Purpose
The
assumption of classical physics that physical reality is local
that a point in space cannot influence another point beyond a relatively
short distance was challenged by Nicolas Gisins 1997 experiments
involving twin photons in which light particles were shown to communicate
with one another instantly. Linked to research in atom optics conducted
by Alain Aspect in the early 1980s, the revelation led some scientists
to argue that physical reality on the most basic level is an undivided
wholeness. Does it also imply that the stark division between mind and
world is an illusion? The mystical traditions of all major religions
have conceived of spiritual reality as, in some measure, a unified essence.
Sufism, an Eastern approach to the divine rooted in Islamic faith and
practice, has stressed the centrality of tawhid, the assertion
of Gods fundamental unity, to our understanding of the world and
ourselves. Gods love for creation gave existence to the universe,
according to Sufi teaching, and human love for God closes the gap between
the Creator and His creatures. The philosophic expression of Hinduism
known as the Vedanta emphasizes the substantial and essential identity
of the individual soul with the unqualifiable Absolute (Atman
is Brahman). Can the scientific concept of nonlocality aid us
in exploring the ultimate reality beyond time and space and causation?
Can Eastern approaches to divinity help us, in turn, to find meaning
in the fantastic and ongoing revelations of modern science beyond the
thrill of the chase and of discovery itself? To consider the broad implications
of correlations between properties of quanta is the purpose of thirteen
scientists, theologians, and philosophers meeting on the northern shore
of Lake Geneva. They come together to explore the implications of quantum
nonlocality for the character of physical reality, as well as the uses
of the concept of complementarityNiels Bohrs logical framework
for acquiring and comprehending scientific knowledgein understanding
the relationship between parts and wholes, the fundamental unity of
creation from Eastern perspectives, and the search for meaning in modern
science and mystical traditions.
Chair
BRUNO
GUIDERDONI is a director of research at the Paris Institute
of Astrophysics (IAP) and an expert on Islam. A graduate of the University
of Paris where he earned a Ph.D. in astronomy in 1986, he held a post-doctoral
fellowship at the French Academy of Sciences for two years before receiving
an appointment to the research staff of the IAP, which is supported
by the French National Center for Scientific Research. He was promoted
to his present position in 1992. Dr. Guiderdonis research has
focused on the birth and evolution of galaxies. He has produced a number
of key papers that have contributed significantly to the elaboration
of the paradigm of hierarchical galaxy formation, the theory
that galaxies are the result of mergers and collisions between smaller
star swarms, and participated in the discovery of the uniform glow of
the cosmos at far-infrared wavelengths invisible to the human eye. He
is currently working on simulations of galaxy formation that are used
to interpret observations made of the universes most distant large-scale
structures. Dr. Guiderdoni is an associated scientist on the European
Space Agencys two scientific satellites, Herschel and Planck,
that will be launched in 2007 to survey the full far-infrared and submillimeter
waveband and measure the fluctuations in the temperature of cosmological
background radiation with unprecedented resolution and sensitivity.
He has published more than 100 scientific papers and organized eight
international conferences in his field. Before undertaking his graduate
work, Dr. Guiderdoni fulfilled his national service obligation as a
physics teacher in the French high school in Casablanca. Introduced
to Islam in Morocco, he embraced the faith in 1987, and from 1993 to
1999, he was in charge of a television program, Knowing Islam,
that is broadcast by the state TV channel in France. Under the aegis
of the Islamic Institute for Advanced Study, he has lectured widely
on spirituality and on his views about the connections between science
and religion. He has played an active role in promoting inter-religious
dialogue, particularly among the Abrahamic traditions. Since the tragic
events of last September 11th, he has spoken out often on the values
of humility and tolerance in any search for truth.
Participants
ANINDITA
NIYOGI BALSLEV, an expert on classical Indian as well as
Western thought traditions, is an associate research professor of philosophy
at the University of Copenhagen. Born in Calcutta, she received her
bachelors degree with honors from Calcutta University, took a
masters degree in philosophy there, and went on to earn a Ph.D.
in philosophy from the University of Paris in 1968. She has been a fellow
at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study and a research lecturer at
the Center for Cultural Research at Denmarks Aarhus University,
as well as a senior lecturer at Aalborg University in Denmark and a
visiting professor at the University of Kentucky, Rutgers University,
and Aarhuss Institute for the History of Ideas. Dr. Balslev was
a senior advisor to the Danish National Institute for Education Research
in 1996, and in 1998, she held the Asutosh Mukherji Chair at the National
Institute of Advanced Study in Bangalore, India. Dr. Balslev has organized
a number of international conferences around cross-cultural and interdisciplinary
issues and delivered invited talks in Asia, Europe, and North America
on the interface between science and religion. Her articles in academic
journals explore, among other issues, the problem of time, notions of
self, and the meaning of consciousness in the context of Indian thought.
