This is a list of atheists in science and technology. A statement by a living person that he or she does not believe in God is not a sufficient criterion for inclusion in this list. Persons in this list are people (living or not) who both have publicly identified themselves as atheists and whose atheism is relevant to their notable activities or public life.
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I'm Schlumberger Centennial Chair of Computer Science at The University of Texas at Austin, and director of its Quantum Information Center.
If you'd asked, I would've told you that I, like yourself, am what most people would call a disbelieving atheist infidel heretic.
He was not only a distinguished German physicist and one of the most famous inventors on the staff at the Zeiss optical works at Jena but a notable social reformer, By a generous scheme of profit-sharing he virtually handed over the great Zeiss enterprise to the workers. Abbe was an intimate friend of Haeckel and shared his atheism (or Monism). Leonard Abbot says in his life of Ferrer that Abbe had "just the same ideas and aims as Ferrer."
D'Alembert, though privately an atheist and materialist, presented the respectable public face of 'la philosophie' in the French capital while remaining henceforth uninterruptedly aligned with Voltaire.
Unlike the French and English deists, and unlike the scientific atheists such as Diderot, d'Alembert, and d'Holbach,...
We atheists can, as he does, argue that, with the modern revolution in attitudes toward homosexuals, we have become the only group that may not reveal itself in normal social discourse.
Like, for me, as an atheist, bisexual, Jew, I'm gonna go on, uh – oh and Emma Goldman is one of my great heroes and I really think that anarchism is a fantastic principle by which to fashion a utopian society even if we can't get there.
Svante Arrhenius (I859-I927), recipient of the Nobel Prize in chemistry (I903), was a declared atheist and the author of The Evolution of the Worlds and other works on cosmic physics.
Although he is an atheist, Dr Ashtekar says, his attitude toward work is from the Hindu religious text, the Bhagavad Gita.
This was to be the last large-scale work of lifelong atheist Bateson, seeking to understand the meaning of the sacred.
By now, he was also a 'Protestant Atheist', which he remained all his life.
John Bell was certainly not interested in Protestantism as such – his wife Mary [33] has reported that he was an atheist most of his life.
Naturally, I was raised as an atheist. This was quite easy since the only one in the family that had any religion was my grandmother, and she was of German stock. Although she believed in God, and went to the synagogue on the high holy days, there was no nonsense about ritual. I well remember when I went off to the army, she said, "God will protect you." I smiled politely. She added, "I know you don't believe in God, but he will protect you anyway." I know many sophisticated and highly intelligent people who are practicing Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Mormons, Hindus, Buddhists, etc., feel strongly that religion, or lack of it, is a highly personal matter. My own attitude is like Lagrange's. One day, he was asked by Napoleon whether he believed in God. "Sire," he said, "I have no need of that hypothesis."
In 1902, Marcellin P. Berthelot, often called the founder of modern organic chemistry, was one of France's most celebrated scientists—if not the world's. He was permanent secretary of the French Academy, having succeeded the giant Louis Pasteur, the renowned microbiologist. Unlike Delage, an agnostic, Berthelot was an atheist—and militantly so.
Although Delage made it clear that he did not regard Jesus as the resurrected Son of God, his paper upset the atheist members of the Academy, including its secretary, Marcellin Berthelot, who prevented its full publication in the Academy's bulletin.
Bethe: "I am an atheist."
Bethune was a communist and an atheist with a healthy contempt for his evangelical father.
As for standard religion, though, Bohr was unsympathetic. His mother was a nonpracticing Jew, his father an atheist Lutheran.
His mother was warm and intelligent, and his father, as Bohr himself later recalled, recognized "that something was expected of me." The family was not at all devout, and Bohr became an atheist who regarded religious thought as harmful and misguided.
Planck was religious and had a firm belief in God; Bohr was not, but his objection to Planck's view had no anti-religious motive.
Niels had quietly resigned his membership in the Lutheran Church the previous April. Although he had sought out religion as a child, by the time of their marriage he no longer "was taken" by it, as he put it. "And for me it was exactly the same," Margrethe later explained. "[Interest in religion] disappeared completely," although at the time of their wedding, she was still a member of the Lutheran Church. (Niels's parents were also married in a civil, not a religious, ceremony, and Harald also resigned his membership in the Lutheran Church just before his wedding, a few years later.)
