Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowships in Science & Religion

About eight years ago here in Santa Fe, N.M., everybody was talking about the bikini Virgin. That's virgin with a capital V—and the reference was to a piece of art on exhibition at a local museum, in which Our Lady of Guadalupe, the most beloved figure in New Mexico Catholicism, was depicted in a skimpy floral bathing suit with as many colors as a birthday piñata.

Angry Catholics demanded that the image be removed from the show, but it stayed on display until the exhibition closed, and the young artist who created it received the kind of career boost that only comes with being denounced from the pulpit.

The controversy has long since faded but I thought about it again last night as I waited in line for an advance screening of Angels & Demons, the new thriller (based on a Dan Brown novel) in which the Vatican comes across as an age-old enemy of reason and scientific truth.

The movie, which has already been denounced in the United States by William Donohue of the conservative Catholic League, stars (along with Tom Hanks) a legendary cabal called the Illuminati—a group of evil eggheads who have figured in various conspiracy theories for more than 200 years. This time, they are plotting (or so it seems) to vaporize the Vatican as punishment for centuries of oppression against freethinkers. I was a little disappointed when when there were no picketers at the theater passing out copies of Donohue's new tract,

With plumes of gas and stardust reaching up like the fingers of Adam and a purple sun winking back, the “Pillars of Creation” has the high ecclesiastical wattage of a Michelangelo. But this late-20th-century masterpiece wasn’t painted by human hands. It is a digital image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope of the Eagle nebula, a celestial swarm 7,000 light-years from Earth. While the image is embraced sometimes by Christians to evoke the Garden of Eden or the Pearly Gates, what we are seeing is something real and more inspiring: a cosmic incubator hatching new stars.

Reproduced on calendars and book jackets and in coffee-table books, “Pillars of Creation” belongs among the iconic images of modern times — right up there with the raising of the flag on Iwo Jima and Ansel Adams’s “Moon and Half Dome, Yosemite National Park.” More than an artifact of technology, “Pillars of Creation” is a work of art. As John D. Barrow, a professor of mathematical sciences at Cambridge University, writes in COSMIC IMAGERY: Key Images in the History of Science (Norton, $39.95), pulling such an arresting canvas from the digital signals beamed by Hubble required aesthetic choices much like those that went into the great landscape paintings of the American West.

There is no reason, for example, why the plumes had to be shown standing up. There are no directions in space. More important, the scientists processing the bit stream chose the color palette partly for dazzling effect.

“If you were floating in space you would not ‘see’ what the Hubble photographs show in the sense that you would see what my passport photo shows if you met me,” Barrow writes. Following a suggestion by an art historian, Elizabeth Kessler, he juxtaposes “Pillars of Creation” with Thomas Moran’s “Cliffs of the Upper Colorado River, Wyoming Territory.” Both works “draw the eyes of the viewer to the luminous and majestic peaks,” Barrow writes. “The great pillars of gas are like a Monument Valley of the astronomical landscape.”

Through dozens of short essays, each prompted by one of science’s visual creations, Barrow conducts his own personal tour of the universe. A picture of the Whirlpool Galaxy, with its double spirals, sets him to wondering whether it was the spark for van Gogh’s

s though their knowledge of the quantum secrets came with the power of prophecy, some three dozen of Europe’s best physicists ended their 1932 meeting in Copenhagen with a parody of Goethe’s “Faust.” Just weeks earlier, James Chadwick had discovered neutrons — the bullets of nuclear fission — and before long Enrico Fermi was shooting them at uranium atoms. By the time of the first nuclear explosion a little more than a decade later in New Mexico, the idea of physics as a Faustian bargain was to its makers already a cliché. Robert Oppenheimer, looking for a sound bite, quoted Vishnu instead: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

Innocent of all that lay before them, the luminaries gathering at Niels Bohr’s Institute for Theoretical Physics were in a whimsical mood. Werner Heisenberg, Paul Dirac and Lise Meitner were there. Max Delbrück, the young scientist charged with writing the spoof — it happened to be the centennial of Goethe’s death — couldn’t resist depicting Bohr himself as the Lord Almighty and the acerbic Wolfgang Pauli as Mephistopheles.

