Plenary Lecturer
George F. R. Ellis, professor of applied mathematics emeritus at the University of Cape Town (UCT), is as widely respected for his anti-apartheid Quaker activism as for his contributions to cosmology. Born in Johannesburg, South Africa, and educated in Natal and at UCT, where he received his baccalaureate degree with distinction, he earned his Ph.D. in applied mathematics and theoretical physics at Cambridge University in 1964. He became a research fellow at Peterhouse College, Cambridge, and then was a university lecturer in applied mathematics and theoretical physics before joining the UCT faculty as a full professor in 1974. Dr. Ellis also served as a professor of cosmic physics at the International School of Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy, for five years and has been a visiting professor at the University of Chicago, the University of Hamburg, Boston University, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Alberta. He is currently G. C. McVittie Visiting Professor of Astronomy at Queen Mary College, London, and lectures throughout the world. His scientific work on the mathematical foundations of general relativity and cosmology is recognized for its depth, originality, and wit. He studies fundamental questions like the geometrical structure of the universe and has not been afraid to challenge conventional assumptions about how our universe began and is built. In his alternative model to the violent Big Bang, the Whimper model, all starts with Quaker gentleness. In the bleak South Africa of the 1970’s and 1980’s, he used knowledge both as a weapon and a shield against violence and injustice. During the past several decades, he has been deeply involved in race relations, housing policy, and the future of the scientific enterprise of his country. Dr. Ellis has served as president of the Royal Society of South Africa (RSA) and of the International Society of General Relativity and Gravitation. He is a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications, the RSA, the UCT, and the Third World Academy of Sciences. Winner of the 2004 Templeton Prize for Research or Discoveries about Spiritual Realities, his many other awards include the Herschel Medal of the Royal Society of South Africa, the Claude Harris Leon Foundation Achievement Award, the Gold Medal of the South African Association for the Advancement of Science, the Star of South Africa Medal, which was presented to him in 1999 by President Nelson Mandela, the National Science and Technology Forum Award for lifetime contributions to cosmology, the Academy of Science of South Africa Science-for-Society Gold Medal, and the Order of Mapungubwe, which was conferred on him by South African President Thabo Mbeki last year. Dr. Ellis holds honorary degrees from Haverford College, the University of Natal, and Queen Mary College, London. He serves as co-editor-in-chief of the international Journal of General Relativity and Gravitation. Co-author with Stephen W. Hawking of The Large Scale Structure of Space Time (1973), which quickly became a standard reference work, he has published more than three hundred scientific papers and eight other major books. His latest studies are (with John Wainwright) The Dynamical Systems Approach to Cosmology (1996), (with Nancey Murphy) On the Moral Nature of the Universe: Theology, Cosmology, and Ethics (1996), and (with Peter Coles) Is the Universe Open or Closed? The Density of Matter in the Universe (1997). He edited, most recently, The Far-Future Universe: Eschatology from a Cosmic Perspective, which was published by the Templeton Foundation Press in 2002.
Ian G. Barbour has been writing about science and religion, with a deep understanding of both cultures, for more than forty years. Born in Peking, China to missionary parents, he graduated from Swarthmore College and received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Chicago in 1950. His initial research focused on cosmic ray mesons. He began his teaching career at Kalamazoo College and rose from assistant professor to professor and chair of the physics department. Taking a leave of absence, he enrolled in the Yale Divinity School where he earned a B.D. in 1956. The year before he had accepted an appointment at Carleton College, teaching both physics and religion, and in 1974 he was promoted to professor of religion and named director of Carleton's Program in Science, Technology, and Public Policy. Dr. Barbour became the Winifred and Athernon Bean Professor of Science, Technology, and Society in 1981, a chair he held until his retirement in 1986. A member of Phi Beta Kappa and Sigma Xi, he has won many honors over the course of his career, including a Ford Faculty Fellowship, an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fullbright Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, the Danforth Foundation's Harbison Award for Distinguished Teaching, and the American Academy of Religion's Annual Book Award. He was Lilly Visiting Professor of Science, Theology, and Human Values at Purdue University in 1973-74 and a Fellow of the National Humanities Center in 1980-81. Dr. Barbour has served on the editorial boards of Process Studies, Zygon, Research in Philosophy and Technology, and Environmental Ethics. The most recent of his dozen books is Religion and Science: Historical and Contemporary Issues (Harper Collins, 1997 and SCM Press, 1998).
