The Foundational Questions Institute, styled FQXi, is an organization that provides grants to "catalyze, support, and disseminate research on questions at the foundations of physics and cosmology."
[About the Foundational Questions Institute](_blank)
/ref> It was founded in 2005 by cosmologists Max Tegmark and Anthony Aguirre, who hold the positions of Scientific Directors.
It has run four worldwide grant competitions (in 2006, 2008, 2010, and 2013), the first of which provided US$2M to 30 projects. It also runs yearly essay contests open to the general public with $40,000 in prizes awarded by a jury panel and the best texts published in book format.
FQXi is an independent, philanthropically funded non-profit organization, run by scientists for scientists, with a Scientific Advisory Board including John Barrow, Nick Bostrom, Gregory Chaitin, David Chalmers
David John Chalmers (; born 20 April 1966) is an Australian philosopher and cognitive scientist specializing in the areas of philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. He is a professor of philosophy and neural science at New York Univer ...
, Alan Guth, Martin Rees
Martin John Rees, Baron Rees of Ludlow One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where: (born 23 June 1942) is a British cosmologist and astrophysicist. He is the fifteenth Astronomer Roya ...
, Eva Silverstein, Lee Smolin
Lee Smolin (; born June 6, 1955) is an American theoretical physicist, a faculty member at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, an adjunct professor of physics at the University of Waterloo and a member of the graduate faculty of th ...
, and Frank Wilczek.[Who is FQXi?](_blank)
/ref>
The $6.2 million seed funding was donated by the John Templeton Foundation, whose goal is to reconcile science and religion. Tegmark has stated that the money came with "no strings attached"; The ''Boston Globe
''The Boston Globe'' is an American daily newspaper founded and based in Boston, Massachusetts. The newspaper has won a total of 27 Pulitzer Prizes, and has a total circulation of close to 300,000 print and digital subscribers. ''The Boston Glob ...
'' stated FQXi is run by "two well-respected researchers who say they are not religious. The institute's scientific advisory board is also filled with top scientists." Critics of the John Templeton Foundation such as Sean Carroll have also stated they were satisfied that the FQXi is independent.
Notable members
FQXi members include
* Scott Aaronson
* Anthony Aguirre
* Yakir Aharonov
* John Carlos Baez
John Carlos Baez (; born June 12, 1961) is an American mathematical physicist and a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Riverside (UCR) in Riverside, California. He has worked on spin foams in loop quantum gravity, appl ...
* Julian Barbour
* John D. Barrow
* Jacob Biamonte
Jacob Daniel Biamonte (born January 22, 1979) is an American physicist and theoretical computer scientist active in the fields of quantum information theory and quantum computing
Quantum computing is a type of computation whose operations can ...
* Raphael Bousso
* Sean Carroll
* David Chalmers
David John Chalmers (; born 20 April 1966) is an Australian philosopher and cognitive scientist specializing in the areas of philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. He is a professor of philosophy and neural science at New York Univer ...
* Paul Davies
* David Deutsch
* George F. R. Ellis
* Nicolas Gisin
* Brian Greene
* Sabine Hossenfelder
Sabine Hossenfelder (born 1976) is a German theoretical physicist, author, musician and YouTuber. She is currently employed as a research fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies. She is the author of ''Lost in Math: How Beauty L ...
* Robert Lawrence Kuhn
* Seth Lloyd
* George Musser
* Roger Penrose
Sir Roger Penrose (born 8 August 1931) is an English mathematician, mathematical physicist, philosopher of science and Nobel Laureate in Physics. He is Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics in the University of Oxford, an emeritus f ...
* Lisa Randall
* Martin Rees
Martin John Rees, Baron Rees of Ludlow One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where: (born 23 June 1942) is a British cosmologist and astrophysicist. He is the fifteenth Astronomer Roya ...
* Carlo Rovelli
Carlo Rovelli (born May 3, 1956) is an Italian theoretical physicist and writer who has worked in Italy, the United States and, since 2000, in France. He is also currently a Distinguished Visiting Research Chair at the Perimeter Institute, and c ...
* Lee Smolin
Lee Smolin (; born June 6, 1955) is an American theoretical physicist, a faculty member at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, an adjunct professor of physics at the University of Waterloo and a member of the graduate faculty of th ...
* Leonard Susskind
* Gerard 't Hooft
* Max Tegmark
* Vlatko Vedral
* Steven Weinberg
* Frank Wilczek
* Stephen Wolfram
* Anton Zeilinger
* Wojciech Zurek
Wojciech Hubert Zurek ( pl, Żurek; born 1951) is a theoretical physicist and a leading authority on quantum theory, especially decoherence and non-equilibrium dynamics of symmetry breaking and resulting defect generation (known as the Kibble� ...
References
External links
Institute website
{{Authority control
Physics organizations