In addition to editing two volumes, she is the author of A Study
of Time in Indian Philosophy (1983 and 1999) and Cultural Otherness:
Correspondence with Richard Rorty (1991 and 1999). Dr. Balslev is
currently writing a new book entitled I-Consciousness: A Cross-Cultural
Inquiry.
Physicist
RAYMOND Y. CHIAO is widely known
for pioneering experiments in the twilight zone of quantum mechanics
where objects can pass through solid walls. His recent work involves
investigations of faster-than-light phenomena. He has measured how long
photons take to tunnel through a barrier that ought to be
impenetrable and found that they appear to outpace the speed of light
when they are successful in reaching the other side. Born in Hong Kong
and educated in the United States, he earned a bachelors degree
from Princeton University, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in
his junior year, and a Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology in 1965. After teaching at MIT for two years, he joined
the physics faculty of the University of California, Berkeley and was
named a full professor in 1977. Dr. Chiao has held a Woodrow Wilson
Fellowship and an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship. A member of Sigma Xi,
he won the second prize of the Gravity Research Foundation in 1981 and
the Scientific Innovation Award for Outstanding Work in Modern Optics
from the Center for Advanced Study at the University of New Mexico in
1986. He is a fellow of both the American Physical Society and the Optical
Society of America. Dr. Chiao has published some 125 papers in major
scientific journals. He edited Amazing Light (1996), a volume
dedicated to the Nobel laureate Charles H. Townes on the occasion of
his eightieth birthday.
WILLIAM
C. CHITTICK, a professor of comparative studies at the State
University of New York, Stony Brook, has written extensively on Islamic
philosophy with special emphasis on the Sufi tradition. A graduate of
the College of Wooster in Ohio, he received a Ph.D. in Persian language
and literature from Tehran University in 1974 and later studied at the
Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy in Tehran, where he also served
as an assistant professor in 1978-79. Dr. Chittick had begun his teaching
career at the Center for the Humanities at Aryamehr Technical University
in Tehran. He returned to the United States just before the Iranian
Revolution and in 1981 accepted an appointment as an assistant editor
of Columbia Universitys Encyclopedia Iranica (1982-85).
In 1983, he was named an assistant professor of religious studies at
SUNY Stony Brook. He was promoted to his present position in 1996. Dr.
Chittick has been a visiting professor of Arabic literature at Harvard
University. A former member of the board of editors of the SUNY Press,
he has held a Fulbright Fellowship and two fellowships awarded by the
National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2000, he was awarded the Mevlâna
Özel Ödülü by the Kombassan Foundation in Turkey.
In addition to numerous articles in scholarly journals and contributions
to encyclopedias, histories, and collected works, he has translated
a dozen major Persian and Arabic texts into English and is the author
or co-author of eleven books. His most recent studies are Sufism:
A Short Introduction (Oneworld, 2000) and The Heart of Islamic
Philosophy: The Quest for Self-Knowledge in the Teachings of Afdal al-Din
Kâshânî (Oxford University Press, 2001).
The
director of the Indian Institute of Astrophysics in Bangalore for the
past decade, RAMANATH COWSIK has
made wide ranging contributions to theoretical physics, experimental
physics, and science management. He formerly headed the Gravitation
Group at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Bombay with which
he was associated for forty years. His papers pointing out the astrophysical
and cosmological consequences of finite neutrino masses contributed
to the basic paradigm for studying galaxy formation and dark matter.
Dr. Cowsik also has advanced knowledge of the behavior of cosmic rays
at low and high energies, and his discussion of non-thermal particle
pop ulations inside supernova remnants have led to a physical understanding
of their spectra. In the course of his experimental searches for new
feeble forces and tests of Einsteins principle of equivalence
of inertial and gravitational masses, he designed a new kind of torsion
balance with which he performed the ½rst laboratory experiment
searching for the so-called fifth forcea hypothesized
addition to the four fundamental interactions between objects in nature.