They were perfect choices. The avuncular Bohr, with his inquisitive needling, had presided over the quantum revolution, revealing the strange workings within atoms, while the skeptical Pauli, who famously signed his letters “The Scourge of God,” could always be counted on for a sarcastic comment. (“What Professor Einstein has just said is not so stupid.”) Faust, who in the legend sells his soul for universal knowledge, was recast as a troubled Paul Ehrenfest, the Austrian physicist who despaired of ever understanding this young man’s game in which particles were just smears of probability.

Disguised with makeup, younger physicists played the parts of their “elders.” (Pauli, who skipped the meeting, was just turning 32.) Faust’s tormented love, Gretchen, appeared as the fairylike neutrino. It was only in retrospect that the silliness became profound. The players were becoming possessors of “a truth with implicit powers of good and evil,” Gino Segrè writes in “Faust in Copenhagen,”

Looking back, it was the intellectual high point of my summer: Ten science and religion reporters sitting inside the divinity building at Cambridge University, contemplating the essence of a raisin. As the hypnotic voice of the speaker, an expert on Buddhist meditation, lulled us from the here and now, I placed the wrinkly thing on my tongue, exploring its peaks and valleys until, all of a sudden, I broke through the linguistic cellophane. The raisin ceased to be a raisin or anything with a name. It had no history as a fruit grown on a vine and shipped to market; it evoked no memories of the little Sun-Maid boxes my mother packed in my lunch pail or of a particularly good glass of cabernet sauvignon. It just was.

My colleagues–we were in England for a journalism fellowship sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation, which hopes to find God in science–were having their own quiet epiphanies. After days of talks by physicists and theologians seeking cosmological justification for their spiritual beliefs, the close encounter with the raisin brought us back to earth. God was not to be found in the perfect wheeling of the cosmos, the quantum ambiguity of the atom, or the fortuity of the Big Bang, but in the electrical crackling of the human brain.

If recent findings in “neurotheology” hold up, our meditating neurons, locked in the state called mindfulness, were radiating gamma waves at about 40 cycles per second, beating against the 50-hertz hum of the fluorescent lights. At the same time, parts

In June 1948, as Jack Kerouac was recovering from another of the amphetamine-fueled joy rides immortalized in On the Road, Freeman Dyson, a young British physicist studying at Cornell, set off on a road trip of a different kind. Bound for Albuquerque with the loquacious Richard Feynman, the Neal Cassady of physics, at the wheel, the two scientists talked nonstop about the morality of nuclear weapons and, when they had exhausted that subject, how photons dance with electrons to produce the physical world. The hills and prairies that Dyson, still new to America, was admiring from the car window, the thunderstorm that stranded him and Feynman overnight in Oklahoma–all of nature's manifestations would be understood on a deeper level once the bugs were worked out of an unproven idea called quantum electrodynamics, or QED.

Dyson recounted the journey years later in Disturbing the Universe, contrasting Feynman's Beat-like soliloquies on particles and waves with the mannered presentations (“more technique than music”) he heard later that summer from the Harvard physicist Julian Schwinger. On a Greyhound bus crossing Nebraska–Dyson had fallen in love with the American highway–he had an epiphany: his two colleagues were talking, in different languages, about the same thing.

It was a pivotal moment in the history of physics. With their contrasting visions joined into a single theory, Feynman, Schwinger and the Japanese scientist Sin-Itiro Tomonaga were honored in 1965 with a Nobel Prize, one that some think Dyson deserved a piece of.

In The Scientist as Rebel, a new collection of essays (many of them reviews first published in The New York Review of Books), he sounds content with his role as a bridge builder. “Tomonaga and Schwinger had built solid foundations on one side of a river of ignorance,” he writes. “Feynman had built solid foundations on the other side, and my job was to design and build the cantilevers reaching out over the water until they met n the middle.”

Drawing on this instinct for unlikely connections, Dyson has become one of science's most eloquent interpreters. From his perch at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, he followed Disturbing the Universe, a remembrance of physics in the making, with Infinite in All Directions, his exuberant celebration of the universe, and other books like Weapons and Hope,

Maybe the pivotal moment came when Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate in physics, warned that “the world needs to wake up from its long nightmare of religious belief,” or when a Nobelist in chemistry, Sir Harold Kroto, called for the John Templeton Foundation to give its next $1.5 million prize for “progress in spiritual discoveries” to an atheist–Richard Dawkins, the Oxford evolutionary biologist whose book The God Delusion is a national best-seller.

