A Biography of Victor J. Stenger
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, Vic 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. Vic 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.
Vic’s 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, Vic collaborated on the underground experiment in Japan that showed for the first time that the neutrino has mass. The Japanese leader of the project, Masatoshi Koshiba, shared the 2002 Nobel Prize for this work.
Vic 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: Takings a Stand for Science and Reason and The Fallacy of Fine Tuning: Why the Universe is Not Designed for Us (2011). God: The Failed Hypothesis was a New York Times best seller. His next book, due out in April 2012, is God and the Folly of Faith: The Incompatibility of Science and Religion.
Vic and his wife Phylliss have been happily married since 1962 and have two children and four grandchildren. They now live in Lafayette, Colorado. Phylliss and Vic travel the world as often as they can.
