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Victor J. Stenger
Victor J. Stenger grew up in a Catholic working-class neighborhood in Bayonne, New Jersey. His father was a Lithuanian immigrant, his mother the daughter of Hungarian immigrants. He attended public schools and received a bachelor's of science degree in electrical engineering from Newark College... show more

Victor J. Stenger grew up in a Catholic working-class neighborhood in Bayonne, New Jersey. His father was a Lithuanian immigrant, his mother the daughter of Hungarian immigrants. He attended public schools and received a bachelor's of science degree in electrical engineering from Newark College of Engineering (now New Jersey Institute of Technology) in 1956. While at NCE, he was editor of the student newspaper and received several journalism awards.Moving to Los Angeles on a Hughes Aircraft Company fellowship, Dr. Stenger received a master's of science degree in physics from UCLA in 1959 and a PhD in physics in 1963. He then took a position on the faculty of the University of Hawaii, retiring to Colorado in 2000. He currently is emeritus professor of physics at the University of Hawaii and adjunct professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado. Dr. Stenger is a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and a research fellow of the Center for Inquiry. Dr. Stenger has also held visiting positions on the faculties of the University of Heidelberg in Germany, Oxford in England (twice), and has been a visiting researcher at Rutherford Laboratory in England, the National Nuclear Physics Laboratory in Frascati, Italy, and the University of Florence in Italy.His research career spanned the period of great progress in elementary particle physics that ultimately led to the current standard model. He participated in experiments that helped establish the properties of strange particles, quarks, gluons, and neutrinos. He also helped pioneer the emerging fields of very high-energy gamma-ray and neutrino astronomy. In his last project before retiring, Dr. Stenger collaborated on the underground experiment in Japan that in 1998 showed for the first time that the neutrino has mass. The Japanese leader of this experiment shared the 2002 Nobel Prize for this work.Victor Stenger has had a parallel career as an author of critically well-received popular-level books that interface between physics and cosmology and philosophy, religion, and pseudoscience. These include: Not by Design: The Origin of the Universe (1988); Physics and Psychics: The Search for a World beyond the Senses (1990); The Unconscious Quantum: Metaphysics in Modern Physics and Cosmology (1995); Timeless Reality: Symmetry, Simplicity, and Multiple Universes (2000); Has Science Found God? The Latest Results in the Search for Purpose in the Universe (2003); The Comprehensible Cosmos: Where Do the Laws of Physics Come From? (2006); God: The Failed Hypothesis--How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist (2007); Quantum Gods: Creation, Chaos, and the Search for Cosmic Consciousness (2009); The New Atheism: Taking a Stand for Science and Reason (2009); The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning: Why the Universe is Not Designed for Us (2011); God and the Folly of Faith: The Incompatibility of Science and Religion (2012). God: The Failed Hypothesis made the New York Times Best Seller List in March 2007.Vic and his wife, Phylliss, have been happily married since 1962 and have two children and four grandchildren. They now live in Lafayette, Colorado. They travel the world as often as they can.Dr. Stenger maintains a website where much of his writing can be found, at http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/vstenger.
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Birth date: January 29, 1935
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Philosophy, Science
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Tolle Lege!.
Tolle Lege!. rated it 11 years ago
The author does make a slam dunk case on the non-sense of fine-tuning. He fills the book with mathematics, physics and statistical equations. That doesn't bother me, what did bother me is he doesn't always give enough explanations to the equations or their derivations if the reader is seeing them fo...
Bettie's Books
Bettie's Books rated it 11 years ago
bookshelves: essays, philosophy, nonfiction, published-2007, winter-20132014, tbr-busting-2014, sciences, fraudio Read from January 03 to 05, 2014 The Portable Atheist read by Nicolas Ballanthology of atheist writing through the ages.1. Introduction by Christopher Hitchens2. Lucretius: from the N...
Manny Rayner's book reviews
Manny Rayner's book reviews rated it 12 years ago
I am distressed by the way that atheism, at least for some people, has managed to metamorphose into just another religion. As far as I am concerned, a blind, dogmatic faith that there is no god is no different from any other kind of blind, dogmatic faith. I respect it, the way I respect all faiths (...
Manny Rayner's book reviews
Manny Rayner's book reviews rated it 12 years ago
I have become very interested in the faith/science debate, and over the last couple of years have read a fair number of books about it. This one felt a little like the atheist version of Collins's The Language of God. The title suggests that you're going to get a rant, but Stenger is no ignorant ran...
spocksbro
spocksbro rated it 14 years ago
The two stars I’ve given The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning more reflects my inadequacies as a reader than any failure on Stenger’s part. He gives fair warning that anyone reading his book should have at least a basic, college-level familiarity with math and physics.Alas, that is not me.As an undergraduate,...
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