2008 Templeton Prize

Michael (Michał) Heller, a Polish cosmologist and Catholic priest whose research specializes on the origin and cause of the universe, won the 2008 $1.6 million Templeton Prize a couple of weeks ago.

Upon winning, Heller described his work as:

"Various processes in the universe can be displayed as a succession of states in such a way that the preceding state is a cause of the succeeding one… (and) there is always a dynamical law prescribing how one state should generate another state. But dynamical laws are expressed in the form of mathematical equations, and if we ask about the cause of the universe we should ask about a cause of mathematical laws. By doing so we are back in the Great Blueprint of God's thinking the universe, the question on ultimate causality…: "Why is there something rather than nothing?" When asking this question, we are not asking about a cause like all other causes. We are asking about the root of all possible causes."

Please, can someone tell me what this means? I can't see that it means anything whatsoever, beyond what a freshman physics student would tell you. It is just gibberish as far as I can tell, no different from anything in the Dancing Wu Li Masters or What the Bleep Do We Know? There's just nothing remotely profound about it -- and this guy gets a million and a half for spouting such nonsense, merely because he says it in a deep, introspective tone? What garbage....