Investigating the dust of presolar diamonds, rubies, and carborandum
embedded and preserved in meteorites, Dr. Cowsik has been able to infer
the formation of these materials in stellar winds and to estimate by
a completely new method the age of the Milky Way. Recently he explored
the Himalayas to establish a unique site for optical infrared astronomy
in Ladakh on the border of Tibet. Dr. Cowsik was born in Nagpur in central
India and took his baccalaureate degree at the University of Mysore.
He earned a masters degree in physics at Karnatak University and,
after further graduate work at the Atomic Energy Training School in
Mumbai, he received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Bombay
in 1969. He had joined the Tata Institute as a research associate in
1961, and he subsequently became a research fellow, a fellow, a reader,
an associate professor, a professor, and a senior professor there. Named
a Distinguished Professor in 1996, he retired from his faculty position
earlier this year. Dr. Cowsik has held a research fellowship at the
University of Chicago and been a visiting lecturer and assistant professor
at the University of California, Berkeley, a senior visiting fellow
at the Max Planck Institute for Physics and Astrophysics in Munich,
and a distinguished visiting professor at Washington University in St.
Louis. Currently serving on the governing council of the Commission
on Cosmic Rays of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics,
he is a fellow of the Indian National Science Academy, the Indian Academy
of Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, India, the Indian Geophysical
Union, and the Third World Academy of Sciences. In addition to invited
lectureships, he is the recipient of many other honors, including the
Vikram Sarabhai Award for Space Sciences, the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar
Award in Physical Sciences, a NASA Public Service Group Achievement
Award, the Third World Academy of Sciences Award in Basic Sciences,
the Vainu Bappu Memorial Award of the Indian National Science Academy,
the S.N. Bose Birth Centenary Award of the Indian Science Congress Association,
and the Padma Shri Award from the President of India. Dr. Cowsik has
published some 180 papers in scientific journals and is the editor of
Cosmic Pathways (1985) and two other books.
NICOLAS
GISIN is the group leader for the Optics Division of the
Group of Applied Physics at the University of Geneva. He is also a professor
of physics at the Swiss university. His research is at the crossroads
between modern optics and quantum physics, and he works both on conceptual
issues and on their application. Dr. Gisins experiments in long
distance quantum entanglement are at the heart of quantum information
processing and have made him an international leader in the emerging
field of quantum cryptographya technique using single photons
of light to send secret messages with the assurance that no one has
eavesdropped on them. A graduate of the University of Geneva, he took
his undergraduate degree and earned masters degrees in mathematics
and in physics there as well as a Ph.D. in physics in 1981. His dissertation
was awarded a prize by the Louis de Broglie Foundation. Dr Gisin did
post-graduate work in optics at the University of Rochester and upon
his return to Switzerland in 1984, he joined a start-up company, Alphatonix,
dedicated to the development of fiber instrumentation for the telecommunications
industry. Four years later, he joined a Swiss software company. In 1988,
he accepted an invitation to return to his alma mater as head of the
optics section of the Group of Applied Physics. His work won worldwide
attention in 1997 when he reported the results of an experiment in which
he split a light beam in two, at a facility near the Geneva train station,
and sent the resulting pair of photons in opposite directions over fiber-optic
cables to detectors located more than six miles apart. Dr. Gisin confirmed
that a stimulus applied to just one of the twin beams instantly determined
the state of the sibling photon as predicted by quantum theory. What
Albert Einstein called spooky action at a distance has been
the focus of much of Dr. Gisins subsequent research. It is increasing
our understanding of the information content of quantum states and holds
promise not only for encryption but also computation among other applications.
Dr. Gisin has published some 200 papers in scientific journals. Once
a nationally ranked field hockey player, he also finds time to work
with Swiss youngsters interested in the sport.

