Heller, Michael

▪ 2009

Michal Kazimierz Heller 

born March 12, 1936, Tarnow, Pol.

      In 2008 the Templeton Prize, with an award of £820,000 (more than $1.6 million), was conferred on Michael Heller of Poland, an ordained Roman Catholic priest and world-respected mathematical cosmologist. As had been the case frequently in recent years, the focus of the annual prize was intended to honour a person who had dedicated his life to understanding and explaining the interaction of science and religion, and Heller was singled out as a scholar “who for more than 40 years has developed sharply focused and strikingly original concepts on the origin and cause of the universe, often under intense governmental repression.” Heller, who had published more than 800 works, including 30 books in Polish and 5 in English, often wrote of the need for an understanding of the natural sciences as a basis for constructing philosophies of nature and man. The disciplines of mathematical physics, theology, and philosophy—most often viewed as incompatible—to Heller were interdependent and indivisible.

      Heller was born in southern Poland. When he was four years old, his father helped sabotage the chemical plant in which he worked, and the family fled to the U.S.S.R. to escape the advancing Nazi invaders. During a roundup of Polish refugees, the Hellers were sent to a labour camp in Sakha (Yakutia) in Siberia, where they withstood the attendant hardships chiefly through fortitude and their strong Roman Catholic faith. After World War II they were sent back to Poland, where in 1953 Heller completed his secondary schooling and entered the seminary in Tarnow. Having received a master's degree in theology and taken ordination in 1959, he was given a parish near his hometown. The following year he began courses in science and mathematics at the Catholic University of Lublin, which was at the time virtually the only institution in communist Poland where a priest could pursue advanced studies. He received a master's degree in philosophy (1965), a doctorate (1966), and a habilitation degree (1969) with a thesis titled Mach's Principle in Relativistic Cosmology. In 1972 Heller began his association with the Pontifical Faculty (later Academy) of Theology in Krakow. He was given the rank of associate professor in 1985 and professor in 1990, while also serving as rector of the Institute of Theology in Tarnow (from 1991) and dean of its faculty of theology (from 2000). The government allowed Heller to travel outside Poland only from the mid-1970s, but he subsequently visited or held positions at the Catholic University of Louvain (1977 and 1982) and the University of Liège (1996) in Belgium, the Universities of Oxford and Leicester in England (1982), the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., and the Vatican Observatory in Castel Gandolfo, Italy (1986). Heller was made a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 1991.

Charles Trumbull

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