Science and Nature « Yonason Goldson

California and the Waters of Life and Death

February 21, 2017 2:25 pm / Leave a comment

Whenever headlines carry the painful images of human being caught in the path of catastrophic flooding, we should all take a few moments to contemplate how quickly nature can become our greatest adversary. Water is both the source of all life and the greatest destructive force on earth. I ponder the paradox in these reflections from after the Pacific Rim tsunami of 2005.

The Tsunami and the Circle-Maker

Volcanoes. Hurricanes. Earthquakes. Fires. Tornadoes. Blizzards. Drought.

In a time when reports of terrorism have become all too common, it is sobering to consider the myriad ways nature possesses to inflict death and violence on a scale surpassing the most destructive instruments devised by man. Of all these, however, destruction by water, whether from the sea or from the sky, holds a unique terror in the scope and measure of its devastation.

Aside from the 150,000 lives already reported lost across nearly a dozen countries along the Indian Ocean, dehydration, disease and hunger threaten as many as 5 million more in the wake of the recent tsunami. And rare though tidal waves may be, the more familiar trial-by-water of floods has, with much greater frequency, left similar numbers homeless and in danger of starvation.

It seems ironic that water, the source and foundation of all life upon our planet, can become nature’s most malevolent instrument against the beings whose lives depend upon it.

Devastation by water occupies a prominent place in human history. Virtually every ancient culture records the tradition of a great flood that inundated the world, lending credence to the biblical account of Noah and the ark. Jewish tradition describes this not as a random event, but as a divine response to the corruption of mankind.

The Talmud, however, reports a much more enigmatic account of divine intervention through water. It was in a time of terrible drought that the Jewish people approached the sage Choni HaMagil and beseeched him to pray for rain on their behalf. When Choni’s supplications to the Almighty went unanswered, he drew a circle in the dust and stepped inside of it, vowing not to leave the circle until G-d bestowed rain upon His people.

Immediately, a fine mist settled upon the earth, too little to alleviate the drought but sufficient to free Choni from his vow.

Choni called out to heaven: “I asked not for this, but for a rain to fill all the wells and cisterns.” Immediately, raindrops larger than melons began to fall, wreaking destruction upon homes and fields.

Again Choni called out to heaven: “Neither did I ask for this, but for a rain of blessing.” Immediately a normal rain began to fall, filling the wells and cisterns of the people as Choni had requested. But the rain did not stop, and soon the entire population of the land feared that they would drown in the rising waters.

One last time Choni called out heavenward: “Master of the World, Your people, Israel, whom You brought out from Egypt, can tolerate neither too much blessing nor too much misfortune.” Immediately the waters abated, and the people returned to their fields. From this time onward, people referred to Choni by the name HaMagil — the Circle-maker.

What was the point of G-d’s demonstration to the people of Israel? What did Choni mean that the people could not tolerate too much blessing? And why did Choni find it necessary to remind the Almighty, at this particular moment, that He had brought the Jewish people out from Egypt?

The Exodus from Egypt may be described, in commercial terms, as the largest loan ever extended in the history of man. During the generations of slavery in Egypt, the Jewish people had forgotten their Creator and lapsed into the same idolatries as their Egyptian masters. And although, to their credit, the Jews had guarded themselves against assimilation, this alone was insufficient to earn them the privilege of miraculous redemption. Nevertheless, G-d gave them an incalculable line of credit: Freedom from slavery, freedom from oppression, freedom to chart their own course into the future.

Moreover, He promised them immeasurable blessing and unbounded prosperity, on condition that they would repay their loan — repay it by living according to G-d’s law, repay it by rising above material pursuits and petty self-interest, repay it by using all the blessing that G-d would bestow upon them to aspire to moral, ethical, and spiritual perfection.

In this light, blessing may be understood as a double-edged sword. Wielded in one direction, it cuts down all enemies and obstacles that stand before us. Wielded in another, it obligates us to a standard of righteousness and moral behavior that we may find nearly impossible to meet.

