The Trotter Prize (named after Dr. Ide P. Trotter Sr., former dean of the Texas A&M Graduate School.) is awarded at Texas A&M University and is part of an endowed lecture series. It is awarded "for pioneering contributions to the understanding of the role of information, complexity and inference in illuminating the mechanisms and wonder of nature" and includes The Trotter Lecture which "seeks to reveal connections between science and religion, often viewed in academia as non-overlapping, if not rival, worldviews.
Nobel Prize winners Charles Hard Townes and Francis Crick received the inaugural award at A&M's Rudder Theater in 2002. Townes spoke about connections between science and faith. [1] Promoter of the notion of intelligent design William A. Dembski [2] shared the award in 2005 with theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman. [3] Simon Conway Morris received the award and spoke in 2007. [4] [5] Francis Collins, the director of the human genome project, and Steven Weinberg, a Nobel Prize recipient for physics, shared the Trotter Prize in 2008 and discussed the interplay between science and religion. [6] Astronomer and historian of science Owen Gingerich also won the prize. [7]
Robert L. Park has criticized the award for being given to William A. Dembski, a proponent of the pseudoscientific concept of intelligent design, saying it is given out for "overlapping the magisteria" (a comment based on Stephen Jay Gould's concept of non-overlapping magisteria, NOMA, the idea that science and religion inherently do not overlap). [8]
William Albert Dembski is an American mathematician, philosopher and theologian. He was a proponent of intelligent design (ID) pseudoscience, specifically the concept of specified complexity, and was a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture (CSC). On September 23, 2016, he officially retired from intelligent design, resigning all his "formal associations with the ID community, including [his] Discovery Institute fellowship of 20 years". A February 2021 interview in the CSC's blog Evolution News announced "his return to the intelligent design arena".
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.
Victor Franz Hess was an Austrian-American physicist, and Nobel laureate in physics, who discovered cosmic rays.
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).
Ivar Giaever is a Norwegian-American engineer and physicist who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1973 with Leo Esaki and Brian Josephson "for their discoveries regarding tunnelling phenomena in solids". Giaever's share of the prize was specifically for his "experimental discoveries regarding tunnelling phenomena in superconductors".
Sheldon Lee Glashow is a Nobel Prize-winning American theoretical physicist. He is the Metcalf Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Boston University and Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics, emeritus, at Harvard University, and is a member of the board of sponsors for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
Robert Lee Park was an American professor of physics at the University of Maryland, College Park, and a former director of public information at the Washington office of the American Physical Society. Park was most noted for his critical commentaries on alternative medicine and pseudoscience, as well as his criticism of how legitimate science is distorted or ignored by the media, some scientists, and public policy advocates as expressed in his book Voodoo Science. He was also noted for his preference for robotic over crewed space exploration.
Owen Jay Gingerich was an American astronomer who had been professor emeritus of astronomy and of the history of science at Harvard University and a senior astronomer emeritus at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. In addition to his research and teaching, he had written many books on the history of astronomy.
The Michael Polanyi Center (MPC) at Baylor University, Texas, was the first center at a research university exclusively dedicated to the principle of intelligent design, primarily to host William Dembski, its director, and Bruce L. Gordon, its assistant director. It was founded in 1999 by Baylor president Robert B. Sloan "with the primary aim of advancing the understanding of the sciences" in a religious context and was named for Michael Polanyi. It was aligned with the Discovery Institute's wedge strategy, and was funded in part by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation via the Discovery Institute. All of the center's research investigated the subject of intelligent design. It hosted a conference in April 2000 that brought the center to the attention of the broader Baylor community as well as the rest of the scholarly world.
Horst Ludwig Störmer is a German physicist, Nobel laureate and emeritus professor at Columbia University. He was awarded the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physics jointly with Daniel Tsui and Robert Laughlin "for their discovery of a new form of quantum fluid with fractionally charged excitations". He and Tsui were working at Bell Labs at the time of the experiment cited by the Nobel committee.
David Morris Lee is an American physicist who shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Physics with Robert C. Richardson and Douglas Osheroff "for their discovery of superfluidity in helium-3." Lee is professor emeritus of physics at Cornell University and distinguished professor of physics at Texas A&M University.
Henry Frederick "Fritz" Schaefer III is an American computational, physical, and theoretical chemist. He is one of the most highly cited chemists in the world, with a Thomson Reuters h-index of 121 as of 2020.
Makoto Kobayashi is a Japanese physicist known for his work on CP-violation who was awarded one-fourth of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature."
Toshihide Maskawa was a Japanese theoretical physicist known for his work on CP-violation who was awarded one quarter of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature."
Non-overlapping magisteria (NOMA) is the view, advocated by paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, that science and religion each represent different areas of inquiry, fact vs. values, so there is a difference between the "nets" over which they have "a legitimate magisterium, or domain of teaching authority", and the two domains do not overlap. He suggests, with examples, that "NOMA enjoys strong and fully explicit support, even from the primary cultural stereotypes of hard-line traditionalism" and that it is "a sound position of general consensus, established by long struggle among people of goodwill in both magisteria." Some have criticized the idea or suggested limitations to it, and there continues to be disagreement over where the boundaries between the two magisteria should be.
The Princeton University Department of Physics is an academic department dedicated to research and teaching at Princeton University. The associated faculty members, researchers, and students have been recognized for their research contributions, having been awarded 19 Nobel Prizes, four National Medals of Science, and two Wolf Prizes in Physics. Notable professors, researchers, and graduate students affiliated with the department include Richard Phillips Feynman, Joseph H. Taylor, Jim Peebles, Eugene P. Wigner, and John von Neumann. In addition, the department offers degree programs for bachelor's students (A.B.) and doctoral students (Ph.D.).
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