Wednesday, November 16, 2005

Physics and Jews

I love that physics is so religious. Listening these Nobel-prize winning ultra-materialists talk you’d think you were in church. Einstein spent half his life trying to prove that G-d doesn’t play dice. Steven Hawking, says G-d not only plays dice but rolls them where we can not see. And this is even after Neils Bohr told all them physicists to, and I quote, “stop telling G-d what to do.” But it never stops, physics are forever speculating on “the mind of G-d” and trying to figure out whether if in creating the world G-d had any choices. More recently physicist Leon Lederman wrote a whole book about “G-d Particle.” Is this a physics lab or a revival tent?

Physics and Judaism definitely share ideas, for example both embrace mono-creationism, that our universe was created and remains animated by a single, all-powerful thing. Physicist call it the energy of the big bang, rabbis call it the power of G-d. But they agree that all existence, from Britney Spears’ baby to Usama Bin Laden’s beard, is powered by that one phenomenon.

Physics and Judaism also have the same idea about the nature of G-d which is: “I dunno.” A lot of us don’t even write out the word, “G-O-D,” we instead write “G- dash- d,” lest we delude ourselves that we have even the beginnings of an understanding of G-d’ nature. Physicists are less with total ignorance but insist on it anyway. Any proton pusher or beam jockey can show you beautiful math to explain what happened half a second after the big bang and paint you grand, elegant pictures of what happened since. But the moment of the bang, the moment before it? There matnatics crumbles. Equations deliver nonsense. Physicists call their unknowable creator “singularity.”

Both Judaism and physics deal with their uncertainty deity my means of extremely precise methodology. The rituals of both the Jews and the physicist are so minutely detailed that people with obsessive compulsive disorder look at them and say, “Damn, you didn’t have to do all that!”

Both observant Jews and responsible physicists are required to behave with immense precision and like it or not, and they mostly don’t, they must accept that G-d is not only stranger than they know, she is stranger than they can know.

Maybe that’s why there are so few physicists and and so few Jews.

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