This was the meaning behind the Almighty’s response to Choni the Circle-maker’s plea:

Two roads lie before My people, and it is their choice which to follow. One leads back to Egypt, back to the oppression of materialism and the slavery of self-indulgence, back to spiritual emptiness and the absence of all blessing. The other road leads forward, to spiritual fulfillment and spiritual greatness, if My people will only find within themselves the potential to seek greatness and discard all lesser goals. It is for this that I redeemed them, that they might cast off the chains of physicality and reach for the heavens.

And this too was the meaning behind Choni’s appeal to the Almighty:

Master of the World, You brought your people out from slavery and oppression on condition that they would use their freedom and the blessings to strive for spiritual heights. Your people, however, have demonstrated from their beginnings that, whatever their potential may be, they still suffer from human failings and human shortcomings. They cannot tolerate too little material blessing, lest the struggle to survive overwhelms them and they abandon all higher aspirations. And they cannot tolerate too much blessing, lest they cower before the goal set for them and lose all hope of its attainment.

By all accounts, the world that we live in today enjoys a level of material affluence unattained and unimagined by previous generations. Such basic necessities as rapid transit, instantaneous communication, indoor plumbing, electrical lighting and refrigeration, which we take for granted, provide us with an ease of living simply unavailable to even the wealthiest, most powerful monarchs until the last century. The very existence of an “entertainment industry,” much less the staggering sums of money devoted to it, testifies to our abundance of resources — which is to say, our abundance of material blessing.

Nowhere does Jewish tradition teach the condemnation of wealth or of recreation.

Nowhere does Jewish law mandate the forcible redistribution of wealth from those blessed with good fortune to those less fortunate. But Jewish tradition does warn us of the responsibilities of prosperity. It warns us in the narrative of the flood, in the story of Choni HaMagil, and also in the Hebrew word for charity: tzedakah, derived from the word tzedek, or justice.

It is only just that those who are blessed share a portion of their blessing with their less fortunate neighbors. It is only just that, before overindulging in one’s own good fortune, he ponders why he deserves having received such blessing while his neighbor has not. And it is only just that he ask himself how, even in the absences of tax incentives or legal mandate, he might reach out with his blessing to ease his neighbor’s plight.

If the waters of the earth, the life-giving waters that are the source of our greatest blessing — life itself — have risen up to inflict enormous tragedy, swallowing human life and draining billions of dollars of aid to spare human suffering, we will all be remiss if we do not pause to consider whether we have used our blessings wisely, and what we must do to ensure that we will continue to deserve them.

Originally published by Jewish World Review.

It’s about time

January 4, 2017 2:30 pm / Leave a comment

Are you feeling more rested this week? Do you notice your watch running a smidgen fast? Maybe it’s because of the leap-second added by the National Institute of Standards and Technology on New Year’s Eve.

A few of us may take comfort knowing that our clocks are back in sync with the earth’s relative positive to the sun, and find it reassuring that all the cosmic gears and cogs are once again in perfect alignment. The rest of us couldn’t care less.

Does it really matter?

Well, yes; it just might.

There are two ways to look at time. First, as a convenient touchstone for organizing our lives. Without some universal standard for tracking our days and our hours, imagine the trouble we would have arranging our affairs and interactions.

But you can also make the case that time really does mean something.

Click here to read the whole article.

When bubbles burst

December 28, 2016 2:36 pm / 1 Comment on When bubbles burst

Raise your glass of champagne to toast the new year. And then, before you take your first sip, ask yourself this question: where do the bubbles come from?

You see them, don’t you – those strings of tiny bubbles rising steadily from the bottom of your fluted goblet? They seem to appear out of nothing and come from nowhere. And yet they keep coming, like refugees from some parallel universe escaping through an inter-dimensional portal, yearning to be free.

The explanation is quite simple. What is more compelling is how the mystery of champagne bubbles can lead us to victory in the modern culture wars.