A British theoretical physicist, based in Australia, Paul Davies is the author of more than twenty-five books. He obtained a doctorate from University College, London in 1970 and was a research fellow at the Institute of Theoretical Astronomy in Cambridge until 1972, when he was appointed lecturer in mathematics at King's College, London. In 1980, he was offered the chair of theoretical physics at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, a post he held until moving to Australia in 1990, first as professor of mathematical physics at the University of Adelaide and then as professor of natural philosophy until 1996. He is currently professor of natural philosophy in the Australian Centre for Astrobiology at Macquarie University in Sydney. He also holds the posts of visiting professor of physics at Imperial College, London and adjunct professor of physics at the University of Queensland. Dr. Davies's research has been mainly in the field of quantum gravity and cosmology, topics on which he has published more than 100 scientific papers. His books, The Physics of Time Asymmetry (1974) and Quantum Fields in Curved Space (1981), written with his former student Nicholas Birrell, remain standard texts for researchers. He has made several important contributions to the theory of black holes and cosmological models. His interests, however, extend much more widely, ranging from particle physics to astrobiology to complexity theory. For many years he has explored the philosophical consequences of the latest ideas at the forefront of research, work for which he won the 1995 Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion. Dr. Davies has a strong commitment to bringing science, and its deeper implications, to the wider public. In addition to research and writing that has led to his best-selling books, he makes almost daily media appearances and contributes regularly to newspapers and journals around the world. He was a columnist for The Economist and The Australian for several years. He devised and presented a highly successful series of science documentaries on BBC Radio 3, two of which were published in book form as The Ghost in the Atom (1986) and Superstrings: A Theory of Everything? (1988). Recently his two television series, "The Big Questions" and "More Big Questions," won critical acclaim when screened on Australia's SBS channel. In the UK, Dr. Davies's Templeton Prize was the subject of an Equinox documentary on Channel 4, and several years ago an entire episode of the Border Television's series, "The Beatitudes," was devoted to an interview with him on science and the meaning of life. Dr. Davies is a fellow of the Institute of Physics, the Australian Institute of Physics, The World Economic Forum, and the World Academy of Arts and Science. He is a consultant to several publishers, as well as a number of scientific and cultural organizations in the UK and Australia. In a recent book, The Fifth Miracle: The Search for the Origin of Life (1998), he examines the state of our knowledge about information-based complexity, argues that science also must account for the source of biological information, and suggests that emergent laws of complexity offer reasonable hope for better understanding not only of biogenesis, but of biological evolution, too.
Charles Hard Townes was born in Greenville, South Carolina on July 28, 1915. He graduated summa cum laude from Furman University in Greenville in 1935 with a B.S. in physics and a B.A. in modern languages. Physics had fascinated him since his first course in the subject during his sophomore year in college because of its “beautifully logical structure.” He was also interested in natural history while at Furman, serving as curator of the museum and working during the summers as a collector for Furman's biology camp. Dr. Townes received his M.A. in physics from Duke University in 1936 and his Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology in 1939 for his thesis on isotope separation and nuclear spins.
As a member of the technical staff of Bell Laboratories from 1933 to 1947, Dr. Townes worked extensively during World War II in designing radar-bombing systems and now holds a number of patents in related technology. He then turned his attention to applying the microwave technique of wartime radar research to spectroscopy, which he foresaw as providing a powerful new tool for the study of the structure of atoms and molecules and as a potential new basis for controlling electromagnetic waves.