Or perhaps the turning point occurred at a more solemn moment, when Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City and an adviser to the Bush administration on space exploration, hushed the audience with heartbreaking photographs of newborns misshapen by birth defects–testimony, he suggested, that blind nature, not an intelligent overseer, is in control.

Somewhere along the way, a forum this month at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., which might have been one more polite dialogue between science and religion, began to resemble the founding convention for a political party built on a single plank: in a world dangerously charged with ideology, science needs to take on an evangelical role, vying with religion as teller of the greatest story ever told.

Carolyn Porco, a senior research scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo., called, half in jest, for the establishment of an alternative church, with Dr. Tyson, whose powerful celebration of scientific discovery had the force and cadence of a good sermon, as its first minister.

She was not entirely kidding. “We should let the success of the religious formula guide us,” Dr. Porco said. “Let's teach our children from a very young age about the story of the universe and its incredible richness and beauty. It is already so much more glorious and awesome–and even comforting–than anything offered by any scripture or God concept I know.”

She displayed a picture taken by the Cassini spacecraft of Saturn and its glowing rings eclipsing the Sun, revealing in the shadow a barely noticeable speck called Earth.

There has been no shortage of conferences in recent years, commonly organized by the Templeton Foundation, seeking to smooth over the differences between science and religion and ending in a metaphysical draw. Sponsored instead by the Science Network, an educational organization based in California, and underwritten by a San Diego investor, Robert Zeps (who acknowledged his role as a kind of “anti-Templeton”), the La Jolla meeting, “Beyond Belief: Science, Religion, Reason and Survival,” rapidly escalated into an invigorating intellectual free-for-all. (Unedited video of the proceedings will be posted on the Web at tsntv.org.)

A presentation by Joan Roughgarden, a Stanford University biologist, on using biblical metaphor to ease her fellow Christians into accepting evolution (a mutation is “a mustard seed of DNA”) was dismissed by Dr. Dawkins as “bad poetry,” while his own take-no-prisoners approach (religious education is “brainwashing” and “child abuse”) was condemned by the anthropologist Melvin J. Konner, who said he had “not a flicker” of religious faith, as simplistic and uninformed.

Ten years after his death in 1996, science writer Walter Sullivan's byline occasionally still appears in the New York Times on obituaries of important physicists, as though he were beckoning them to some quantum-mechanical heaven. This is not a case of necromancy–the background material for Times obits is often written in advance and stored. If the dead really did communicate with the living, that would be a scientific event as monumental as the discovery of electromagnetic induction, radioactive decay or the expansion of the universe. Laboratories and observatories all over the world would be fiercely competing to understand a new phenomenon. One can imagine Mr. Sullivan, the ultimate foreign correspondent, eagerly reporting the story from the other side.

Light is carried by photons, gravity by gravitons. If there is such a thing as spiritual communication, there must be a means of conveyance: some kind of “spiritons”–ripples, perhaps, in one of M Theory's leftover dimensions. Some theologians might scoff at that remark, yet there has been a resurgence in recent years of "natural theology"–the attempt to justify religious teachings not through faith and scripture but through rational argument, astronomical observations and even experiments on the healing effects of prayer. The intent is to prove that, Carl Sagan be damned, we are not lost among billions and billions of stars in billions and billions of galaxies, that the universe was created and is sustained for the benefit of God's creatures, the inhabitants of the third rock from the sun.

In God's Universe, Owen Gingerich, a Harvard University astronomer and science historian, tells how in the 1980s he was part of an effort to produce a kind of anti-Cosmos, a television series called Space, Time, and God that was to counter Sagan's "conspicuously materialist approach to the universe." The program never got off the ground, but its premise survives: that there are two ways to think about science. You can be a theist, believing that behind the veil of randomness lurks an active, loving, manipulative God, or you can be a materialist, for whom everything is matter and energy interacting within space and time. Whichever metaphysical club you belong to, the science comes out the same.