In a now classic
experiment, physicist Nicolas Gissin split a light beam in two
at a facility in Geneva and sent the resulting pair of photons
in the opposite directions over fiber-optic cables to detectors
located in the suburban towns of Bellevue and Bernex. He demonstrated
that the twin particles communicated with one another instantly
as predicted by quantum theory.
|
University
Professor of Interdisciplinary Science and a professor of physics at
George Mason University, Greek-born MENAS KAFATOS
has explored the implications for physics and for philosophy of particle
entanglement over long distances in two books. Written with
his George Mason colleague Robert Nadeau, The Non-Local Universe
(Oxford University Press, 1999) and The Conscious Universe (Springer-Verlag,
1990 and 2000) consider the potential of nonlocality to transform our
understanding of the nature of reality. Dr. Kafatos, who is a native
of Crete, received his bachelors degree from Cornell University
and a Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
in 1972. After three years of post-doctoral research in astrophysics
at the University of Colorado and the NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center,
he joined the George Mason physics faculty and was promoted to full
professor in 1984. Dr. Kafatos won international attention for his early
work in theoretical astrophysics, particularly his work on black holes,
those ghosts of massive dead stars whose gravitational imprint,
frozen in space, challenges physicists to broaden their cosmological
perspective. His current research interests include Earth observing
and Earth systems science, foundations of quantum theory, the nature
of consciousness, and cosmology. In 1991, he founded George Masons
Institute of Computational Sciences and Informatics, which evolved into
its School of Computational Sciences. Four years later, he founded the
Center for Earth Observing and Space Research (CESOR). He still serves
as director of CESOR and as principal investigator of several federally
funded George Mason programs for the effective use of data anticipated
from the next generation of space platforms among other activities.
Dr. Kafatos is an honorary member of the Romanian Academy of Sciences
and currently serves as vice president for education of the American
Astronautical Society. He has published some 165 scientific papers and
is the co-editor of six books and the co-author of four others.
AZIM
A. NANJI is director of the Institute for Ismaili Studies
in London. Born in Kenya, he took a first-class degree with honors in
literature and religious studies at Makerere University in Uganda and
received a Ph.D. in Islamic studies from McGill University in 1972.
After spending a year as a post-graduate research and teaching fellow
at McGills Institute of Islamic Studies, he joined the religious
studies faculty of Oklahoma State University, where he became a full
professor in 1983. In 1988, he was named professor and chair of religion
at the University of Florida, a position he held for the next ten years.
Dr. Nanji also has been a Visiting Killam Fellow at Dalhousie University
in Halifax, Nova Scotia and a Margaret Gest Visiting Professor of Religion
at Haverford College. He has received a Rockefeller Fellowship, an American
Institute of Indian Studies Senior Research Fellowship, a Canada Council
Award, and a research grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
An elected member of the American Society for the Study of Islam, he
delivered the plenary lecture at the National Conference on Religion,
Philanthropy, and Civil Society in Washington in 1994. He is a member
of the steering committee for the Aga Kahn Award for Architecture and
was previously co-chair of the Islam Section of the American Academy
of Religion as well as a member of the editorial advisory board of the
Journal of the American Academy of Religion. Dr. Nanji has published
some forty scholarly articles and book chapters and is the editor of
three books and the author or co-author of two others. His 1978 study,
The Nizari Ismaili Tradition, won the Council of Canada Publication
Award.
An
investigator probing images of galaxy clusters produced by the Hubble
Space Telescope for clues to the distribution of dark matter,
the dominant but unseen gravitational influence on the cosmos, PRIYAMVADA
NATARAJAN is an assistant professor of astrophysics at Yale
University with an abiding interest in the philosophy of science. Born
in the south of India, she received bachelors degrees in science
and in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology then
pursued graduate work in MITs program in science, technology,
and society before taking a Ph.D. in astrophysics at Cambridge University
in 1998. Awarded a research fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge,
she continued her work in England for the next several years before
accepting an appointment to the Yale faculty in 2000. Dr. Natarajans
research focuses on a range of topics in astro-physical cosmology. Among
other questions, she is investigating the role of gamma-ray bursts in
star formation, how groups of galaxies may form and change over time,
and the evolution and scale of the massive whirlpools, known as black
holes, in their centers. She serves on the advisory committee of the
American Association for the Advancement of Sciences Program of
Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion and on the board of advisors
of the John Templeton Foundation. In addition to some thirty papers
in scientific journals, Dr. Natarajan has published a collection of
poems.