At Columbia University, where he joined the faculty as Associate Professor in 1948, he continued research in microwave physics, particularly studying the interactions between microwaves and molecules and using microwave spectra for the study of the structure of molecules, atoms, and nuclei. In 1951, Dr. Townes and his associates began working on a device using ammonia gas as the active medium. In early 1954, this led to the first amplification and generation of electromagnetic waves by stimulated emission. He and his students coined the word “ maser, ” an acronym for “microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation,” for this device. In 1958, Dr. Townes and his brother-in-law, Dr. A. L. Schawlow, showed theoretically that masers could be made to operate in the optical and infrared regions and proposed how this could be accomplished in particular systems. This work resulted in their joint paper on optical and infrared masers, or “ laser s” (“light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation”). Other research has been in the fields of astronomy and nonlinear optics. He discovered the first complex molecules in space and detected and determined the mass of the large black hole in the center of our galaxy.
In 1950, Dr. Townes became Full Professor of Physics at Columbia University. He also served as Executive Director of the Columbia Radiation Laboratory from 1950 to1952 and was Chairman of the Physics Department from 1952 to 1955. From 1959 to 1961, he was on leave of absence from Columbia to serve as Vice President and Director of Research at the Institute for Defense Analyses in Washington, D.C., a nonprofit organization operated by eleven universities. In 1961, Dr. Townes was appointed Provost and Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1964, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Nicolay Gennadiyevich Basov and Aleksandr Mikhailovich Prokhorov of the Lebedev Institute for Physics, Moscow, “for fundamental work in quantum electronics which has led to the construction of oscillators and amplifiers based on the maser-laser principle”. In 1966, he became Institute Professor at MIT. Later in the same year, he resigned from the position of Provost to return to more intensive research, particularly in the fields of quantum electronics and astronomy. He was appointed University Professor at the University of California, Berkeley in 1967.
During 1955 and 1956, Dr. Townes was a Guggenheim Fellow and a Fulbright Lecturer, first at the University of Paris and then at the University of Tokyo. He was National Lecturer for Sigma Xi, taught during summer sessions at the University of Michigan and at the Enrico Fermi International School of Physics in Italy, and was Welsh Lecturer at the University of Toronto.
Dr. Townes has served as a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the United States Air Force and as Chairman of the Strategic Weapons Panel of the Department of Defense. He is currently Chairman of the Science and Technology Advisory Committee for Manned Space Flight of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and is a member of the President's Science Advisory Committee. Dr. Townes has served the American Physical Society in various capacities and is currently Vice President. He is also a Trustee of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, the Carnegie Institution of Washington, and the RAND Corporation. His scientific writings have been published in many technical journals. In addition to the Nobel Prize for Physics, Dr. Townes' honors and awards include the Research Corporation Annual Award; the Institute of Radio Engineers Morris N. Liebmann Memorial Prize; the National Academy of Sciences Comstock Award; the Franklin Institute Stuart Ballantine Medal; the US Air Force Exceptional Service Award; the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Rumford Premium; the American Institute of Electrical Engineers David Sarnoff Award; the National Academy of Sciences John J. Carty Medal; the Institute of Physics and the Physical Society (England) Thomas Young Medal and Prize; the City of Philadelphia John Scott Award; and the Dickinson College Joseph Priestley Award. He received the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Medal of Honor in 1967 “for his significant contributions in the field of quantum electronics which have led to the maser and the laser.” He received the Russian Academy of Sciences Lomonosov Medal, the Indian Rabindranath Tagore Award, and the German (German-speaking countries) Karl Schwarzschild Medal. Dr. Townes has also received numerous honorary degrees from universities in the US and abroad. In 2005, he won the Templeton Prize.
Dr. Townes is a member and Fellow of the American Physical Society, the Optical Society of America, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He is a member of the Société Francaise de Physique, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the National Academy of Engineers, the Royal Society of London, the American Physical Society, the American Astronomical Society, and the Board of Advisors of the John Templeton Foundation. Dr. Townes continues to do research at the University of California, Berkeley, where his work at present involves very-high-angular-resolution astronomy in the mid-infrared (10 micron-wavelength region) through the use of interferometric techniques. Current work includes demonstration that old stars throw off substantial material episodically on time scales of 10 to 100 years, discovery of a recent episode in which Betelgeuse suddenly emitted a large amount of gas, and measurement of Betelgeuse's diameter.