John Barrow, a cosmologist at the University of Cambridge, has won the 2006 Templeton Prize for Progress Toward Research or Discoveries about Spiritual Realities. Founded by global financier John Templeton, his foundation says the prize is intentionally larger than the Nobel Prize “to underscore that research and advances in spiritual discoveries can be quantifiably more significant than disciplines recognized by the Nobels”; this year the purse is about $1.4 million.
The focus of Barrow’s current research is on possible time variations in the fine-structure constant. “I am primarily engaged in developing self-consistent theories in which the fine-structure constant and the electron–proton mass ratio and other traditional constants are actually varying,” he says. One consequence of a varying fine-structure constant, he adds, would be violation of the equivalence principle: “If you drop two different materials in a gravitational field, they will accelerate at slightly different rates.”
Astronomy, Barrow says, “breathes new...
