| Avshalom Elitzur | |
| Birth Date: | 31 May 1957 |
| Birth Place: | Pahlavi Iran |
| Nationality: | Israeli |
| Fields: | Quantum mechanics |
| Alma Mater: | Tel Aviv University (Ph.D.) |
| Thesis Title: | Time's Passage and the Time-Asymmetries |
| Thesis Year: | 1999 |
| Doctoral Advisor: | Yakir Aharonov |
| Awards: | Noetic Medal (2010) |
Avshalom Cyrus Elitzur (he|אבשלום כורש אליצור), born 30 May 1957, is an Iranian-born Israeli physicist and philosopher.[1]
Avshalom Elitzur was born in Kerman, Iran, to a Jewish family. When he was two years old, his family immigrated to Israel and settled in Rehovot. He left school at the age of sixteen and began working as a laboratory technician at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot. Elitzur received no formal university training before obtaining his PhD. Elitzur had a relationship with journalist Timura Lessinger, with whom he has a daughter.
Elitzur was a senior lecturer at the Unit for Interdisciplinary Studies, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel. He is noted for the Elitzur–Vaidman bomb tester experiment in quantum mechanics, which was publicised by Roger Penrose in his book Shadows of the Mind.
In 1987, he published Into the Holy of Holies: Psychoanalytic Insights into the Bible and Judaism. That year, he was invited to present an unpublished manuscript on quantum mechanics at an international conference in Temple University in Philadelphia. He was later invited by Yakir Aharonov of Tel Aviv University, to write a doctoral thesis on the subject. He was the chief editor of natural sciences in Encyclopaedia Hebraica. In 2008, he was a visiting professor at Joseph Fourier University.
Elitzur is the founder of Iyar, the Israeli Institute for Advanced Research.[2]
In 2010, Elitzur won the Noetic Medal of Consciousness and Brain Research for his contributions to the cosmology of the mind and Quantum Theory.[3]