It happened on MAY 28

2001
The neurobiologist and epistemologist Francisco Varela died in Paris. He was born in Santiago, Chile in 1946. His fundamental contribution to scientific knowledge affected the fields of biology, immunology, neuroscience, studies on artificial intelligence, cybernetics, the theory of complex systems, and epistemology. He originated the concept of autopoiesis, elaborated together with Humberto Maturana in The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding (1987). The concept of autopoiesis is used to indicate the fundamental characteristic of living systems, that is, the fact of possessing an organized structure, capable of maintaining and regenerating its own unity and autonomy with respect to continual variations in the surrounding environment, through the creation of constituent parts that, in their turn, contribute to the generation of the entire system.
2003
Ilya Prigogine died in Brussels. He was a chemist and physicist noted for his theories of dissipative structures, complex systems, and irreversibility. He was born in Moscow in 1917. Prigogine was director of the center for statistical mechanics at the University of Texas at Austin where, in 1967, he was among the founders of the Center for Complex Quantum Systems. He won the Nobel Prize in 1977 for his theories regarding thermodynamics applied to complex systems far from equilibrium. A pioneer of complexity science, he worked with Francisco Varela and Harold Morowitz to build bridges between physics, ecology, and the social sciences in order to study complex systems such as the biosphere and biological systems. Together with Isabelle Stengers, he authored Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature (1981).

INTERS.org

On the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology


Readings on Quantum Mechanics: An Introduction, by Gabiele Coci

Matter and Light. The New Physics (1937), by Louis de Broglie

The Meaning of Beauty in Exact Natural Science (1970), by Werner Heisenberg

Quantum Mechanics (2002), by John Polkinghorne, from INTERS 

Faith and Quantum Theory (2007), by Stephen Barr

Quantum Mechanics. Philosophical and Theological Implications (2019), by Javier Sánchez Cañizares, from INTERS


Articles of Historical Interest

Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete? (1935), by A. Einstein, B. Podolski, N. Rosen

On the Einstein Podolsky Rosen Paradox (1964), by J.S. Bell

Experimental Realization of Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen-Bohm Gedankenexperiment: A New Violation of Bell's Inequalities (1982), by A. Aspect, P. Grangier and G. Roger

Moreover…

Pursuing Scientific Humanism. Letters Between Werner Heisenberg and Enrico Cantore, 1967-1976, a forthcoming book edited by Claudio Tagliapietra, INTERS staff

    

Interdisciplinary Encyclopedia of Religion and Science

The Encyclopedia, published by the Centro di Documentazione Interdisciplinare di Scienza e Fede operating at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome, provides new, scholarly articles in the rapidly growing international field of Religion and Science (ISSN: 2037-2329). INTERS is a free online encyclopedia.

Anthology and Documents

To emphasize and spread relevant documents within the scientific community, this section provides key materials concerning the dialogue among science, philosophy and theology.

   

Special Issues

We offer here a selection of comments and documents on special issues in Religion and Science, collected for anniversaries and/or for the relevance of the topics.