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, the Heineman Prize for Astrophysics (AAS/AIP), the Bower Award for Science of the Franklin Institute, the Cosmology Prize of the Peter Gruber Foundation and the Einstein Award of the World Cultural Council. He has been president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1994-95) and the Royal Astronomical Society (1992-94) and a trustee of the British Museum, NESTA and the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study. He is currently on the Board of Trustees of the Kennedy Memorial Trust, the National Museum of Science and Industry and the Institute for Public Policy Research, and has served on many bodies connected with education, space research, arms control and international collaboration in science. He is the author or co-author of about 500 research papers, mainly on astrophysics and cosmology, as well as seven books (five for general readership), and numerous magazine and newspaper articles on scientific and general subjects. He has broadcast and lectured widely and held various visiting professorships. His main current research interests include high energy astrophysics -- especially gamma ray bursts, galactic nuclei, black hole formation and radiative processes (including gravitational waves), cosmic structure formation, and general cosmological issues.

 

Mark Richards is professor and former chair of earth and planetary science at the University of California, Berkeley. His research involves convection in the earth's mantle, the hot, viscous region below the crust but above the molten iron core. He has studied how convection in the mantle affects numerous properties of the earth, from its rotation and gravity to the size and shape of tectonic plates that cover the planet's surface. Richards is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union, and in 1990 received the prestigious Presidential (now National Science Foundation) Young Investigator Award. He was on the editorial board of the journal Geology from 1994 to 1997, and served as associate editor of Geophysical Research Letters from 1988 to 1991.

 

Vera C. Rubin is an observational astronomer in the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institute. She has studied the motions of gas and stars in galaxies and motions of galaxies in the universe. Her work was influential in discovering that most of the matter in the universe is dark. She is a graduate of Vassar College, Cornell University and Georgetown University; George Gamow was her thesis professor. She is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, and the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. President Clinton awarded her the National Medal of Science in 1993. She has received the Weizmann Women and Science Award, the Bruce Medal of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, the Gruber International Cosmology Prize, the Watson Medal of the National Academy of Sciences, and the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (London); the previous award of this prize to a woman was to Caroline Herschel in 1828. She is active in encouraging and supporting women in science. Her husband and their four children are all Ph.D. scientists.

 

Robert J. Russell is founder and director of CTNS (Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences) and professor of theology and science in residence at the Graduate Theological Union. He is a leading researcher and spokesperson for the growing international body of theologians and scientists committed to a positive dialogue and creative mutual interaction between these fields. Dr. Russell has authored numerous articles and has co-edited a five volume CTNS/Vatican Observatory series on science and divine action. The most recent title from this series is Quantum Mechanics: Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action (distributed in the USA by the University of Notre Dame Press, 2001). His latest edition is: Fifty Years in Science and Religion: Ian G. Barbour and His Legacy (Ashgate 12/2004). Dr. Russell is the winner of a PCRS/Templeton Grant for Research and Writing on the Constructive Engagement of Religions and Science for his proposed book, Time in Eternity: Theology and Science in Mutual Interaction. Dr. Russell is an ordained minister the United Church of Christ. He received a Ph.D. in physics from the University of California at Santa Cruz and an M.A. in theology and an M. Div. from the Pacific School of Religion. He taught physics at Carleton College and science and religion with Ian Barbour for several years before coming to the GTU in 1981.

 

Marlan O. Scully holds joint appointments as distinguished professor of physics and in the electrical engineering department in the Dwight Look College of Engineering at Texas A&M University. He is also director of Texas A&M's Center for Theoretical Physics. Scully has been at Texas A&M since 1992 after serving on faculties of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Arizona and University of New Mexico. He has served as co-director of the Texas Laser Laboratory at the Houston Advanced Research Center in The Woodlands. His major research interests include quantum optics, laser physics, foundations of quantum mechanics, non-equilibrium statistical mechanics and bioengineering. He is the author of more than 300 research articles, the standard text in laser physics and a book on quantum optics. He is known as the "Quantum Cowboy" for his innovations in quantum physics and his Franklin Society prize-winning research into beef cattle production. Scully has received the OSA Adolph E. Lomb Medal, the Elliott Cresson Medal of The Franklin Institute, and the EG&G Medal of the Society for Optical and Quantum Electronics. He has earned Sloan and Guggenheim Fellowships and a Humboldt Distinguished Senior Faculty Award. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the Optical Society of America, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a member of the Max Planck Society, the German equivalent of the National Academy of Science. Scully earned the Ph.D. and master's degrees in physics from Yale University. He holds the B.S. degree in engineering physics from the University of Wyoming.