One October day in 1947, the director of the local bank in Marksville, La., woke to find that hundreds of fish had fallen from the sky, landing in his backyard. People walking to work that day were struck by falling fish, and an account of the incident by a researcher for the state's wildlife and fisheries department later found its way into the annals of scientific anomalies – phenomena waiting to be understood.

Fish falls have also been reported in Ethiopia and other parts of the world. Whether they are hoaxes, hallucinations or genuine meteorological events – maybe fish can be swept up by a waterspout and transported – scientists are disposed to assume a physical explanation.

The same kind of scrutiny is accorded to miracles – fishes and loaves multiplying to feed the masses and the like. But as two research papers published this month suggest, looking to science to prove a miracle is a losing proposition, for believers and skeptics.

The daddy longlegs clinging vertically to my bathroom wall is a marvel of airy symmetry, its tiny head perched delicately at the center of eight arching limbs. A moment later, struck by the back of my hand, it lies crumpled on the floor. I'm sorry, but I don't like spiders in the house.

In fact, as I learn the next morning, it wasn't a spider I killed, an Araneida, but a member of a parallel order, Phalangida—one that lives by eating spiders, including the annoying little ones that bite. My reflexive action was stupidly self-defeating. But my remorse runs deeper. I feel guilty for destroying this elegant arrangement of carbon molecules, and I can't quite understand why. I don't feel a thing when I pull horsetail and cheat grass from our meadow or massacre a swarm of box elder beetles with laundry soap. I am glad when the cats kill a grasshopper or a mouse; indifferent if their prey is a sparrow; sad if it is a hummingbird. There is no definable moral calculus here. All organisms, I know, are nothing more or less than intricate, intertwined chemistry, products of an evolutionary process that is purposeless and blind. Yet I find myself behaving sometimes as though the world were crawling with spirits. I, the materialist, am making godlike judgments as to what has a “soul,” whatever that means, and what deserves to live or die.

A believer might say I am wrestling with something “spiritual.” I cringe when I hear the word, coming, with all its musty connotations, from the Latin spiritus, meaning “of breathing” or “of wind.” People once thought invisible beings swooped through the trees, bending the branches, propelling leaves and dust. They believed the rhythmic inhalation of these spirits—respiration—animated the body (from the Greek anemos, which also means wind).

We know better now, but the word refuses to go away. “Spiritual” has come to mean the opposite of material: incorporeal, undetectable, unmeasurable—and so, as far as science is concerned, unreal.

These thoughts have come to occupy me after my return from a summer journalism fellowship at Cambridge University devoted to the topic of reconciling science and religion—an idea that has puzzled me since I came across it years ago at a similarly inspired event in Berkeley,California. Science is about what you can prove. Religion is about what you believe. It follows that there can be many different religions, but only one science. So what is there to reconcile?

Science can, of course, study religion, using neuroscience and evolutionary theory to try to explain why people hold religious beliefs. Geology and archeology can refute the fundamentalist teaching that the Earth was created just a few thousand years ago or the Pueblo Indian belief that people emerged fully formed from a hole in the ground somewhere near Espańola, New Mexico. Reconciliation comes as science subsumes religion, as it steadily has been doing for hundreds of years.

It is conceivable that a very different kind of reconciliation could come about: In a stunning reversal, religion might one day subsume science. Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Islam, Jainism, Zoroastrianism, Hopi—one of the world's religions, or some hybridization, would turn out to be true. In a great spiritual awakening, every being on Earth would experience a divine, unifying vision—revealed truth. There would be no more need for scientific investigation

If nowhere else, the dead live on in our brain cells, not just as memories but as programs--computerlike models compiled over the years capturing how the dearly departed behaved when they were alive. These simulations can be remarkably faithful. In even the craziest dreams the people we know may remain eerily in character, acting as we would expect them to in the real world. Even after the simulation outlasts the simulated, we continue to sense the strong presence of a living being. Sitting beside a gravestone, we might speak and think for a moment that we hear a reply.

