Wilson Poon is Professor of Condensed Matter Physics in the University of Edinburgh. He obtained his PhD at Cambridge and was a research fellow of St Edmund’s College. After a year at Portsmouth Polytechnic, he moved to Edinburgh in 1990. He specialises in studying well-characterised ‘model colloids’ to throw light on generic issues in condensed matter and statistical physics. He has had a long-standing interest in biological physics and is currently turning his attention to bacterial self organisation and evolution.
Prof. Poon is keen to develop a comprehensive ‘theology of science’. Currently, he is particularly interested in the 4th century Cappadocian philosophers and in Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The Bible also features strongly in his work, particularly those texts that help us understand how and why scientists can successfully carry on their work without importing the ‘God hypothesis’.
Prof. Poon is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics and of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He is also a member of the Doctrine Committee of the Scottish Episcopal Church, and of the Editorial Board of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews. He holds a grant from the Cambridge-Templeton Consortium with Tom McLeish (Physics, Leeds) and Alexander Bird (Philosophy, Bristol) to study philosophical issues at the interface between biology and physics, particularly these subjects’ differing perspectives on holism and teleology. He is a regular book reviewer for the journal Theology.
Recent publications in science and religion
- Wilson Poon and Tom McLeish, Theology CII (no. 807) May/June 1999, ‘Real Presences: Two scientists’ response to George Steiner’.
- Wilson Poon, Theology CIII (no. 816) Nov/Dec 2000, 433-436, ‘”You must name him Jesus”: Being named as kenosis’.
- Tom McLeish and Wilson Poon, Interdisciplinary Science Review 26 (2001) 167-172, ‘How many cultures? “Real Presences” and the healing of the academy’.
- Wilson C. K. Poon, Expository Times 114 (2003) 224-230, ‘Superabundant Table Fellowship in the Kingdom: The Feeding of the Five Thousand and the Meal Motif in Luke’.
- Wilson Poon, Theology CVII (no. 835) Jan/Feb 2004, 37-44, ‘History, Science and Theology: An Essay Review of Hans Schwarz’s Creation’.
- Wilson Poon and Michael Fuller, eds., Sketches Towards a Theology of Science, Doctrine Committee of the Scottish Episcopal Church (SEC: 2005).
- Wilson Poon, ‘Liquids, biopolymers and evolvability: Case studies in counterfactual “water-life”’, in Water of life: counterfactual chemistry and fine-tuning in biochemistry, ed. Lynden-Bell, R. M., Conway Morris, S., Finney, J. L., Barrow, J. D., Harper, C. L., Jr., forthcoming (2006).
Recent science publications
- W C K Poon, S U Egelhaaf, P A Beales, A Salonen and L Sawyer, J. Phys. Condens.
Matter 12 (2000) L569-L574, ‘Protein crystallization: scaling of charge and salt concentration in lysozyme solutions’. - K N Pham, A M Puertas, J Bergenholtz, S U Egelhaaf, A Mousaïd, P N Pusey, A B Schofield, M. E. Cates, M. Fuchs and W C K Poon, Science 296 (2002) 104-106, ‘Multiple glassy states in a simple model system’.
- K N Pham, S U Egelhaaf, P N Pusey and W C K Poon, Phys. Rev. E 69 (2003) art. no. 011503:1-13, ‘Glasses in hard spheres with short-range attraction’.
- K Kroy, M E Cates and W C K Poon, Phys. Rev. Lett. 92 (2004) art. no. 148302:1-4, ‘Cluster mode-coupling approach to weak gelation in attractive colloids’.
- A Stradner, H Sedgwick, F Cardinaux, W C K Poon, S U Egelhaaf and P Schurtenberger, Nature 432 (2004) 492-495, ‘Equilibrium cluster formation in concentrated protein solutions and colloids’.
- T-J Su, M R Tock, S U Egelhaaf, W C K Poon and D T F Dryden, Nucleic Acids Res. 33 (2005) 3235-3244, ‘DNA bending by M.EcoKI methyltransferase is coupled to nucleotide flipping’.
- W C K Poon and D Andelman, eds., Soft Condensed Matter Physics in Molecular and Cell Biology, Taylor and Francis (2006).
