COCORE: The Colorado Coalition of Reason

Victor J. Stenger, PhD

Academic, author

Victor 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 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, Stenger received a Master 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. His current position is emeritus professor of physics at the University of Hawaii and adjunct professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado. Stenger is a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and a research fellow of the Center for Inquiry. 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, Stenger collaborated on the underground experiment in Japan that showed for the first time that the neutrino has mass.

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. His publications 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: Symetry, 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), which made the New York Times bestseller list in March 2007.

Stenger and his wife Phylliss have been happily married since 1962 and have two children and four grandchildren. They now live in Lafayette, Colorado. They attribut their long lives to the response of evolution to the human need for baby sitters, a task they joyfully perform. Phyllis and Vic are avid doubles tennis players, golfers, generally enjoy the outdoor life in Colorado, and travel the world as often as the can.

Stenger maintains a popular web site (a thousand hits per month), where much of his writing can be found, at http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/vstenger/. He is available for media interviews, talks to interested groups and school presentations.