It happened on APRIL 29

1854
The French mathematician and philosopher France Jules Henri Poincaré was born in Nancy (Lorraine, France). His fields were analytical mechanics, algebra, and electrodynamics. He anticipated the formulation of four-dimensional space that Minkowski employed as a metric for restricted relativity. Among his epistemological works was The Value of Science (1905). Several important considerations concerning the mathematical unpredictability of certain physical phenomena, which led to contemporary reflections on complexity, are owed to Poincaré. He was especially sensitive to the aesthetic and humanistic dimensions of science: “The scientist does not study nature because it is useful to do so. He studies it because he takes pleasure in such a study; and he takes pleasure in it because nature is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful, knowing about it would not be worthwhile and life would not be worth living” (quoted by Chandrasekhar, “Beauty and the Quest for Beauty in Science,” Physics Today, July 1979, p. 25).

1951
The Austrian philosopher and logician Ludwig Wittgenstein died in Cambridge. Baptized Catholic, he spent most of his life distant from religious faith, but as he grew older he made some steps back toward it in a personal experience of openness to the transcendent. He was buried with a Catholic funeral in the cemetery next to St. Giles Church in Cambridge. In his attempt to transcend the world of facts, in a rigorous way through language, he wrote in his Tractatus Logico-philosophicus (1921), “Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is.”

INTERS.org

    

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.