On the other hand Bohr wrote of his admiration for the writing and presentation of Kierkegaard – at the same time stating he could not accept some of it. Part of this may have followed from Kierkegaard being a very avowed, yet rather circuitous proponent of a costly Christian faith, while after a youth of confirming faith Bohr himself was a non-believer.
"Bohr's atheism, the counterpiece of Einstein's monotheism, ... was more affined to traditional Far Eastern philosophy," according to Stent. ...The young Bohr thus lived in two worlds, but mostly the cultural Christianity of the Danish middle class. As a young man, he had read Søren Kierkegaard, a fellow Dane and a Christian existentialist from the nineteenth century, with some enthusiasm. But he finally faced a religious crisis, and by the time he went to England to study physics, the idea of God had lost its appeal. The aim of life was happiness, he wrote his fiancée, making it impossible "that a person must beg from and bargain with fancied powers infinitely stronger than himself." ... In his only published paper on the topic of religion, Bohr spoke not of deities and doctrines but of psychological experience.
Gunther S. Stent: "Niels Bohr was one of the few five-star scientists who really was an atheist — and not merely paying lip service to atheism."
A statement about religion in the loose notes on Kierkegaard may throw light on the notion of wildness that appears in many of Bohr's letters. "I, who do not feel in any way united with, and even less, bound to a God, and therefore am also much poorer [than Kierkegaard], would say that the good [is] the overall lofty goal, as only by being good [can one] judge according to worth and right."
Bohr's sort of humor, use of parables and stories, tolerance, dependence on family, feelings of indebtedness, obligation, and guilt, and his sense of responsibility for science, community, and, ultimately, humankind in general, are common traits of the Jewish intellectual. So too is a well-fortified atheism. Bohr ended with no religious belief and a dislike of all religions that claimed to base their teachings on revelations.
Raymond Bridgman was extremely disappointed with his son's rejection of his religious views. Near the end of his life, however, he offered a conciliatory interpretation that allowed him to accept Percy's commitment to honesty and integrity as a moral equivalent to religion.
In many ways they were opposites; Kemble, the theorist, was a devout Christian, while Bridgman, the experimentalist, was a strident atheist.
Asked to join Le Conseil de l'Union Catholique des Scientifiques Français, Louis declined because, he said, he had ceased the religious practices of his youth.
As Richard Dawkins points out, I have no obligation to explain why I am an atheist, it's for those who believe in a god to supply evidence. Atheism, religion, science and ethics are linked: Religion provides a simple world view based on the existence of one or more gods. Gods are super-beings who are unscrutable, far superior to humans and endowed with supernatural powers. Such a world view starts from the axiom that humans will not be able to understand the world around them. There is no further argument possible: one lives "by the book".
He was a lifelong atheist and felt no need to develop religious faith as he approached the end of his life.
SC: I am not religious in any sense; in fact, I consider myself an atheist.
However, the dogmatic position of the Anglican Church against Darwin's theory of evolution induced him to reexamine his beliefs. He soon evolved into an agnostic and then an atheist.
As for his own Jewish identity, Cohen was an avowed atheist who was cremated after he died, against Jewish tradition. But still he was proud of being Jewish, his daughter said, and even had a kind of "arrogant attitude" about Jewish intelligence.
Although both parents were English Lutherans, Crile, after reading Paine, Ingersoll, and Voltaire in his college years, became a lifelong atheist, devoted to the concept of intellectual freedom.
Curie, Pierre (1859–1906) A codiscoverer of radium, Pierre Curie was an atheist.
Dirac was contemptuous of philosophy and, as many scientists do, professed atheism. But it was a narrow sort, mainly dismissive of religious orthodoxy. In notes he wrote in 1933, he embraces another creed: "[T]his article of faith is that the human race will continue to live for ever and will develop and progress without limit . . . Living is worthwhile if one can contribute in some small way to this endless chain of progress."
He died in 1984, aged 82. An atheist, he was buried under a gravestone chosen by Manci. It read "because God said it should be so".
Kramers was certainly not a dogmatic atheist like, for instance, Dirac in his younger years, whose attitude was summed up by Pauli in one famous sentence: "Our friend Dirac has a religion; and the main tenet of that religion is: 'There is no God and Dirac was his prophet.
Du Bois-Reymond was a self-proclaimed atheist but more through intimate conviction than logical necessity.
