The John Templeton Foundation has chosen another scientist for its lucrative annual Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion. This year it's Freeman Dyson. The prize, started in 1972, has also in the past few years honored physicists Paul Davies and Ian Barbour.
Physicist Dyson is probably best known for his futuristic ideas about space colonization, but Templeton is impressed by his "efforts to inject higher ethics and social justice into the realm of science." His latest book, The Sun, the Genome, and the Internet, discusses how technology can be harnessed to reduce the gap between rich and poor.
Dyson, 77, has been at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, since 1953. He is a churchgoing member of the Church of England, but is not necessarily on board with Templeton's cosmology--which includes a belief that there's got to be a "designer" out there. "To me religion is a way of life and not a set of beliefs," he says.
Dyson is still keen on getting us off the home planet. Earth has about another 5 billion years to go, he estimates, but the human race probably has fewer than 2 billion. "We'll probably be a million species by then. That's the reason for spreading life throughout the universe rather than sitting on this planet."
Dyson, who will be honored at a public do on 16 May at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., says he doesn't know what he'll be doing with the $948,000 award, adding: "If I did I probably wouldn't tell you."
