French physicist Bernard d'Espagnat has won the annual Templeton Prize with its purse of $1.4 million; the prize is often given to scientists who find common ground between religion and science.

Professor d'Espagnat, 87, worked with great luminaries of quantum physics but went on to address the philosophical questions that the field poses [BBC News].

Physicists may be more open to seeing a higher power behind the great mysteries of the universe than scientists in other disciplines:

Including Dr. d'Espagnat, five of the past 10 Templeton winners have been physicists or have had strong connections to the discipline [The Christian Science Monitor].

The thrust of d'Espagnat's work was on experimental tests of Bell's theorem. The theorem states that either quantum mechanics is a complete description of the world or that if there is some reality beneath quantum mechanics, it must be nonlocal – that is, things can influence one another instantaneously regardless of how much space stretches between them, violating Einstein's insistence that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light [New Scientist].

Quantum mechanics describes such bizarre phenomena as quantum teleportation, in which two "entangled" particles reflect each other's properties, although the information couldn't travel between them by any conventional means. D'Espagnat argues that such experiments show that quantum mechanics only gives us a glimpse of a "veiled reality" that is beyond our comprehension.

"Quantum mechanics introduced another point of view, which consists essentially that the aim of science is not to describe ultimate reality as it really is," d'Espagnat recounted by phone Friday from Paris. "Rather, it is to make account of reality as it appears to us, accounting for the limitations of our own mind and our own sensibilities" [The Christian Science Monitor].

D'Espagnat, a Catholic, says that leaves open the possibility that a greater power is involved in what he sees as a deeper level of reality.

"I would accept calling it God or divine or Godhead but with the restriction that it cannot be conceptualised for the very reason that this ultimate reality is beyond any concept that we can construct" [Times Online]

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