That Einstein's attitude was the result more of muddle than agnostic scruple seems clear from a letter which he wrote less than two years later when Paul Ehrenfest ruled himself out from becoming Einstein's successor by roundly declaring himself an atheist.
The man he had hoped would succeed him in Prague, Paul Ehrenfest, refused to compromise his true atheist's principles. Einstein scolded him. "Your refusal to acknowledge a religious affiliation" was just this side of "willful stupidity," he assured him, with the benefit of recent experience. Once he became a professor Ehrenfest could revert to unbelief.
In his own words, "I'm not qualified to say whether or not God exists. I kind of doubt He does. Nevertheless, I'm always saying that the SF has this transfinite Book that contains the best proofs of all mathematical theorems, proofs that are elegant and perfect...You don't have to believe in God, but you should believe in the Book." (SF was his tongue- in-cheek reference to God as "the Supreme Fascist").
Among celebrity atheists with much biographical data, we find leading psychologists and psychoanalysts. We could provide a long list, including...Hans Jürgen Eysenck...
Interviewer: Do you call yourself an agnostic or an atheist? Feynman: An atheist. Agnostic for me would be trying to weasel out and sound a little nicer than I am about this.
After the initial mathematical work on relativity the ory had been done, the Big Bang theory itself was invented by a Belgian priest, Georges lemaitre, im proved upon by an avowed atheist, George Gamow, and is now all but universally accepted by those who hold advanced degrees in astronomy and the physical sciences, despite its obvious absurdity.
Surprisingly, the atheist George Gamow enjoyed the Papal attention given to his field of research.
Gamow was, like Hoyle, an atheist, but he was familiar with organized religion: his grandfather was the Metropolitan, the senior bishop, of Odessa Cathedral.
I am a practising atheist.
I made them quit essentially. When I was nine years old I decided that I was an atheist. So I told them, "Well you shouldn't go to church anymore, it's silly." Well, apparently they'd been going to church primarily for my benefit. So after I refused to go, they quit going too.
In 1924, Hadamard recounted his meetings with Hermite: "...When Hermite loved to direct to me remarks such as: "He who strays from the paths traced by Providence crashes." These were the words of a profoundly religious man, but an atheist like me understood them very well, especially when he added at other times: "In mathematics, our role is more that of servant than master.""
Hering and Mach were atheists, and disbelieved in a soul, but still accepted the idea that nature had internal direction.
According to Hoyle: "I am an atheist, but as far as blowing up the world in a nuclear war goes, I tell them not to worry."
The biologist Francois Jacob (who shared the Nobel Prize with Jacques Monod) admits that he is an atheist, but he finds, parallel to the material nature of the universe, another aspect — in man — which is not reductible to the first.
There were no prayers: Irene was deeply atheist.
It's a portrait of besotted opposites: Both Kahneman and Tversky were brilliant scientists, and atheist Israeli Jews...
The paradox is that he thought of himself as a hard-boiled philosophical materialist. He was also what one may call a devoted atheist; a freemason; a member of the Austrian Socialist Party; and a regular contributor to the Monisticshe Monatshelfe, the monthly published by the German league of Monists.
Karlin was born in Yonova, Poland, in 1924. His family immigrated to Chicago when he was a small child and struggled financially through the Great Depression. He was raised in a strict Orthodox Jewish household but broke with religion in his early teens and remained an atheist for the rest of his life.
Among celebrity atheists with much biographical data, we find leading psychologists and psychoanalysts. We could provide a long list, including...Melanie Klein...
Among celebrity atheists with much biographical data, we find leading psychologists and psychoanalysts. We could provide a long list, including...Jacques Lacan...
I present here two examples of notable atheists. The first is Lev Landau, the most brilliant Soviet physicist of the twentieth century.
Landau's theoretical minimum exam was famous and only about forty students passed it in his time. This was Landau's entry-level exam for theoretical physics. It contained what Landau felt was necessary to work in that field. Like many Soviet era physicists he was an atheist.
Leon Lederman is himself an atheist and he regrets the term, and Peter Higgs who is an atheist too, has expressed his displeasure, but the damage has been done!
And Mach, in personal conviction, was a socialist and an atheist.
Both make explicit claims against the pseudo-problems generated by materialism, and although Mach the atheist would have no gripe with "irreligion" per se, as a pacifist and a socialist he was indeed an ardent proponent of "peace.
