Heinz Pagels

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Heinz Rudolf Pagels (1939 – July 23, 1988) was an American physicist. He was an adjunct professor of physics at Rockefeller University, the executive director of the New York Academy of Sciences and president of the International League for Human Rights. He is best known for his popular science books The Cosmic Code (1982), Perfect Symmetry (1985), and The Dreams of Reason: The Rise of the Sciences of Complexity (1988). He obtained his PhD in elementary particle physics from Princeton University under the guidance of Sidney Drell. His technical work includes the Physics Reports review articles Quantum Chromodynamics (with W. Marciano) and Departures from Chiral Symmetry. A number of his published papers dealt with the source of the mass of elementary particles in quantum field theory, especially the Nambu-Goldstone realization of chiral symmetry breaking. The list of his graduate students includes Dan Caldi, Saul Stokar and Seth Lloyd.

Pagels was an outspoken critic of those he believed misrepresented the discoveries and ideas of science to promote mysticism and pseudoscience. In his capacity as executive director of the New York Academy of Science in 1986, Pagels submitted an affidavit in a case involving a former member of the Transcendental Meditation movement who sued the organization for fraud. "I would like to be generous to the Maharishi and his movement," he wrote, "because it supports world peace and other high ideals. But none of these ideals could possibly be realized within the framework of a philosophy that so willfully distorts scientific truth. ... There is no known connection between meditation states and states of matter in physics. No qualified physicist that I know would claim to find such a connection without knowingly committing fraud. ... To see the beautiful and profound ideas of modern physics, the labor of generations of scientists, so willfully perverted provokes a feeling of compassion for those who might be taken in by these distortions."[1]

In 1969, Pagels married theology professor, author, and MacArthur Fellow Elaine Pagels. They had a son Mark, who died in 1987 after four years of illness. Pagels died in 1988 in a mountain climbing accident — one disturbingly similar to the imagined fatal fall he described at the end of The Cosmic Code.

According to Michael Crichton, Pagels' work in chaos theory inspired the character Ian Malcolm in his novel Jurassic Park. However, the character's pessimistic, anti-science philosophy bears little resemblance to Pagels' own strongly held view: "Science is not the enemy of humanity but one of the deepest expressions of the human desire to realize that vision of infinite knowledge," he wrote in The Cosmic Code. "Our capacity for fulfillment can come only through faith and feelings. But our capacity for survival must come from reason and knowledge." Science, he warned, is not "as resilient as commerce, religion, or politics. In needs careful nurturing." If humankind ultimately abandons science, it would be "an error that might cost us our existence."[2]

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Skolnick, AA, 1991, "Maharishi Ayur-Veda: guru's marketing scheme promises the world eternal 'perfect health'" Journal of the American Medical Association. 270:1252-4
  2. ^ Pagels, Heinz, The Cosmic Code (1982). NY: Simon & Schuster

[edit] Books

[edit] External links

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