Mission Statement The Institute for Advanced Physics is established to advance modern science in a balanced fashion that does not leave behind the correct philosophical foundations, nor the proper moral and spiritual components.  Can you say more about the need for the Institute?  Anywhere physical science is done, one finds a ready defense of certain basic truths. Scientists hold that the world is rational and understandable by us. Science is one of the few arenas in modern culture where objectivity is respected. As Nietzsche, albeit from a hostile prospective, pointed out, those who study the world and hold to the reality of objective understanding witness to the God of Truth. Still, scientists have inadvertently allowed the poison of subjectivism to enter through various port holes. Leading scientists hold, for example, using facts of quantum mechanics, that the world is not there when you’re not looking at it!  Of course, this entails a kind of split thinking, for while they're actually doing their science they obviously think that they are learning something about a real world whose existence is not merely an aspect of themselves. The root causes of such a schizophrenic state must be addressed or science itself will be undermined by its unintended subjectivist fruit. Now, science is extremely important. It is a key driving force in intellectual and cultural formation. Yet, moral, spiritual and philosophical poverty truly exist in modern day science departments.  Morally, men of science are ready to treat human beings as mere objects for and of research. Increasingly science is animated by a disordered curiosity, not unlike that of Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein.  Spiritually, the life of the soul and its directedness toward God are ignored and even despised. Philosophically, physica (physics) 1 , the study of changeable being, is now for all practical purposes narrowed to the empiriometric and the empirioschematic tools of physica.2 This has bred a narrowness of thought and personality that is creating an increasingly toxic atmosphere for human minds and hearts. There is a clear need for reestablishing right order in all these areas. Briefly, how will the Institute accomplish this important mission? The Institute will begin to reestablish balance by deeply studying and advancing our knowledge in these areas, by making bare the foundations of science and applying them rigorously to old and new scientific knowledge, thereby opening new areas of research. Initially, this information and training will be disseminated through seminars, conferences, internships, books (including texts), journal articles, course materials at a distance university run through Notre Dame (see ICU web site), television programs, newsletters and Internet activities. Though the Institute primarily targets higher education, it will also, of necessity, foster high school science education through these means as well. The end goal of the Institute is to partner with a Catholic university to provide undergraduate and graduate education in science in an educational atmosphere that is fully human, incorporating the appropriate philosophical, moral and spiritual components. Footnotes: 1. “Physics” is used in the broad Aristotelian sense, meaning the study of all of the physical world, i.e. changeable being, which includes as a subset what we now call physics, chemistry and biology. 2. Empiriometric sciences study the physical world as quantitative.  As such, it is the tool for the broader study of the physical world as it is in its fullness as physical.  Modern physics is largely this tool. Empirioschematic sciences develop schema to coordinate observables.  Biology, the study of living changeable being, makes extensive use of this latter tool.   IAP is tax-exempt, publicly supported and recognized by the Internal Revenue Service as a 501c(3) organization.

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