The Austrian positivist physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach was nominally a Catholic, but in reality he was an atheist and strongly opposed to Christian doctrines.
Markov (1856–1922), on the other hand, was an atheist and a strong critic of the Orthodox Church and the tsarist government (Nekrasov exaggeratedly called him a Marxist).
Among celebrity atheists with much biographical data, we find leading psychologists and psychoanalysts. We could provide a long list, including G. Stanley Hall, John B. Watson, Carl R. Rogers...Abraham Maslow...Maslow was a second-generation atheist, and his father was a militant freethinker.
He was a member of the firm of Vickers' Sons and Maxim. Maxim was an aggressive Atheist (personal knowledge) and the compiler (with the present writer) of the collection of strong criticisms of religion...
By the way I'm an atheist.
Another area where he "goes against the flow" is in his spiritual beliefs. As far as religion is concerned, he's a confirmed atheist. "I think it [religion] is a contagious mental disease. . . . The brain has a need to believe it knows a reason for things.
Moleschott's atheism is much more prominent, for example, and he declares absurd Liebig's opinion that insights into the laws of nature inevitably lead us to the notion of a Being knowable only through revelation.
Born and raised in a Sephardic Jewish family in which culture and love of learning were categorical imperatives, she abandoned religion and embraced atheism.
Montgolfier (Michel Joseph), aeronaut. b. Aug. 1740. He was the first to ascend in an air balloon, 5 June 1783. A friend of Delambre and La Lalande, he was on the testimony of this last an atheist. Died 26 June 1810.
Also that year, a Montgolfier balloon sailed over Paris in the first manned free balloon flight. Montgolfier served the Revolution with zeal and was much honored. Lalande, who knew him well, wrote that Montgolfier was an atheist.
The Nobel Prize-winning geneticist and stringent atheist Thomas Hunt Morgan was developing the chromosome theory of heredity by examining his swarm of mutated Drosophila (fruit flies) through a jeweler's loupe.
In this circle, Nash learned to make a virtue of necessity, styling himself self-consciously as a "free thinker." He announced that he was an atheist.
Nash, by then an atheist, balked at a Catholic ceremony. He would have been happy to get married in city hall.
Unfortunately I am a 100% skeptic (an "Epicurus" in Yiddish), an atheist although not in an aggressive connotation.
Although an atheist, Neeman believes that traditions are important for a revolutionary movement, and he strongly defends the spiritual heritage of the Jewish people, preaches a retum to biblical sources, and is in constant dialogue with the ultra-nationalist-religious groupings.
Alexander Oparin (1894–1980), an atheist, suggested that natural chemical reactions produced biological molecules that came together to form the first living thing.
For the locals, it was as if aliens had landed. "The normal folks were wearing tight jeans and cowboy hats, and here was a rancher who didn't wear a hat," said Pete Richards, who lived on one of the neighboring ranches at the time. "He was skinnier than a rail, he was really hyper. Both he and Jackie swore like sailors. And they were atheists!".
Most of them are either atheists like Albert Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer, or agnostics like JBS Haldane.
He was a Jew and Groves was at least conventionally anti-Semitic; but perhaps worse, Oppenheimer practiced no religion at all and thus was almost certainly an atheist or agnostic, whereas Groves was the sincerely believing son of an army chaplain.
Even Wilhelm Ostwald, who was the most radical atheist among these scholars, uses the instrument of the 'Monistic Sunday Sermons' to spread his ideas on rationality.
I turned secular at the age of 11, by divine revelation. [Laughs.] I was standing on the roof of the house my father built, looking down on the street and suddenly it became very clear to me that there is no God.
In some ways, Penrose and Hameroff are the odd couple of science. Hameroff is upfront about his spiritual views, talking openly about the possibility of the soul existing after death. Penrose is an atheist who calls himself "a very materialistic and physicalist kind of person," and he's bothered by New Agers who've latched onto quantum theories about non-locality and entanglement to prop up their paranormal beliefs.
Jean and Francis Perrin held similar political and philosophical ideas. Both were socialists and atheists.
Generally, I do not get a lot of satisfaction out of being identified with causes or logos. But – a couple of years ago, when Richard Dawkins started his "out campaign" for atheists, I thought that showing my support was not a bad idea.