 

John Searle is Mills Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Language at UC Berkeley. He took his Ph.D. in philosophy at Oxford, where he studied under John Austin and later became Lecturer in Philosophy at Christ Church from 1957-1959. Subsequently he went to UC Berkeley, where he became Professor of Philosophy. Searle's early work was in speech act theory, culminating in (1969) and (1979). He is credited with having elaborated the theory of speech acts associated with Austin, and with having introduced into the theory original elements of his own, most notably regarding the role played by speakers' and receivers' intentions in constituting the meaning of speech acts. Consistent with the focus on intentionality, his interest turned to philosophy of mind, where his major work can be seen as consisting in three main efforts: a critique of computationalism and strong Artificial Intelligence (AI); the development of a theory of intentionality; and the formulation of a naturalized theory of consciousness. He has written many books including Rediscovery of the Mind (1992).

 

Marjorie D. Shapiro holds joint appointments as professor and chair of the Department of Physics, University of California, Berkeley, and, as a research scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1984. After a postdoctoral fellowship and Assistant Professorship at Harvard, she joined the Berkeley faculty in 1990. Shapiro is an experimental particle physicist whose interests lie in probing the most basic interactions in nature. In her research she addresses such questions as what is the physics that generates quark and lepton masses? What determines the size of the Fermi constant? What is the mechanism responsible for the CP noninvariance observed in nature? She is currently a collaborator on two collider experiments: the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) and the Atlas experiment at CERN both of which have substantial Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory involvement. The author of a number of journal articles, she was a Presidential Young Investigator 1989-94. She is a Fellow of the American Physical Society.

 

Koichi Shimoda is professor emeritus of the University of Tokyo and a trustee of the Toray Science Foundation. He was president of the Laser Society of Japan and contributed greatly to the advancement of laser technology. As a colleague of Charles Townes, Professor Shimoda was one of the earliest developers of masers and lasers, including work on laser accelerators, high-speed laser photography, laser frequency stabilization, and other quantum optics and quantum electronics. His earlier work focused on ammonia masers at Columbia University and noise properties of the maser amplifiers for the Army Signal Corps. He has been a leading promoter and educator of laser science to the general public as well as a research leader of the Japanese laser science community for the last several decades.

 

Vaclav Smil, FRSC is Distinguished Professor of University of Manitoba. His interdisciplinary research encompasses a broad area of environmental, energy, food, population, economic and public policy studies, ranging from quantifications and modeling of global biogeochemical cycles to long-range appraisals of energy and environmental options. He has been also applying these approaches to energy, food and environmental affairs of China. Selected works include Creating the Twentieth Century: Technical Innovations of 1867-1914 and Their Lasting Impact (Oxford, 2005); China's Past, China's Future: Energy, Food, Environment (RoutledgeCurzon, 2004); Energy at the Crossroads: Global perspectives and Uncertainties (MIT, 2003); The Earth's Biosphere: Evolution, Dynamics and Change (MIT, 2002), Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch and the Transformation of World Food Production (MIT, 2001); Cycles of Life: Civilization and the Biosphere (Scientific American Library, 2000); Feeding the World: A Challenge for the Twenty-First Century (MIT, 2000); Energies: An Illustrated Guide to the Biosphere and Civilization (MIT, 1998); Cycles of Life: Civilization and the Biosphere (Scientific American Library, 1997), General Energetics: Energy in the Biosphere and Civilization (John Wiley & Sons, 1991).

 

