Priest-Cosmologist Wins $1.6 Million Templeton Prize
By BRENDA GOODMAN

The $1.6 million Templeton Prize, the richest award made to an individual by a philanthropic organization, was given Wednesday to Michael Heller, 72, a Roman Catholic priest, cosmologist and philosopher who has spent his life asking, and perhaps more impressively answering, questions like “Does the universe need to have a cause?”

The John Templeton Foundation, which awards grants to encourage scientific discovery on the “big questions” in science and philosophy, commended Professor Heller, who is from Poland, for his extensive writings that have “evoked new and important consideration of some of humankind’s most profound concepts.”

Much of Professor Heller’s career has been dedicated to reconciling the known scientific world with the unknowable dimensions of God.

In doing so, he has argued against a “God of the gaps” strategy for relating science and religion, a view that uses God to explain what science cannot.

Professor Heller said he believed, for example, that the religious objection to teaching evolution “is one of the greatest misunderstandings” because it “introduces a contradiction or opposition between God and chance.”
---------------
Gus: Here on this site we have not shied away from this major subject. But we get so little exposure that our chance to win god. gold or the Templeton Prize is as remote as star 23,967,841 in the seventh quadrant of Galaxy 29,860,472,109. But one can spend a life time of the subject and one can spend 5 minutes or 30 seconds, the result will be very similar should we be honest with our interpretations of the illusions we encounter. As the good old priest postulate the "god of the gap" is an old clap trap, and “Does the universe need to have a cause?”... is a good question that can have many answers, including "no" which is my favourite one.

For many years I have pushed the barrow of "negative time" and of the necessity of flaws in matter and energy from the time of the big bang... Maybe, my use of the word "flaws" is wrong because it could make us recall something "wrong" when I only mean something that is different from uniformity in the system — something that arrest the formation of thinning perfection, in the flux of expanding energy. I used the word flaws in this expression : "relative flaws versus absolute perfection" extracting the concept that if there was an absolute in the universe, there would be no universe... As soon as there is a variation — as minute as it could be — in the potential from one side of the flux to the other, or within the same area of the flux, the universe has to have singularities and discrepancies (flaws) that eventually create the matter as we know it. Thus the universe becomes relative... But the flexibility of time as postulated by Einstein is further exposed by the possibility of "black Holes" in which gravity (which I have claimed for yonks operate in negative time) becomes a time-absorption point (collapse) of light-emitting matter — including dark matter.

Theillard de Chardin, was searching the answers to the same problem yonks ago. Many philosophers have broken their teeth on the subject and "Michael Heller, 72, the Roman Catholic priest, cosmologist and philosopher who has spent his life asking, and perhaps more impressively answering (I'd like to see that without the god prop), questions like “Does the universe need to have a cause?” may have found an elegant swindle to prove something absolute in a relative environment. Yes, my understanding of this complex elusive problem is bathed in relativity and soaks in the chaotic values of uncertainty. This, If my estimates are correct, the good priest achieved as much as Moko in an instant of life-sharing, but he is still on the pathway of individual oblivion as we all are, whether we "understand" or not. Thus, as humans, we need to create our own cause, our own faith for some... But my ultimate relative cause is to take a stand for the protection of ourselves, of other humans and of the place — the environment — in which we live, not just for ourselves but for all the other animal species, including the annoying ones.

For me, this personally created and accepted "cause" includes cartooning and many other activities that I hope might help swing things around towards a more balanced and more equitable human and animalistic-ally inclined world... Animality is our most recent root. That we can fiddle with genes is the proof of this pudding.

Our awareness is anchored in our memory, from our genes and our chemical ability to learn, in which we build a mechanical delta-plus momentum of interpreted perception on which we build our memory of doing and understanding. Our morality is but a built social acceptance of an interpretation of the mechanics of survival reactivity in uncertainty.

That we codify this "morality" should not go beyond the self-protection, the protection of others and the protection of our environment... Any other appendage appears to be designed to control the weak, rather than protect the weak, and to open the path for psychopaths to take over the pack.

The Catholics had their Jansenism in the 16-18th century, now the Australian Anglicans seem to have their own Jensenism.. meanwhile, the Jesuits still think they own the high intellectual religious ground.

Both Jansenism and Jensenism seem to adhere to original sin, human depravity and the necessity of divine grace for salvation. Jansenism also professed predestination. I don't know where Archbishop Jensen sits on this one. The Jesuits hate predestination. I know that scientifically there is an elastic predestination of body parts, bathing in a sea of uncertain change in evolution and growth. I don't know about souls and spirits. The various Chaos Theories formulate the material world with many variations — as one has to admit there are many factors of strange attraction, some of distraction and plenty of minded opposition. This is also paralleled in atomic physics — as islands of stability in the sea of instability, passed a certain atomic mass...