Reber was a diehard atheist, and whatever he understood of those bumps in the night is not certain.
As it turns out, Lord Rees is an atheist, though one who said in a recent interview that he is "not allergic to religion," and that he enjoys participating in aesthetic and cultural activities of the Anglican church, in which he was raised.
Wilhelm declared himself a "confirmed atheist" at the age of eight.
Among celebrity atheists with much biographical data, we find leading psychologists and psychoanalysts. We could provide a long list, including G. Stanley Hall, John B. Watson, Carl R. Rogers...
By most definitions he would be called an atheist, but he hated the term. 'An atheist has to know a lot more than I know. An atheist is someone who knows there is no god. By some definitions atheism is very stupid.'
Even though he later came to be known as an atheist, Saha was well-versed in all religious texts— though his interest in them was purely academic.
a self-described atheist, saha loved swimming in the river and his devout wife loved the sanctity of the spot. swimming and walking were among the few things they could do together.
Apparently Sakharov did not need to delve any deeper into it for a long time, remaining a totally nonmilitant atheist with an open heart.
Sakharov was not invited to this seminar. Like most of the physicists of his generation, he was an atheist.
The Soviet dissident most responsible for defeating communism, Andrei Sakharov, was an atheist.
It cannot be said that Dr. Sarkar was a confirmed atheist.
In one respect, however, he is not a romantic: he does not idealize the person of the beloved, his highest praise is to consider her his equal. "When you feel your own equal in the body of a beautiful woman, just as ready to forget the world for you as you for her – oh my good Lord – who can describe what happiness then. You can live it, now and again – you cannot speak of it." Of course, he does speak of it, and almost always with religious imagery. Yet at this time he also wrote, "By the way, I never realized that to be nonbelieving, to be an atheist, was a thing to be proud of. It went without saying as it were." And in another place at about this same time: "Our creed is indeed a queer creed. You others, Christians (and similar people), consider our ethics much inferior, indeed abominable. There is that little difference. We adhere to ours in practice, you don't." Whatever problems they may have had in their love affair, the pangs of conscience were not among them. Sheila was as much an unbeliever as Erwin, but in a less complex, more realistic way. She was never entirely convinced by his vedantic theology.
In terms of religion, Schrodinger fits in the atheist camp. He even lost a marriage proposal to his love, Felicie Krauss, not only due to his social status but his lack of religious affiliation. He was known as a freethinker who did not believe in god. But interestingly Schrodinger had a deep connection to Hinduism, Buddhism, and Eastern philosophy in general. Erwin studied numerous books on Eastern thought as well as the Hindu scriptures. He was enthralled with Vedanta thought and connected ideas of oneness and unity of mind with his research on quantum physics, specifically wave mechanics.
Schopenhauer often called himself an atheist, as did Schrodinger, and if Buddhism and Vedanta can be truly described as atheistic religions, both the philosopher and his scientific disciple were indeed atheists. They both rejected the idea of a "personal God," and Schopenhauer thought that "pantheism is only a euphemism for atheism."
He rejected traditional religious beliefs (Jewish, Christian, and Islamic) not on the basis of any reasoned argument, nor even with an expression of emotional antipathy, for he loved to use religious expressions and metaphors, but simply by saying that they are naive.
He claimed to be an atheist, but he always used religious symbolism and believed his scientific work was an approach to the godhead.
He claimed to be an atheist, but he used religious symbolism and believed that his scientific work was 'an approach to God'.
My parents were atheists, I was an atheist, I never really felt Jewish.
Although having a distinct loyalty to his Jewish origins and friends, Dennis himself was an avowed atheist, as was his father, and neither generally followed Jewish religious practice.
He considered himself an atheist and never went to church.
Rabid atheist by age six. (His father, Boris, was too, but intensely studied great religious works.)
His secular, scientific values came well before he was old enough to make such calculating career decisions. For example, while still in middle school, Simon wrote a letter to the editor of the Milwaukee Journal defending the civil liberties of atheists, and by high school he was "certain" that he was "religiously an atheist," a conviction that never wavered.
But that tells you about my religious affiliation, which is not very strong, and I must say I'm not even an agnostic. I'm just an atheist in real life.
Jack Steinberger: "I'm now a bit anti-Jewish since my last visit to the synagogue, but my atheism does not necessarily reject religion."
