About the Fellowship
Once he's finished paying taxes on his £1 million Templeton Prize, Bernard d'Espagnat says that he wants to use part of his award to foster study of apophatic, or “negative”, theology. “It's the only form of theology that I appreciate,” the French physicist said. “It would be a good thing if it were investigated a little more than it now is.”
D'Espagnat is the 2009 winner of the Templeton Foundation's annual award for affirming life's spiritual dimension. The award, which boasts a monetary value pegged above that of the Nobel Prize, was announced on Monday at Unesco in Paris and will be presented to D'Espagnat by Prince Philip in a private ceremony at Buckingham Palace on 5 May. Now a spry 87, the laureate can look back on a long and illustrious career as senior physicist at the Cern particle physics laboratory in Geneva and physics professor in leading French and American universities. But it's his metaphysical thinking, most recently set out in his 2006 book On Physics and Philosophy, that won him the prize.
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