RAVI
RAVINDRA is a professor emeritus at Dalhousie University
in Halifax, Nova Scotia where, until his recent retirement, he had been
professor and chair of comparative religion, professor of international
development studies, and adjunct professor of physics. Born in Patiala
in the Punjab area of northwest India, he earned his bachelors
and masters degrees at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur
and a Ph.D. in physics at the University of Toronto in 1965. Subsequent
to a post-doctoral fellowship in physics at Toronto, he held a post-doctoral
fellowship in philosophy at Princeton University and a post-doctoral
fellowship in religion at Columbia University. He began his teaching
career as an assistant professor of physics at Dalhousie in 1966. Formerly
a visiting member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and
a visiting member of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study in Simla,
he has been the visiting Kern Professor of Science and Spirituality
at the California Institute of Integral Studies and the Korett Visiting
Professor of Philosophy and Medicine at the Pacific Medical Center in
San Francisco. The founding director of the Threshold Award for Integrative
Knowledge given by the Swiss Threshold Foundation, he formerly served
as chair of its selection committee. Dr. Ravindra is the recipient of
numerous research grants and a John Templeton Foundation Science and
Religion Course Program grant as well as fellowships from the Canada
Council, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada,
and the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute. He formerly served as a director
of the International Theosophical Societys School of the Wisdom
in Madras, India, a member of the board of advisors of the John Templeton
Foundation, a member of the board of judges for the Templeton Prize,
and a member of the advisory committee for the Program of Dialogue Between
Science and Religion of the American Association for the Advancement
of Science. Dr. Ravindra has had a long and deep interest in the metaphysics
and practical spiritual disciplines of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity.
Among contemporary spiritual teachers, he has been influenced by Jiddu
Krishnamurti and Jeanne de Salzmann, who was a pupil of George Ivanovitch
Gurdjieff. In addition to publishing more than 120 articles in scientific
and scholarly journals, Dr. Ravindra is the author or co-author of ten
books. Among them are the highly influential Whispers from the Other
Shore: Spiritual Search East and West (1984 and 2000) and The
Yoga of Christ in the Gospel According to St. John (1990 and 1992).
His most recent study, Science and the Sacred, was published
by the Theosophical Publishing House in 2000. A new book, Krishnamurti
in the Long Line of Rishis in India, will be published next year
by Munshilal Manoharilal Publishers in its Builders of Indian Philosophy
Series.

Twin
photons produced in the nonlinear optical process called "spontaneous
parametric down-conversion" pass through pinholes 1 and
2. They are entangled with each other in such a way that it
is possible to observe correlations-at-a-distance in their behaviors.
The experiment was carried out at the University of California
at Berkeley by Raymond Y. Chiao and Paul G. Kwait.
|
The
founding director of the Center for Quantum Philosophy, a division of
the Zurich-based Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies (IIS), ANTOINE
SUAREZ conducts and promotes research on the foundations
of quantum theory and seeks to stimulate discussion of its metaphysical
implications. He is a native of Spain and graduated from the University
of Zaragoza before pursing graduate work in experimental physics at
the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. Dr. Suarez took his Ph.D.
in natural science at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (Eidgenössische
Technische Hochschule Zürich or ETH) in 1975. While at ETH, he
not only became interested in the philosophical significance of quantum
mechanics, but also in genetic epistemology. For more than a decade,
he was engaged in research on cognitive growth that led to the development
of improved methods for teaching mathematics and science to children.
Dr. Suarez directed the Swiss think tank, IIS, from 1985 to 1993, and
with major support from the Leman Foundation, he undertook studies that
brought the insights of philosophers, theologians, and ethicists to
bear on advances in science. Since assuming his current position in
1989, he has conducted and facilitated, with support from the Odier
Foundation, experimental research on correlations of nonlocal quantum,
that is, faster-than-light influences on phenomena. With Valerio Scarani,
he was the first scientist to propose experiments using moving measuring
devices to investigate the tension between quantum mechanics and relativity,
especially whether there is a real time ordering behind nonlocal influences.
Dr. Suarez actively collaborated with Nicola Gisins Group at the
University of Geneva in carrying out the work. Recent results suggesting
that relativitys tools for dealing with the flow of time are irrelevant
in the realm of quantum processes have strengthened his interest in
exploring possible links among levels of reality. In addition to articles
in scientific journals, chapters in volumes of collected works, and
an early study on the relation of thought to action in adolescents,
he is the editor (with Alfred Driessen) of Mathematical Undecidability,
Quantum Nonlocality and the Question of the Existence of God (Kluwer,
1997).