In the 21st century, cybernetic metaphors provide a rational grip on what prehistoric people had every reason to think of as ghosts, voices of the dead. And that may have been the beginning of religion. If the deceased was a father or a village elder, it would have been natural to ask for advice--which way to go to find water or the best trails for a hunt. If the answers were not forthcoming, the guiding spirits could be summoned by a shaman. Drop a bundle of sticks onto the ground or heat a clay pot until it cracks: the patterns form a map, a communication from the other side. These random walks the gods prescribed may indeed have formed a sensible strategy. The shamans would gain in stature, the rituals would become liturgies, and centuries later people would fill mosques, cathedrals and synagogues, not really knowing how they got there.

With speculations like these, scientists try to understand what for most of the world's population needs no explanation: why there is this powerful force called religion. It is possible, of course, that the world's faiths are triangulating in on the one true God. But if you forgo that leap, other possibilities arise: Does banding together in groups and acting out certain behaviors confer a reproductive advantage, spreading genes favorable to belief? Or are the seeds of religion more likely to be found among the memes--ideas so powerful that they leap from mind to mind?

In Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, Daniel Dennett, director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University, has embarked on another of his seemingly impossible quests. His provocatively titled book Consciousness Explained made a persuasive effort to do just that. More recently, in Freedom Evolves, he took on free will from a Darwinian perspective.

This time he may have assumed the hardest task of all--and not just because of the subject matter. Dennett hopes that this book will be read not just by atheists and agnostics but by the religiously faithful--and that they will come to see the wisdom of analyzing their deepest beliefs scientifically, weeding out the harmful from the good. The spell he hopes to break, he suggests, is not religious belief itself but the conviction that its details are off-limits to scientific inquiry, taboo.

Maybe it's because I already knew the story - about the tragic genius who revolutionized mathematics, helped the British crack secret Nazi codes and died after biting into a poisoned apple. Or maybe I was just in the mood for fiction. For some reason, about halfway through David Leavitt's short, readable life of Alan Turing, I put the book aside for a few days and turned instead to his most recent novel, "The Body of Jonah Boyd." It is actually a novel within a novel, ending with a self-referential twist that made me wonder whether Leavitt had been inspired by Turing's dizzying proof about undecidability in mathematics, in which a computer tries to swallow its own tail.

Turing was a fellow at King's College, Cambridge, in 1936, when he confronted what might be called the mathematician's nightmare: the possibility of blindly devoting your life to what, unbeknownst to anyone but God, is an unsolvable problem. If only there were a way to know beforehand, a procedure for sifting out and discarding the uncrackable nuts.

Turing's stroke of genius was to recast the issue - mathematicians call it the decision problem - in mechanical terms. A theorem and the instructions for proving it, he realized, could be thought of as input for a machine. If there was a solution, Turing's imaginary device would eventually come to a stop and print the answer. Otherwise it would grind away forever. Although it was not his primary intention, he had discovered, in passing, the idea of the programmable computer.

Now all that he needed to identify undecidable problems was a method for predicting in advance which programs would get stuck in infinite loops. But that would require examining them with another program, and how would you know that it wouldn't get stuck without vetting it with a third program, ad infinitum? Like a novel about a novelist writing a novel, the dream of mathematical infallibility went

Except for the robes and the fact that each is addressed as "His Holiness," it would be hard to find much in common between Pope Benedict XVI and Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama. Yet both have recently expressed an unhappiness with evolutionary science that would be a comfort to the Pennsylvania school board now in a court fight over its requirement that the hypothesis of a creator be part of the science curriculum.

It's not just fundamentalist Protestants who have difficulty with the idea that life arose entirely from material causes. Look East or West and you can detect the rumblings from an irreconcilable divide between science and religion, with one committed to a universe of matter and energy and the other to the existence of something extra, a spiritual realm.

Sometimes compared to the Scopes "monkey trial" of 1925, Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District opened last week in Federal District Court in Harrisburg with scientists making the usual arguments against intelligent design - which holds that the complexity of biological organisms is evidence of a creator.

Opponents say they doubt that the theory's supporters, like the Discovery Institute in Seattle, are talking about a smart gas cloud or a 10th-dimensional teenager simulating the universe on his Xbox. The American Civil Liberties Union, which filed suit against the Dover district, considers intelligent design a Trojan horse to introduce religion into public schools.

