{"id":924,"date":"2006-07-31T14:07:23","date_gmt":"2006-07-31T19:07:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/2006\/07\/31\/foundational-questioners-announced\/"},"modified":"2006-07-31T14:07:23","modified_gmt":"2006-07-31T19:07:23","slug":"foundational-questioners-announced","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2006\/07\/31\/foundational-questioners-announced\/","title":{"rendered":"Foundational Questioners Announced"},"content":{"rendered":"

Back in March we had a guest post by Anthony Aguirre<\/a> about the Foundational Questions Institute<\/a>, a new effort to support “research at the foundations of physics and cosmology, particularly new frontiers and innovative ideas integral to a deep understanding of reality, but unlikely to be supported by conventional funding sources.” Today the FQXi (that’s the official acronym, sorry) announced their first round of grant awardees<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It’s a very good list, and Anthony and Max Tegmark are to be congratulated for funding some very interesting science. If anything, I could see almost all of these proposals receiving money from the NSF or DOE or NASA, although perhaps it might have been more difficult. We see well-known string theorists (for example Steve Giddings<\/a>, Brian Greene<\/a>, Eva Silverstein<\/a>), early-universe cosmologists (Richard Easther<\/a>, Alex Vilenkin<\/a>), late-universe astrophysicists (Fred Adams<\/a>, Avi Loeb<\/a>), general relativists (Justin Khoury<\/a>, Ken Olum<\/a>), loop-quantizers (Olaf Dreyer<\/a>, Fotini Markopoulou<\/a>), respectable physicists taking the opportunity to be a little more speculative than usual (Louis Crane<\/a>, Janna Levin<\/a>), and even some experimentalists working on the foundations of quantum mechanics (Markus Aspelmeyer<\/a>, former guest-poster<\/a> Paul Kwiat<\/a>), as well as a bunch of others.<\/p>\n

Nothing in there about finding God by doing theoretical physics. Which might have been a non-trivial worry, since currently the sole source of funding for FQXi is the John Templeton Foundation<\/a>. The Templeton Foundation was set up “to encourage a fresh appreciation of the critical importance \u00e2\u20ac” for all peoples and cultures \u00e2\u20ac” of the moral and spiritual dimensions of life,” and in particular has worked to promote a reconciliation between science and religion. I am not a big fan of such reconciliation, in the sense that I think it is completely and woefully misguided. This has led me in the past to decline to participate<\/a> in Templeton-sponsored activities, and the close connection between Templeton and FQXi was enough to dissuade me from applying for money from them myself.<\/p>\n

Gareth Cook has written a nice article in the Boston Globe<\/a> about FQXi and the grant program, in which I am quoted as saying that bringing science and religion together is a bad thing. Absolutely accurate, but the space constraints of a newspaper article make it hard to convey much subtlety. The FQXi folks have stated definitively that their own mission is certainly not<\/em> to reconcile science and religion; in case of doubt, they’ve put it succinctly in their FAQ<\/a>:<\/p>\n

I’ve read that a goal of JTF [John Templeton Foundation] is to “reconcile science and religion.” Is this part of the FQXi mission?<\/em><\/p>\n

No.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Indeed, they’ve been quite clear that the Templeton Foundation has just given them a pot of money and been otherwise hands-off, which is good news. And that they would like to get additional sources of funding. My own current worry — which is extremely mild, to be clear — is that the publicity generated by FQXi’s activities will be good for Templeton’s larger purpose, to which I am opposed.<\/p>\n

But at the moment the focus should be on recognizing Max and Anthony and their friends for steering a substantial amount of money to some very interesting research. If they succeed at getting additional sources of funding, I may even apply myself one day!<\/p>\n

Update:<\/em> More quotes in this piece from Inside Higher Ed<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Back in March we had a guest post by Anthony Aguirre about the Foundational Questions Institute, a new effort to support “research at the foundations of physics and cosmology, particularly new frontiers and innovative ideas integral to a deep understanding of reality, but unlikely to be supported by conventional funding sources.” Today the FQXi (that’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27,28,30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-924","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-religion","category-science","category-science-and-society"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/924","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=924"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/924\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=924"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=924"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=924"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}