Boris P. Stoicheff is an emeritus university professor of physics at the University of Toronto, a past president of the Optical Society of America in 1976 (the first non-American to be President), and of the Canadian Association of Physicists in 1984, as well as the founding Executive-Director of Photonics Research Ontario (an Ontario Center of Excellence). He received a B.A.Sc. in Engineering Physics in 1947 and Ph.D. in Molecular Physics in 1950, University of Toronto. He was a Research Officer of the National Research Council (NRC) in Ottawa, 1951-64 and then joined the University of Toronto as professor of physics. In the 50s, he developed techniques for high-resolution Raman spectroscopy of gases, and determined the structures of many molecules, from hydrogen to benzene. He built Canada's first lasers in 1960, and continued his research interests in quantum optics and nonlinear optics with contributions in stimulated Raman and Brillouin scattering, 2-photon spectroscopy, generation of tunable far-ultraviolet radiation (to ~70 nm), its use in spectroscopy of rare-gas dimers, the dissociation of molecular hydrogen, and gain and electro-magnetically induced transparency of atomic hydrogen. He has supervised the research of students in 22 MSc and 24 PhD degrees, and published over 190 technical papers, as well as Gerhard Herzberg; An Illustrious Life in Science a biography of the 1971 Nobel Laureate in chemistry. His service on national and international committees is extensive, including the Board of NRC, Quantum-Electronics Council, Council of Professional Engineers of Ontario, Ontario Nuclear Safety Review Committee, International Union of Pure and Applied Physics, the Royal Society of Canada, and Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. He was appointed University Professor in 1977, Officer of the Order of Canada in 1982, and elected fellow of numerous societies including the Royal Society of London, Royal Society of Canada, American Physical Society, Optical Society of America, and Foreign Honorary Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts, and Indian Academy of Sciences. Among his awards are the William F. Meggers Award, Frederic Ives Medal, Distinguished Service Award of the Optical Society of America, Gold Medal of the Canadian Association of Physicists, and Henry Marshall Tory Medal of The Royal Society of Canada, as well as several honorary degrees.

 

Horst L. Störmer has been professor of physics and professor of applied physics and applied mathematics at Columbia University in the City of New York and adjunct physics vice president at Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies since 1997. Störmer received his Ph.D. in 1977 from the University of Stuttgart, joined Bell Labs as a post-doc shortly afterward and became a member of the technical staff at Bell Labs in 1978. From 1983 to 1992 he headed the Semiconductor Physics Research Department and was the Director of the Physical Research Laboratory of AT&T Bell Labs from 1992 until 1997. While working at Bell Labs, he and Daniel Tsui discovered the fractional quantum Hall effect in 1982. For this work, he shared the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physics with Tsui and Robert B. Laughlin for discovering that electrons acting together in strong magnetic fields can form new types of "particles," with charges that are fractions of electron charges-a new form of quantum fluid with fractionally charged excitations. In addition to his teaching at Columbia, he performs research in condensed matter physics, and is one of the Scientific Directors of the Columbia NSF Nano Center. Störmer has worked extensively on the properties of lower-dimensional electron systems.

 

Eleonore Stump is the Robert J. Henle, S.J., Professor of Philosophy at Saint Louis University. She obtained her Bachelor's degree from Grinnell College in 1969, her Master's degrees from Harvard University in 1971 and Cornell University in 1973, and her Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1975. She is the 2005-2006 President and 2003-2004 Vice-President of the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association, and past president of the Society of Christian Philosophers and of the American Catholic Philosophical Association. Professor Stump's research interests include the Philosophy of Religion, Metaphysics, and Medieval Philosophy. The author of many articles and a book Aquinas published by Routledge Press in 2003 in their series "Arguments of the Philosophers." In 2003, she gave the Gifford Lectures at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. Currently, she is working on a book based on those lectures entitled Wandering in Darkness: Narrative and the Problem of Evil to be published by Oxford University Press. In 2004, Baylor University awarded her the Robert Foster Cherry Award for Great Teaching.

 

Leonard Susskind, Ph.D. is Felix Bloch Professor of Physics at Stanford University. He did his undergraduate work at City University of New York and received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1965. He was a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at Cornell from 1965-66. He has been a professor of physics at the Belfer Graduate School of Science, Yeshiva University, and at the University of Tel Aviv. He came to Stanford as a full professor in 1979. He was Loeb Lecturer at Harvard University in 1976. Professor Susskind received the Pregel Award from the New York Academy of Science in 1975 and the J. J. Sakurai Prize in Theoretical Physics in 1997. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His current research is involved with Black Holes, Quantum Gravity, String Theory and their connection with cosmology.

 

Max Tegmark is associate professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A native of Stockholm, Tegmark left Sweden in 1990 after receiving his B.Sc. in Physics from the Royal Institute of Technology, having earned a B.A. in economics the previous year at the Stockholm School of Economics. He received both his M.A. and Ph.D. in physics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1992 and 1994 respectively. After an appointment as a research associate with the Max-Planck-Institut fü¼r Physik in Munich, Tegmark returned to to the U.S. as a Hubble Fellow and member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He became assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he received tenure in 2003. In 2004, he joined the faculty of MIT.