It can also provide a deeper insight into history’s first culture war, which culminated in the miracle of Chanukah.

TRAPPED IN THE DEPTHS

An average glass of champagne contains about 20 million microscopic bubbles, produced when fermentation under pressure forces carbon gas into wine. The relatively few bubbles that rise to the surface burst and release their CO₂. As for the rest, the even distribution of internal pressure across the surface of each bubble keeps the gas trapped within.

Along the interior surface of the glass, however, are tiny imperfections. When bubbles come in contact with any such imperfection, the slightest change in pressure at the point of contact is enough to cause them to burst. Once released, the gas inside streams upward to the surface in a race for freedom.

Now think of champagne as an allegory for life.

A WORLD OF BUBBLE-DWELLERS

Never in history has a society been more comfortable than in this generation. Our homes are climate controlled within a two-degree range. Our cars have automatic entry, heated leather seats, and full entertainment centers. We buy our groceries and holiday gifts with the click of a mouse and wait for them to be delivered by bonded messenger or drone. We text people in the same room and find it too burdensome to open our email.

And what do we have to show for it? We have lost all ability to cope with inconvenience, delay, and change. A website refusing to load, a text not returned in 15 seconds, or our favorite TV show preempted by an amber alert — these are the crises of our times, the insufferable challenges of our era. It’s both laughable and tragic to imagine how we would manage had we to face the hardships of the crossing of the Mayflower, the Great Depression, or the Battle of the Bulge — let alone Auschwitz or the Soviet gulag. The plight of Syrian refugees right now across the sea is too horrific for us to even contemplate.

So we don’t. We’re too comfortable inside our bubbles, insulated from the cold, hard realities that most humans have had to endure through the ages. We hide away from the rest of the word, until something pricks the surface to burst our bubbles — leaving us in pieces and gasping for breath.

But really, we should be grateful for those pinpricks, both great and small. Like the gas that remains trapped beneath the surface, our own potential for greatness remains dormant within us until we are forced to confront the sharp edges of life. Instead of trying to hide from them, we need to prepare ourselves for when they inevitably arrive.

HIGHS AND LOWS

This was the state of affairs in Judea under the rule of the Seleucid Empire 2180 years ago. The prevailing culture of Greek philosophy worshipped aesthetic idealism. Graceful lines, elegant syllogisms, and harmonic symmetry represented the highest expression of human civilization.

But it also represented the lowest. Where the ancient Greeks revered physical and intellectual beauty, they abandoned children with physical deformities or mental impairments and left them to die. They valued the philosophic sophistication of their greatest thinkers less for its content and more for the polished sophistry of its expression. They ruthlessly stamped out all dissonance – as they did by sentencing Socrates, the greatest among them, to death for the crime of exposing the logical contradictions of their philosophy.

Enamored with the cultural idealism of Greece, Jewish Hellenists believed they could blend their practice of Judaism with the prettified ways of their masters. But Jewish philosophy demands that we challenge the external status quo, that we push our personal boundaries outward even as we strive to refine our commitment to the traditions on which our nation is founded. It is a prickly discipline, one in which bubbles cannot long survive.

And so the culture of Greece tried to swallow the soul of Judaism. But in the end, the weak rose up against the strong and the few prevailed over the many. Instead of capitulating to the apparent inevitability of their defeat, the Jews fought for their physical and spiritual lives. By doing so, they broke through the boundaries of what anyone imagined possible, and they set free the potential that would have remained forever hidden if the Greeks had not tried to crush it into non-existence.

And when the hidden spark of determination inside them caught fire, it light up the darkness of exile, just like the tiny container of oil that burned miraculously for eight days – a sign of divine favor because they refused to exchange spiritual identity for the comfort of cultural superficiality.

When we reject comfortable confinement and fight our way out of the bubbles we live in, there is no limit to the miracles we can expect to see in our daily lives.

Published by Jewish World Review.

