PARIS (AP) -- A French physicist and philosopher of science was named Monday as winner of a religion award described as the world's richest annual prize given to an individual.

Bernard d'Espagnat, 87, will receive the Templeton Prize, valued at $1.42 million. He played a key role from the mid 1960s through the early 1980s in exploration and development in quantum mechanics, focusing on experiments testing the "Bell's inequalities" theorem.

The John Templeton Foundation