Professor Tegmark has received numerous awards for his research, including a Packard Fellowship (2001-06), Cottrell Scholar Award (2002-07), and an NSF Career grant (2002-07). His work with the SDSS collaboration on galaxy clustering shared the first prize in Science magazine's "Breakthrough of the Year: 2003." His research is focused on precision cosmology, e.g., combining theoretical work with new measurements to place sharp constraints on cosmological models and their free parameters. He is particularly enthusiastic about the prospects of comparing and combining current and upcoming data on CMB, LSS, galaxy clusters, lensing, LyA forest clustering, SN 1, etc. to raise the ambition level beyond the current cosmological parameter game, testing rather than assuming the underlying physics.

 

Patrick Thaddeus is Robert Wheeler Willson Professor of Applied Astronomy and professor of applied physics at Harvard University. He is also Senior Space Scientist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.

 

Daniel C. Tsui is Arthur LeGrand Doty Professor of Electrical Engineering at Princeton University. A native of China, he spent his childhood years in a remote village in the province of Henan in central China. In 1951, he was sent by his parents to begin schooling in the sixth grade in Hong Kong where he was fortunate to attend Pui Ching Middle School, known for being outstanding, especially in the natural sciences. He completed his undergraduate work at Augustana College and in 1967 received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago where he worked as research assistant to Royal Stark. He joined Bell Laboratories in 1968 in Murray Hill, New Jersey to do research in solid-state physics. He found a niche in semiconductor research, moving into a new area of research dubbed the physics of two-dimensional electrons. Just before moving to Princeton University to teach in 1982, while still at Bell Labs, he and Horst L. Störmer discovered the fractional quantum Hall effect, which would result in the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physics. With Störmer and Robert B. Laughlin, Dr. Tsui was awarded the Nobel Prize for discovering that electrons acting together in strong magnetic fields can form new types of "particles," with charges that are fractions of electron charges-a new form of quantum fluid with fractionally charged excitations. Tsui's research focuses on the electrical properties of thin films and microstructures of semiconductors and solid-state physics. His current research at Princeton is on the fundamental properties of electronic materials, especially conduction in ultrasmall structures, transport through heterojunctions, heterojunction transistors, and quantum physics of electronic materials in strong magnetic fields and low temperatures, in particular, the quantum Hall regime. He is a member of the National Academy of Science, IEEE, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Physical Society, and Materials Research Society. He was the 1998 recipient of the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics.

 

Herbert Walther is professor emeritus in the department of physics at the University of Munich continuing his research in a special arrangement with the Max Planck Society at the Max Planck Institute. He received his undergraduate and graduate education at the University of Heidelberg where he was awarded the diploma in physics in 1960 and the Dr. Rer. Nat. (doctorate in natural sciences) in 1962. He did postdoctoral work at the Universities of Heidelberg and Hannover, and became a lecturer at the University of Hannover in 1968. After guest appointments in France and in the US he became professor of physics at the University of Bonn in 1971. That year he also accepted a chair in the Physics Department of Cologne University. In 1975 he became chair of the Department of Physics at the University of Munich. He also served as director of the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching since its foundation in 1981. Since March 2003 he has been professor emeritus. Among the many awards he has received for his contributions to atomic physics, quantum optics and optics are the Charles Hard Townes Award and the Frederic Ives Medal/James W. Quint Endowment of the Optical Society of America, the Max Born Prize of the Institute of Physics and the German Physical Society, the Michelson Medal of the Franklin Institute, the Stern Gerlach Medal of the German Physical Society, and the EPS Quantum Electronics and Optics Prize.

 

Frank Wilczek is considered one of the world's most eminent theoretical physicists. He is known, among other things, for the discovery of asymptotic freedom, the development of quantum chromodynamics, the invention of axions, and the discovery and exploitation of new forms of quantum statistics (anyons). When only 21 years old and a graduate student at Princeton University, in work with David Gross he defined the properties of color gluons, which hold atomic nuclei together. Professor Wilczek received his B.S. degree from the University of Chicago and his Ph.D. from Princeton University. He taught at Princeton from 1974 to 1981. During the period 1981 to 1988, he was the Chancellor Robert Huttenback Professor of Physics at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the first permanent member of the National Science Foundation's Institute for Theoretical Physics. In the fall of 2000, he moved from the Institute for Advanced Study, where he was the J.R. Oppenheimer Professor, to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he is the Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics. Professor Wilczek has been a Sloan Foundation Fellow (1975-77) and a MacArthur Foundation Fellow (1982-87). He has received UNESCO's Dirac Medal, the American Physical Society's Sakurai Prize, the Michelson Prize from Case Western University, and the Lorentz Medal of the Netherlands Academy for his contributions to the development of theoretical physics. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Netherlands Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is a Trustee of the University of Chicago. He contributes regularly to Physics Today and to Nature, explaining topics at the frontiers of physics to wider scientific audiences.

