When Selfish Gene author Richard Dawkins challenged physicist John Barrow on his formulation of the constants of nature at last summer’s Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowship lectures, Barrow laughed and said, “You have a problem with these ideas, Richard, because you’re not really a scientist. You’re a biologist.”

For Barrow, biology is little more than a branch of natural history. “Biologists have a limited, intuitive understanding of complexity. They’re stuck with an inherited conflict from the 19th century, and are only interested in outcomes, in what wins out over others,” he adds. “But outcomes tell you almost nothing about the laws that govern the universe.” For physicists it is the laws of nature themselves that capture and structure the universe—and put brakes on it as well.

The 2006 winner of the $1.4 million Templeton Prize for Progress toward Research about Spiritual Realities, Barrow follows a string of renowned physicist winners—including Charles Townes in 2005, John Polkinghorne in 2002, and Freeman Dyson in 2000.

He has been seeking to understand how the world works since his sister’s husband gave him a chemistry set when he was 10. He built a huge lab that would be utterly illegal today—lots of exciting acids—and explored the world of experimental chemistry, teaching himself so much that he never bothered to take chemistry in school. “Anyway, chemistry is really physics,” he notes. Indeed, at Ealing Grammar School in London, he resisted the specialized curriculum, and immersed himself in a wide range of texts, helped along by his athletic coach, a former professor of philosophy at UCLA who had read the Greats at Oxford. He was a top athlete, running the 800 meters, though he says, “Alas, I never won the Olympic medal.” Barrow’s coach encouraged him to study the philosophers, whom he came to appreciate for their language and structure. At Durham University, where he received a Bachelor of Science in mathematics—with 1st Class Honors—in 1974, he also read the advanced curriculum in the humanities. In 1977, he received his doctorate in astrophysics from Oxford, having written a thesis on non-uniform cosmological models supervised by the renowned Dennis Sciama, who also supervised Barrow’s colleague, Stephen Hawking. After stops at the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Sussex, he became a professor of mathematical sciences at the University of Cambridge in 1999.

Today he is vice president of Cambridge’s Clare Hall, one of the oldest (1326), loveliest, most musical, and most liberal colleges. He also holds the Gresham Professorship of Astronomy, the oldest science professorship in the world, at London’s Gresham College. He is a dazzling public lecturer, famous for his extraordinary fluency and command of his subject. As USA Today religion reporter Cathy Grossman summarized, “When asked a tough question, he just speaks off-the-cuff in fully formed paragraphs.”

He has written 17 books, more than 400 scientific papers, and an award-winning play that dramatizes, among other things, a theory called “the infinite replication paradox.” The breadth of his education and personal interests are reflected in his writings, which not only cover technical subjects like the nature and utility of mathematics but also the relationships between human aesthetics and the nature of the universe. Thus he writes not just on particle physics and black holes but also on John Cage and Jackson Pollock. Diverse as the books are they all deal with Barrow’s ongoing themes of simplicity and complexity, pondering the many different levels at which the universe can be studied. Almost no subject is beyond his curiosity since he is enthralled by “the simple and beautiful world…where the lawfulness of nature is most elegantly and completely revealed.”

Physicist Michael Brooks, a senior features editor of the New Scientist, calls Barrow “an innovative and fearless thinker who spends all his thought time trying to break paradigms apart.” He cites Barrow’s investigations into nature’s “constants” as an example: suggestive experimental evidence led Barrow to reexamine their constancy, arguing that tiny variations in their values could provide the window physicists have been seeking to launch into the next level of physical reality. He published many highly respected peer-reviewed research papers in the area, challenging conventional thinking—but with a scientific rigor, says Brooks, that forced the issue onto the mainstream agenda. In other words, Barrow is on a perpetual search for the truth and the next paradigm—even if that overturns his own original work.

As Barrow said in his Templeton Prize address, “Our first attempts to grasp the laws of nature are often incomplete. They capture just a part of the truth or they see it through a glass only darkly.” Non-scientists may think that progress is like a never-ending sequence of revolutions that overthrow the old order, as Thomas Kuhn argued, but Barrow says it doesn't look like that from inside science. Instead, new theories extend and subsume mature old ones. We all know that Newton’s 300-year-old law of universal gravitation has been superseded by Einstein's theories but, argues Barrow, Einstein will be succeeded by M theory or perhaps some totally unknown successor in the future. A thousand years from now, however, engineers will still be using Newton’s equations to build bridges and tunnels, just as they do today. The theory has been discarded but the working equations remain.

Barrow, the rigorous scientist, is comfortable as Barrow, the parishioner at Cambridge’s United Reform Church. Where others see a war between science and religion, he sees no conflict at all. A religious conception of the universe also uses approximations and analogies to try to grasp ultimate questions, he points out. Those analogies are not the whole truth, but they are a shadow of the truth, just as the scientific understanding of the universe has repeatedly evolved and exposed some previous scientific understanding as blinkered, self-serving, and mundane.

As a scientist, Barrow has some useful advice for religious believers: “Don’t be cowed because religious images are often naive or simple. They are merely a shadow of something far more sophisticated. And, as in science, as more knowledge accumulates, old ideas often turn out to be part of the deeper truth that eventually emerges.”

After all, even the constants of nature—Einstein’s “divine inputs”—may shift in value, leading to yet another layer in the dialogue between science and religion.

Links of Interest
For more information about the Templeton Prize for Progress toward Research about Spiritual Realities please go to:: www.templetonprize.org.

Julia Vitullo-Martin, a co-director of the Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowships in Science and Religion, is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

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