UA News

Richard Healey has won the prestigious Latkatos Award and an NSF grant for his work in the philosophy of physics.

University of Arizona Philosophy Professor Richard Healey has been honored twice this spring.

Healey, an noted authority in the field of philosophy of science and metaphysics, won the 2008 Lakatos Award for his book, "Gauging What's Real: The Conceptual Foundations of Gauge Theories" (Oxford University Press, 2007).

The Lakatos Award, recognized as one of the premier awards in the philosophy of science, is endowed by the John S. Latsis Public Benefit Foundation in Geneva, Switzerland. It goes to the author of an English-language book on the philosophy of science published during the previous five years.

The award is named for the late Professor Imre Lakatos of the London School of Economics and is administered by the International Management Committee consisting of distinguished faculty from various prominent institutions. It also comes with a £10,000 (approx. $16,000 U.S.) cash prize.

Healey's book discusses how gauge theories in both classical and quantum physics represent the world.

"Richard Healey is simply brilliant," said Chris Maloney, head of the UA philosophy department. "This philosopher of physics writes with sparkling insight and luminous originality about the most fundamental, yet deeply vexing, issues in the conceptual foundations of quantum mechanics. Richard's mastery of both philosophy and physics positions him as a leading light in one of the most intellectually challenging and difficult areas of inquiry."

Healey's other honor comes from the National Science Foundation Division of Social and Economic Sciences. NSF awarded Healey a grant for $118,990 to support his project, "Physics Without Building Blocks."

"People often think of science as a hierarchy, with physics at its base – itself founded on fundamental physics," Healey said. "The project is to subject this view to critical scrutiny and to develop an alternative view."

Physicists talk of elementary particles and their associated fields, but Healey proposes that there are strong reasons to doubt whether all matter is simply built out of these, so that their properties determine all the properties of matter.

"This is a reason to question the view that physics reduces to the quantum theories of fundamental physics," Healey said. "What's more, it is difficult to understand how any quantum theory can describe a world independent of our measurements. A revised image of physics (if not all of science) pictures it as successfully modeling various domains by a network of theories, with connections of various kinds and strengths between them."