 

Donald York is the Horace B. Horton Professor in Astronomy & Astrophysics at the University of Chicago. In addition to conducting research on interstellar gas, York is the project director for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, an ambitious project scheduled to get underway later this year, which will map one quarter of the nearby universe. He is also Director of the Apache Point Observatory in Sunspot, N.M., where the Sloan survey telescope is under construction. The observatory is home to the world's first remote-controlled ground-based telescope, a 3.5-meter telescope operated by the Astrophysical Research Consortium (of which the university is a member). York was instrumental in building both the observatory and the telescope. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey -- the brainchild of York, Richard Kron, Director of Yerkes Observatory and professor in astronomy & astrophysics, and James Gunn, an astrophysicist at Princeton University -- is one of the most ambitious collaborative projects ever undertaken by astronomers. York said directing the project is akin to "herding cats," because astronomers are used to working independently. The project currently involves more than 100 scientists and has been six years in the making. Once underway, it is expected to take five years to produce a road map of the heavens. York's activities range far beyond the walls of the astronomy building. He takes an active interest in the local public schools, and is a key figure in the Chicago Public Schools/University of Chicago Internet Project, which is bringing the Internet to all 24 schools in the university's immediate neighborhood. He received his B.S. in 1966 from MIT and his Ph.D. from Chicago in 1971. He has been a Chicago faculty member since 1982.

 

Anton Zeilinger is professor of physics and Institute Director at the Experimental Physics Department of the University of Vienna and of the Vienna Branch of the Austrian Academy of Science's Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information. His research focus lies in the fields of quantum communication, which exploits the fundamental insights of quantum physics for new technologies such as quantum teleportation, quantum cryptography and quantum computation, and quantum experiments of macromolecules with the goal of expanding the boundary of quantum phenomena. His group's most important recent research achievements include the world's first quantum teleportation, the first transmission of real information using entangled-state quantum cryptography and the observation of quantum interference for clusters of seventy carbon atoms, the most massive and complex objects worldwide to date. Among his numerous awards and prizes are an honorary professorship at the University of Science and Technology of China, memberships of the German order Pour le MŽrite and of the Academia Scientiarum et Artium Europaea, and the Senior Humboldt Fellow Prize of the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung. Professor Zeilinger studied at the University of Vienna where he earned a Ph.D. in physics and mathematics in 1971. He has held positions at the Technical University of Vienna, MIT, the University of Innsbruck, the University of Melbourne, the Technical University of Munich, the College de France, and Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. He has published more than 350 articles in scientific journals to date, many of them classics of scientific citations.

 

Ahmed H. Zewail is the Linus Pauling Professor of Chemistry and professor of physics, and the Director of the NSF Laboratory for Molecular Sciences (LMS) at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). He was awarded the 1999 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his studies of the transition states of chemical reactions using femtosecond spectroscopy. Dr. Zewail was educated in Egypt, received his B.S. (with First Class honors) and M.S. from Alexandria University, and his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. He is the recipient of honors and awards from around the world. From Egypt, he received the Grand Collar of the Nile, the highest state honor; postage stamps were issued to honor his contributions to science and humanity. His other honors include the Robert A. Welsh Prize, The Wolf Prize, The King Faisal Prize, and the Benjamin Franklin Medal. He holds twenty-five honorary degrees in science, literature, medicine, philosophy, law, and arts, and is an elected member of national and international academies and societies, including the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Achievement, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, the European Academy of Arts, Sciences, and Humanities, the Royal Society of London, the Russian Academy of Sciences, and the Swedish Academy of Sciences. Dr. Zewail's current research interests are directed towards the development of new methodology for understanding the physics of life molecules and their biological behavior.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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fq(x) Foundation Questions in Physics & Cosmology