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Article: Work on 'veiled reality' earns French physicist $1.4 million award.(USA)(Bernard d'Espagnat )
- Article from:
- The Christian Science Monitor
- Article date:
- March 17, 2009
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2009 The Christian Science Publishing Society. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Byline: Brendan Conway Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor
For a young Frenchman, 1939 was a good time to think about alternative realities.
So it was that, on the eve of World War II, 17-year-old Bernard d'Espagnat first considered the idea that physical reality as it had been studied since the time of Sir Isaac Newton - consisting of measurable objects, light, gravity, and the like - may not be what it seems.
He would spend the next seven decades plumbing the philosophical implications of each new development in physics: What insights can science reveal about reality? About space? About time? He wrote 20 books, countless papers and ...