And talking about mass, the Pope is soon to perform his theatre at Randwick. The place — Sydney, New South Wales that is — has been scrubbed of all protest voices by decree. Not even a fart joke will be allowed in this most draconian environment. We had more freedom during the war. We had more freedom during the 60s. But due to the very funny prank by the Chaser Team during "OPEC" (according to Bushit) — yes we know it was APEC — who infiltrated the most secure of all secure sieves in the world of security, with fake IDs screaming to the p'lice they were fake IDs, the laws governing jokes and funny placards have come down hard on the populace that could not give a rat's arse about the Vatican neo-christian machine, but would enjoy a few funnies with a few tinnies in the outdoors. No thanks, Chaser guys...

What makes me laugh is that Sydney is the "sin" capital of the world. Sydney is the world capital for gays and lesbians, and sex. Forget New York on this subject. Sex in the City, the movie, pales in hard fashion and action compared to Oxford street, Sydney. And the schism developing amongst the Anglicans is due to gay believers who want to become priests and bishops... Jensen is not keen on queens redecorating his nest...

Make love not war... A few simple words that were innocuous enough during the 60s, now completely submerged with questions such as who to make it with, the use of condoms, same sex pleasuring, monologues, etc... And what about the pedophiles?... So we still make war. That's pure and simple: bash the other fellow on the head stuff, except some weak souls want to ban the most efficient indiscriminate weaponry such as cluster bombs... I ask you. Life was simple back then. Napalm. Flower power. Religious freedom(s).

I'm with the Quakers on this. Religion should be free from systems. Religion is a personal thing. Individuality of beliefs. But some people can't stop themselves from wanting to "lead". Most are like the pied-piper because many people want to be led. Being one's own master of life and belief is hard work and could be full of angst and mistakes. It's much easier to be a lemming. As long as you're not a lemming protesting against lemmings... So no tee-shirt saying "Long Live the Freemasons" will be allowed to be seen (although many leaders of public and religious office might visit the local lodge). "Hail Existentialism" tee-shirt will be tasered forthwith by the thought p'lice of NSW. Carry a placard that says "Jensenites unites" and you'd find yourself in the cooler for being a terrorist.

Jensen would be shaking in his boots and will sit this one quietly unless in an ecumenical gesture, the Pope invites other religious types to his Youthfool Popefeist. Quakers excluded.

Atheists would be plucked from the crowd should they attend. None will, unless they are observers from other planets — or fabulous left-overs still partying from the Gay and Lesbian Mardi-gras, accidently stepping onto the Randwick lawns.

 

So says Erik Verlinde, 48, a respected string theorist and professor of physics at the University of Amsterdam, whose contention that gravity is indeed an illusion has caused a continuing ruckus among physicists, or at least among those who profess to understand it. Reversing the logic of 300 years of science, he argued in a recent paper, titled “On the Origin of Gravity and the Laws of Newton,” that gravity is a consequence of the venerable laws of thermodynamics, which describe the behavior of heat and gases.

“For me gravity doesn’t exist,” said Dr. Verlinde, who was recently in the United States to explain himself. Not that he can’t fall down, but Dr. Verlinde is among a number of physicists who say that science has been looking at gravity the wrong way and that there is something more basic, from which gravity “emerges,” the way stock markets emerge from the collective behavior of individual investors or that elasticity emerges from the mechanics of atoms.

Looking at gravity from this angle, they say, could shed light on some of the vexing cosmic issues of the day, like the dark energy, a kind of anti-gravity that seems to be speeding up the expansion of the universe, or the dark matter that is supposedly needed to hold galaxies together.

Dr. Verlinde’s argument turns on something you could call the “bad hair day” theory of gravity.

...............

The next day Dr. Verlinde gave a more technical talk to a bunch of physicists in the city. He recalled that someone had told him the other day that the unfolding story of gravity was like the emperor’s new clothes.

“We’ve known for a long time gravity doesn’t exist,” Dr. Verlinde said, “It’s time to yell it.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/13/science/13gravity.html?ref=science&pagewanted=all

---------------

Gus: a couple of blogs above this one I stated:

For many years I have pushed the barrow of "negative time" and of the necessity of flaws in matter and energy from the time of the big bang... Maybe, my use of the word "flaws" is wrong because it could make us recall something "wrong" when I only mean something that is different from uniformity in the system — something that arrest the formation of thinning perfection, in the flux of expanding energy. I used the word flaws in this expression : "relative flaws versus absolute perfection" extracting the concept that if there was an absolute in the universe, there would be no universe... As soon as there is a variation — as minute as it could be — in the potential from one side of the flux to the other, or within the same area of the flux, the universe has to have singularities and discrepancies (flaws) that eventually create the matter as we know it. Thus the universe becomes relative... But the flexibility of time as postulated by Einstein is further exposed by the possibility of "black Holes" in which gravity (which I have claimed for yonks operate in negative time) becomes a time-absorption point (collapse) of light-emitting matter — including dark matter.

G = M(-C)X(-C) is the equation I proposed in the 1980s and still stick by it... We feel gravity although it operates in negative time because when negative time is squared, it creates a positive "reality".