The Pathology of Praise

November 16, 2016 4:13 pm / Leave a comment

You’re so cute. You’re so sweet. You’re such a doll.

You slob. You moron. You’re such a loser.

Anyone who has studied education or taken parenting classes has heard the eight-to-one rule: offer eight positive comments for every negative one. The theory is sound. By responding to good behavior, we accomplish three things:

reinforce that behavior so it will be repeated more often
encourage a positive self-image inconsistent with bad behavior
legitimize occasional criticism so it will be taken to heart

All well and good. Except when it doesn’t work.

In her acclaimed bestseller, Mindset, Dr. Carol Dweck reports that grade school teachers criticize boys eight times more often than girls. If that weren’t enough, school-age boys typically pepper their conversation with insults, put-downs, and name-calling. Consequently, we should expect to find that girls grow up into self-confidant over-achievers and boys grow up into meek underperformers.

In fact, just the opposite is true.

Professor Dweck observes that the constant negativity directed at boys makes them increasingly impervious to criticism, which may boost their confidence but leaves them unreceptive to constructive advice. In contrast, the praise lavished on girls can leave them hypersensitive to criticism, to the point where they are afraid to take risks and tend to indulge in constant self-doubt.

Applied to society at large, this may explain a lot about our collective cultural dysfunction.

Click here to read the whole article.

It’s right before your eyes

November 15, 2016 3:45 pm / Leave a comment

Yesterday’s supermoon, the closest and brightest in seven decades, is dramatic precisely because it fails to push back the darkness of night. King Solomon warns us of the pitfalls of living “under the sun,” reminding us that too much light can blind us to the dangers posed by our own misperception — a theme that figures prominently in my book Proverbial Beauty. I’m taking the opportunity to revisit this article from 2009.

Imagine if, in the late 1990s, a freshman congressman in the House of Representatives had submitted, as his first piece of legislation, a bill requiring airlines to install high-security doors on all passenger planes between the cockpit and the cabin. Imagine that the bill narrowly passed, was signed into law, and resulted — at great inconvenience and expense — with enhanced security for every commercial flight crew by the summer of 2001.

What would such an initiative have produced? Most notably (or really, just the opposite), September 11 would be a date of no greater significance than August 3. No terrorists would have seized those airliners and flown them into the Twin Towers that day. Perhaps American troops would never have gone into Afghanistan or Iraq. Perhaps the economy would not (yet) have collapsed. Quite possibly, Barack Obama would never have been elected president in an anti-George W. Bush backlash.

In his book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable , economist Nassim Nicholas Taleb proposes just such a scenario. But Mr. Taleb focuses less on the global consequences than on the fate of our fictional congressman — let’s call him Joe Smith. Congressman Smith will not be remembered as the hero who prevented the worst terrorist attack in history, precisely because he successfully prevented it. In all likelihood, he will be loudly denounced as the architect of an expensive and irrelevant measure and hounded out of office. He may live out his life regret his own lack of political saavy, which ended his career before it had even begun.

A complicated and often elusive treatise, The Black Swan proposes a correlation between history’s most significant events and the degree to which they were unanticipated. The stock crashes of 1929 and 1987; the outbreak of both world wars; the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. Each of these came as a profound shock to the world; only with the benefit of hindsight have historians explained all of them as political and economical inevitabilities.

Moreover, the lessons learned from history’s most earth-shattering events tend consistently to be exercises in locking the barn door after the horse has run away. Both individually and collectively, we implement strategies that would have changed the course of history had we applied them earlier, failing to realize that our measures to correct address the specific circumstances that shaped the past rather than the broader principles that will determine the future. The more closely we focus on what we expect to happen, the more we increase the probability that the future will arrive from an entirely unimagined direction.

DON’T LOOK NOW

The human eye is a truly remarkable organ. It is self-focusing, adjusts instantly from close-range to distance, discerns color and texture, judges distance, and adapts to bright sunlight, inky darkness, and everything in between. It allows us to focus on a single point of interest while, through our faculty of peripheral vision, we continue to process information coming in from all sides to provide context and enable us to respond to changing conditions.

