Catholic priest and cosmologist Michael Heller is this year’s winner of the Templeton Prize. According to the Templeton Foundation, which bestows it, the prize is intended to “serve as a philanthropic catalyst for discovery in areas engaging life’s biggest questions, ranging from explorations into the laws of nature and the universe to questions on love, gratitude, forgiveness, and creativity.” The Templeton Prize is the largest annual award to an individual and was designed to have a bigger purse than the Nobel Prize. This year it is worth about $1.6 million.
Heller, a member of the philosophy faculty at the Pontifical Academy of Theology in Krakow, Poland, first became a priest and then studied physics. Although he served in a parish at one time, he now pursues both interests as a scholar. He began his scientific career looking at dissipative processes in cosmic evolution. Today his focus is on using noncommutative...