Steinhaus was an outspoken atheist.
I believe atheism makes coherent sense.
Nowadays, when we are facing manifestations of religious and. more often, pseudoreligious feelings, it is appropriate to mention that Igor Evgenevich was a convinced and unreserved atheist.
Tamm's circumspect humorous reply: "Generally speaking, I am an atheist but may I give the answer next time?"
Thorne grew up in an academic, Mormon family in Utah but is now an atheist. "There are large numbers of my finest colleagues who are quite devout and believe in God, ranging from an abstract humanist God to a very concrete Catholic or Mormon God. There is no fundamental incompatibility between science and religion. I happen to not believe in God."
Tinbergen had never been a religious man. Wartime atrocities, however, had highlighted the absence of a deity for him while both sides invoked one aligned with themselves, and this turned him into a militant atheist.
Recently, at a seminar, Harold Urey, the noted scientist who won a Nobel prize for his experiments on the origin of life.... ...Dr. Urey, a somewhat outspoken confirmed atheist and evolutionist, answered:...
Despite his strict upbringing in the Orthodox Church, Vavilov had been an atheist from an early age. If he worshipped anything, it was science.
Both the French paleontologist-priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and the Russian atheist Vladimir Vernadsky agreed that Earth is developing a global mind.
Although he had occasionally cut Church Parade, he had once held very strong religious beliefs, but these had eroded to such an extent that he had come to regard himself as an atheist. "By degrees", he said "I was forced to the conclusion that my beliefs were inconsistent with scientific teaching. Once the seeds of doubt were sown the whole structure of my former religious beliefs rapidly collapsed, and I swung to the other extreme".
Neither did I want to be a clergyman. I liked a good sermon. But religion tells people how to behave and that I could never do. Clergymen also had to assume and advocate the presence of God, and proofs of God's existence seemed to me quite unsatisfactory. People claimed that He had made our earth. Well, how had He made it? With an earth-making machine? Someone once asked Saint Augustine, "What did the Lord do before he created the world?" And Saint Augustine is said to have answered, "He created Hell for people who ask such questions." A retort perhaps made in jest, but I knew of none better. I saw that I could not know anything of God directly, that His presence was a matter of belief, I did not have that belief, and preaching without belief is repulsive. So I could not be a clergyman, however many people might gain salvation. And my parents never pressed the point.
{{cite web}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)... I am also atheist or agnostic (I don't even know the difference). I've never been to church and prefer to think for myself. I do believe that religions stand for good things, and that if you make irrational sacrifices for a religion, then everyone can tell that your religion is important to you and can trust that your most important inner faiths are strong.
Wright was the son of a Connecticut farmer and teacher who moved his family to the Ohio frontier in 1810 to start a farm and open an academy. He was a quirky man who rejected evangelicalism for atheism, and Garrisonianism for the Liberty party, and then the Free Soilers.
And yet it did, even though since moving into the boarding house he had become an atheist and most of his friends, including his best friend, were Russians.
I think that you know me well enough: I am an absolute atheist, and all days of the week are completely the same to me.
Speaking about religion, Yakov Borisovich could say unambiguously, "I'm an absolute atheist".
The author is Emile Zuckerkandl of Stanford University. Prof. Zuckerkandl ferociously attacks ID and any belief in a designer, God, or other "superghost".
Zwicky has dealt critically with religion during his whole life. (Source: "Everybody a genius"). In a diary entry of 1971, he writes "To base the unexplainabilty and the immense wonder of nature onto an other miracle God is unnecessary and not acceptable for any serious thinker".
Zwicky has dealt critically with religion during his whole life. A 1971 diary entry states: "To base the inexplainabilty and the immense wonder of nature upon another miracle, God, is unnecessary and not acceptable for any serious thinker." According to one story, Zwicky once discussed the beginning of the universe with a priest. The priest, quoting Scriptures, stated that the universe had started with "and there is light." Zwicky replied that he would buy this, if instead God had said "and there is electronmagnetism".
Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger, sometimes written as Schroedinger or Schrodinger, was a Nobel Prize–winning Austrian and naturalized Irish physicist who developed fundamental results in quantum theory. In particular, he is recognized for postulating the Schrödinger equation, an equation that provides a way to calculate the wave function of a system and how it changes dynamically in time. He coined the term "quantum entanglement", and was the earliest to discuss it, doing so in 1932.
Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck was a German theoretical physicist whose discovery of energy quanta won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918.
Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac was an English mathematical and theoretical physicist who is considered to be one of the founders of quantum mechanics. Dirac laid the foundations for both quantum electrodynamics and quantum field theory. He was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, a professor of physics at Florida State University and a 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics recipient.
The relationship between religion and science involves discussions that interconnect the study of the natural world, history, philosophy, and theology. Even though the ancient and medieval worlds did not have conceptions resembling the modern understandings of "science" or of "religion", certain elements of modern ideas on the subject recur throughout history. The pair-structured phrases "religion and science" and "science and religion" first emerged in the literature during the 19th century. This coincided with the refining of "science" and of "religion" as distinct concepts in the preceding few centuries—partly due to professionalization of the sciences, the Protestant Reformation, colonization, and globalization. Since then the relationship between science and religion has been characterized in terms of "conflict", "harmony", "complexity", and "mutual independence", among others.
Wolfgang Ernst Pauli was an Austrian theoretical physicist and a pioneer of quantum physics. In 1945, after having been nominated by Albert Einstein, Pauli received the Nobel Prize in Physics for his "decisive contribution through his discovery of a new law of Nature, the exclusion principle or Pauli principle". The discovery involved spin theory, which is the basis of a theory of the structure of matter.
John Charlton Polkinghorne was an English theoretical physicist, theologian, and Anglican priest. A prominent and leading voice explaining the relationship between science and religion, he was professor of mathematical physics at the University of Cambridge from 1968 to 1979, when he resigned his chair to study for the priesthood, becoming an ordained Anglican priest in 1982. He served as the president of Queens' College, Cambridge, from 1988 until 1996.
Igor Yevgenyevich Tamm was a Soviet physicist who received the 1958 Nobel Prize in Physics, jointly with Pavel Alekseyevich Cherenkov and Ilya Mikhailovich Frank, for their 1934 discovery and demonstration of Cherenkov radiation. He also predicted the quasi-particle of sound: the phonon; and in 1951, together with Andrei Sakharov, proposed the Tokamak system.
Lev Davidovich Landau was a Soviet physicist who made fundamental contributions to many areas of theoretical physics. He was considered as one of the last scientists who were universally well-versed and made seminal contributions to all branches of physics. He is credited with laying the foundations of twentieth century condensed matter physics, and is also considered arguably the greatest Soviet theoretical physicist of the twentieth century.
Steven Weinberg was an American theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate in physics for his contributions with Abdus Salam and Sheldon Glashow to the unification of the weak force and electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles.
Kip Stephen Thorne is an American theoretical physicist and writer known for his contributions in gravitational physics and astrophysics. Along with Rainer Weiss and Barry C. Barish, he was awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics for his contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves.
Vitaly Lazarevich Ginzburg, ForMemRS was a Russian physicist who was honored with the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2003, together with Alexei Abrikosov and Anthony Leggett for their "pioneering contributions to the theory of superconductors and superfluids."
Charles Hard Townes was an American physicist. Townes worked on the theory and application of the maser, for which he obtained the fundamental patent, and other work in quantum electronics associated with both maser and laser devices. He shared the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics with Nikolay Basov and Alexander Prokhorov. Townes was an adviser to the United States Government, meeting every US president from Harry S. Truman (1945) to Bill Clinton (1999).
Criticism of atheism is criticism of the concepts, validity, or impact of atheism, including associated political and social implications. Criticisms include positions based on the history of science, philosophical and logical criticisms, findings in both the natural and social sciences, theistic apologetic arguments, arguments pertaining to ethics and morality, the effects of atheism on the individual, or the assumptions that underpin atheism.
Sean Michael Carroll is an American theoretical physicist and philosopher who specializes in quantum mechanics, cosmology, and the philosophy of science. He is the Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. He was formerly a research professor at the Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) department of physics. He also is currently an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute, and he has been a contributor to the physics blog Cosmic Variance, where he has published in scientific journals such as Nature as well as other publications, including The New York Times, Sky & Telescope, and New Scientist. He is known for his atheism, his vocal critique of theism and defence of naturalism. He is considered a prolific public speaker and science popularizer. In 2007, Carroll was named NSF Distinguished Lecturer by the National Science Foundation.