Instinctively and intuitively, we place the object of immediate interest at the center of our optic and cognitive attention. But this is not always the most effective means of perception. We have all experienced instances of looking directly at an object and failing to see it, either because it is so familiar or unremarkable that our minds filter it out as irrelevant, or because it is so incongruous that our subconscious refuses to accept its presence. In such cases, we may notice an object only when we are looking elsewhere and our peripheral vision, unencumbered by the censorship of our expectations, draws our attention back to that which had previously hidden in plain sight.

This phenomenon — called averted vision — was first alluded to by Aristotle and has become particularly important among astronomers, who have found that observing an object peripherally may increase its resolution by up to three or four magnitudes. Because the center of the eye contains only cones, which perceive brightness and color, fainter objects are more easily detected by the rods, which perceive dim, monochromatic light and occupy the outer regions of the eye.

LOOK AWAY AND ALL WILL BE REVEALED

We live in a world that, on its surface, seems well-ordered and readily understood. The cycle of seasons follows its natural course with relative predictability. The habits of animals remain virtually unchanged. The waters of the earth flow downward from the mountains to the seas, evaporate and rise up to the firmament, then return to the earth as rain.

On closer inspection, however, the world is a place of profound mystery. Solid objects are composed of increasingly tiny particles, many of which are spinning wildly in microscopic orbits at nearly the speed of light. Hundreds of other sub-atomic particles waft about our universe, many without any clear direction or purpose. The beginnings of physical existence and life itself cannot be substantiated through any empirical evidence or rational theory. The force of gravity, which is so fundamental that we scarcely give it any thought, has no satisfactory explanation.

Atoms, the building blocks of our universe, had never been directly observed until last year, when an electronic microscope powerful enough to view them was finally engineered. The protons, neutrons, and electrons, as well as those myriad other sub-atomic particles, are still yet to be seen. So how do we know they exist? Indirect evidence — the averted vision of science. By analyzing observable evidence, scientists have determined that these particles must exist to explain otherwise unexplainable phenomena.

But why should our universe be so impenetrably shrouded in mystery? The sages of the Talmud explain that ours is a world of hester ponim — a world in which the Almighty “hides His face.” The familiarity of the material world draws all our attention, distracts us from the true spiritual nature that reveals itself only at the periphery of our vision. The unanswered questions of science, the anomalies of nature, the enigmas of philosophy, the improbability of the cosmic and individual “coincidences” that surround us daily — all these testify to the order and the One who imposed order upon the universe. They whisper to us from the corners of our consciousness and beckon us from the edges of our awareness, vanishing to insignificance amidst the cacophony of physical existence the moment we try to focus on them, then reappearing as soon as we turn our attention elsewhere.

Search for G-d and all His might, says King David, seek His presence always.The harder we try to find order in our lives, the more chaotic our world seems to become. By allowing the subtle evidence that flutters at the fringes of Creation to hold out attention, however indirectly, the more we make our hearts and minds sensitive to the spiritual reality that is the foundation of the physical universe and the human condition.

Originally published in Jewish World Review

Rosh Hashanah and the Mysteries of the Universe

September 27, 2016 3:21 pm / Leave a comment

Originally published by Jewish World Review in 2003.

96% of the matter in the universe is invisible. Mysterious “dark energy” is pushing all of space apart. Empty space is not really empty, but filled with subatomic “foam.” At least seven parallel universes exist, each a trillionth the size of a proton.

Science fiction? Fantasy? The product of opium hallucinations?

Guess again. According to an article in U.S. News and World Report, these hypothesized phenomena represent the mainstream of current scientific thought.

In the wake of observations reported last March by NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, astronomers and physicists are resorting to these and other fantastic models to explain anomalous temperature variations in the background radiation permeating the heavens.