MUHAMMAD
SUHEYL UMAR is the director of Pakistans Iqbal Academy
in Lahore, a research institution devoted to the works and teachings
of the Muslim poet and philosopher Muhammad Iqbal who became a political
activist and is known as the father of modern Pakistan. Dr. Umar is
also the founding editor of Riwayat, an intellectual journal
in the Urdu language that has published articles on science, philosophy,
and mysticism for the past twenty-one years, and the editor of Iqbal
Review, an academic quarterly published alternately in Urdu and
English, which has both Persian and Arabic editions. A graduate of Government
College in Lahore where he took both a baccalaureate degree and masters
degree in English, he earned a M.Phil. in Iqbal studies at Allama Iqbal
Open University in Islamabad and, after nearly two decades in educational
administration and academic publishing, a Ph.D. in philosophy from Punjab
University in Lahore in 1999. Dr. Umar began his editorial career as
managing partner of Suhail Academy, a publishing company in Lahore,
and in the early 1980s served as secretary general of Al-Manara Academy
and as vice principal and head of the English department at Al-Manara
Public School. He was named deputy director of Iqbal Academy in 1984
and assumed the directorship in 1997. Formerly chief editor of Al-Maarif
and editor of Studies in Tradition, he served as academic director
of the Institute of Islamic Culture in Lahore for two years and was
named an honorary fellow in 1992. The next year he was a visiting scholar
at the International Institute of Islamic Thought and Civilization in
Kuala Lampur, Malaysia. In addition to articles published in scholarly
journals, he has edited a number of volumes of Iqbals writings
and collections of various literary works in Urdu. He also has published
bibliographies and descriptions of extant manuscript collections in
Pakistan and has several new works in preparation.
One
of the worlds leading researchers in the field of quantum physics,
ANTON ZEILINGER is professor of
physics and director of the Experimental Physics Institute at the University
of Vienna. His work first received international attention in 1997 when
he and his colleagues at the University of Innsbruck, where he was then
directing the Institute of Experimental Physics, confirmed the possibility
of quantum teleportation by demonstrating, through the use of pairs
of entangled photons, that the properties of one particle can be instantly
transferred to another over an arbitrary distance at the speed of light.
More recently, Dr. Zeilingers quantum interference experiments
with buckyball molecules (whose shapes resemble the geodesic
domes designed by R. Buckminster Fuller), so far the largest objects
to have demonstrated quantum behavior, have attracted the notice of
the scientific community. By proving that clusters of seventy carbon
atoms obey quantum-mechanical rules, he has extended the quantum domain
further than ever before. Born in Austria, Dr. Zeilinger studied at
the University of Vienna and earned a Ph.D. in physics and in mathematics
in 1971. After a lectureship at the Technical University of Vienna,
a Fulbright fellowship at the Neutron Diffraction Laboratory of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and professorships at MIT, the
Technical University of Vienna, and the University of Innsbruck, he
accepted his present position in 1999. Dr. Zeilinger has been a visiting
professor at the University of Melbourne, the Technical University of
Munich, and the College of France, as well as an adjunct professor at
Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, and a visiting research
fellow at Merton College, Oxford. The former president of the Austrian
Physical Society, he was named Austrian Scientist of the Year in 1996.
His many other honors include the Senior Humboldt Fellow Prize, Germanys
Order pour le Mérite, the 2000 Science Prize of the City of Vienna,
and the 2001 World Future Award. Dr. Zeilinger is a fellow of the American
Physical Society, a member of the European Academy of Arts and Sciences,
and an honorary professor of the University of Science and Technology
of China. He serves on the editorial boards of the Foundations of
Physics Letters and Physical Review A. The author of more
than 200 papers published in major scientific journals, he is co-editor
(with Dirk Bouwmeester and Artur Ekert) of The Physics of Quantum
Information (2000) and most recently (with Chiara Macchiavello and
G. Massimo Palma) of Quantum Computation and Quantum Information
Theory, which was published last year by World Scientific. Mindful
of the practical applications of his research fot the processing and
transmission of information, including quantum teleportation, quantum
cryptography, and quantum computing, Dr. Zeilinger is also intrigued
by the epistemological implications of quantum physics. He has met with
the Dalai Lama to discuss them and has challenged his scientific colleagues
to consider which notions appearing distinct and even opposed today
will turn out to be so for future generations.