This time the anti-evolutionists won't be relying on the fundamentalist oratory moviegoers heard from the Fredric March character in "Inherit the Wind." Instead, the arguments may not sound so different from what one would hear if either the pope or the Dalai Lama were called to the stand. Neither of these men believes that a religious text, whether the Bible or the Diamond Sutra, should be given a strictly literal reading. Yet they share with evangelicals an aversion to the notion that life emerged blindly, without supernatural guidance. Particularly offensive to them is the theory, part of the biological mainstream, that the engine of evolution is random

It was on the second day at Cambridge that enlightenment dawned in the form of a testy exchange between a zoologist and a paleontologist, Richard Dawkins and Simon Conway Morris. Their bone of contention was one that scholars have been gnawing on since the days of Aquinas: whether an understanding of the universe and its glories requires the hypothesis of a God.

The speakers had been invited, along with a dozen other scientists and theologians, to address the 10 recipients of the first Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowships in Science and Religion. Each morning for two weeks in June, we walked across the Mathematical Bridge, spanning the River Cam, and through the medieval courtyards of Queens College to the seminar room.

We were there courtesy of the John Templeton Foundation, whose mission is “to pursue new insights at the boundary between theology and science,” overcoming what it calls “the flatness of a purely naturalistic, secularized view of reality.”

On matters scientific, Dr. Dawkins, who came from Oxford, and Dr. Conway Morris, a Cambridge man, agreed: The richness of the biosphere, humanity included, could be explained through natural selection.

They also agreed, contrary to the writings of Stephen Jay Gould, that evolution is not a crapshoot. If earth's history could be replayed like a video cassette, the outcome would be somewhat different, but certain physical constraints would favor the eventual appearance

It's been a brutal season in the culture wars with both the White House and a prominent Catholic cardinal speaking out in favor of creationist superstition, while public schools and even natural history museums shy away from teaching evolutionary science. When I picked up the Dalai Lama's new book, "The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality," I feared that His Holiness, the leader of Tibetan Buddhism, was adding to the confusion between reason and faith.

It was his subtitle that bothered me. Spirituality is about the ineffable and unprovable, science about the physical world of demonstrable fact. Faced with two such contradictory enterprises, divergence would be a better goal. The last thing anyone needs is another attempt to contort biology to fit a particular religion or to use cosmology to prove the existence of God.

But this book offers something wiser: a compassionate and clearheaded account by a religious leader who not only respects science but, for the most part, embraces it. "If scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims," he writes. No one who wants to understand the world "can ignore the basic insights of theories as key as evolution, relativity and quantum mechanics."

That is an extraordinary concession compared with the Christian apologias that dominate conferences devoted to reconciling science and religion. The "dialogues" implicitly begin with nonnegotiables - "Given that Jesus died on the cross and was bodily resurrected into heaven…" - then seek scientific justification for what is already assumed to be true.

The object of the game is to figure out how the universe works by watching tiny lights move across the sky. The answers must be expressed in numbers -- that is the cardinal rule -- but sometimes passions take over, leaving the history of astrophysics bloodied from clashes among some of the smartest people in the world.

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar -- associates always called him Chandra -- was 19 when, on a boat from India to Britain, he had an idea whose consequences seemed absurd. Scientists suspected that when a star finally gave out, it would be squashed by its own gravity, growing smaller and denser until it died. But what if a star was so massive it was unable to stop collapsing? As it contracted its gravity would keep increasing until, Chandra concluded, it swallowed itself and disappeared -- a black hole. In the next few years, at Cambridge University, he showed mathematically how this would happen, and in 1935 (he was 24) presented his case at a meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society. The proof was in the equations, but the fight had barely begun.

In ''Empire of the Stars: Obsession, Friendship, and Betrayal in the Quest for Black Holes,'' Arthur I. Miller, a British philosopher of science, describes the scene as Chandra's older colleague Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington rises to the podium and savages the black hole theory. To Eddington, as brash and overbearing as Chandra was reserved and polite, the theory was ''stellar buffoonery,'' and so great was his prestige that five decades passed before Chandra, then at the University of Chicago, was vindicated by a Nobel Prize.