George Cowan
(1920-2012)
George Cowan was a key scientist in the Manhattan Project, one of a very few who visited almost all the locations, including the University of Chicago Uranium Pile project, the Oak Ridge Uranium Diffusion and initial Plutonian development project, and the Hanford facility that mass produced Uranium and Plutonium.
See George Cowan's Interview for the Atomic Heritage Foundation
and his book Manhattan Project to the Santa Fe Institute: The Memoirs of George A. Cowan.
In 1984 Cowan gathered a number if scientists, including Nobel-Prize winner Murray Gell-Mann, Phil Anderson, another Nobel-prize physicist, Ken Arrow who won a Nobel prize in economics, and others to found the Santa Fe Institute for the Study of Complex Systems.
Cowan wrote...
In the ‘80s when I started the Santa Fe Institute—it was because I was supposedly on the White House Science Council giving advice to Mr. Reagan—I realized that scientists don’t give advice to politicians. They help support their policies and if they don’t support their policies it doesn’t matter. At that time, one of the big issues was whether or not space platforms should be manned or robotic, and White House Science Council voted unanimously for robots. Mr. Reagan said, in effect, Congress would never pass that program unless there were people on it, so the policy was political and that’s what determined the fact that we had manned space missions.
My mission with the Santa Fe Institute was to get the kinds of people I knew, who knew how to get things done, involved in social and political science, where people gesture and shout at each other and march around in circles, at least that was my impression. And there are still people gesturing and shouting at each other and marching around in circles, so I guess we didn’t change the world, but that was the general notion.
Voices of the Manhattan Project - George Cowan’s Interview (2006)
From Complexity to Life: On the Emergence of Life and Meaning
The Santa Fe Institute held a research symposium between October 14-16, 1999 entitled "Complexity, Information, and Design: A Critical Appraisal,". It was led by the physicist
Paul Davies. Ten mathematicians, physicists, theoretical biologists, and theologians met under the aegis of the John Templeton Foundation. It was marked by the personal presence of
Sir John Templeton.
Attendees included
Charles Bennett,
Gregory Chaitin,
Paul Davies,
William Dembski,
Nils Henrik Gregersen,
Stuart Kaufmann,
Werner Loewentein,
Harold Moskowitz,
Arthur Peacocke, and
Ian Stewart.
Four years earlier, Davies had been awarded the $1,000,000 Templeton Prize.
Four years later, the symposium proceedings were published in 2003 as
From Complexity to Life: On the Emergence of Life and Meaning.
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