And who knows? They may be right. After all, once upon a time a round earth, a heliocentric solar system, and manned flight were all scorned as flights of the wildest fancy. Perhaps entire universes really do exist, wrapped up in a particle of dust beneath your finger nail.

On the other hand, increasingly complex and convoluted theories begin to look like the frantic flailings of scientists drowning in the mysteries of human existence. Indeed, one noted physicist confessed that, if he’d been presented with these theories not long ago, “I’d either ask what you’ve been smoking or tell you to stop telling fairy tales.”

Of course, one almost has to feel sorry for these scientists. Every discovery, every revelation, every insight, opens up a new Pandora’s Box of inexplicable phenomena. A few short decades ago, we knew of about half a dozen known sub-atomic particles. Today there are hundreds, with the number growing all the time, and often only the haziest guesses as to why they exist. Relativity theory and quantum theory both seem to describe the workings of the universe, but only the most strained and unproven theory suggests how to unite these two approaches.

It’s almost enough to make one contemplate — dare we say it? — Divine Creation. Indeed, man’s desire to plumb the secrets of the universe is nothing new. Newton, Descartes, Galileo, Aristotle, all of these and many others grappled with physics and metaphysics in their labors to comprehend the vast expanse of time and space that stretches toward the boundaries of existence.

But long before the first scientist or philosopher raised his eyes to gaze into outer space and contemplate the stars, another man searched inner space seeking understanding. His name was Job.

A righteous man who lost his fortune, his family, and his health, Job questioned whether there was any rhyme or reason to explain the suffering of the righteous and the prosperity of the wicked. And as he sank into the mire of self-pity and nihilism, a Voice from above answered him:

“Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” asked the Almighty. “What is the path where light dwells? And darkness, where is its place, that you may take it to its boundary, that you may understand the paths of its home?”

The Creator never explains Job’s suffering, but He does provide Job with the answer that restores his faith: The complexity of creation is not only more that you know, but more than you can begin to imagine. Every star above you in the sky, every drop of water in the sea, and every grain of sand upon the shore resides in its place and follows the course chosen for it; so too is every seeming whim of fate rather an unfathomable pulse from the primordial machine that steers the unfolding of eternity.

And so we say in the Rosh HaShanah liturgy, “This day is the anniversary of the beginning of Your handiwork, a remembrance of the First Day.” As we stand in the murky spiritual twilight between the end of one year and the start of another, we contemplate that amidst the mystery and uncertainty that surrounds us, one constant offers us security and safety if we take hold of it: the indivisible relationship between the Creator of all and His ultimate creation — Mankind, for whom He brought all else into being.

This day. This day of Rosh HaShanah begins a new year, a new season, a new opportunity to draw near to the Master of Creation. This day offers us a poignant reminder of how to cling to the godliness the resides within us, to strive to become more devoted in our relationships and less demanding in our expectations, more focused on others and less fixated on ourselves, less passionate about material gain and more ardent in our pursuit of spiritual fulfillment.

This day reminds us that we hold in our hands an awesome privilege, as well as an awesome responsibility. How willingly are we seduced into looking for simplistic solutions to the moral and ethical dilemmas that life throws at us day after day? How longingly do we embrace superficial cliches and bromides that urge us to pull the warm covers of apathy over our heads?

This day. Rosh HaShanah is our wake up call, and the sound of the shofar signals our reveille to open our eyes and behold the breathtaking magnificence that is Creation. And if our minds reel as we try to grasp the limitless expanse of the universe, we can yet grasp onto this certainty: that the One who placed us in its midst has revealed Himself through His Word and has given each of us a priceless gift, no less than the sand and the sea and the stars — an indispensable role to play in the completion of His masterpiece and the means through which we can become one with the infinite and with the divine.

Louisiana and the Waters of Life and Death

August 23, 2016 3:08 pm / 1 Comment on Louisiana and the Waters of Life and Death

As residents across Louisiana struggle against catastrophic flooding, we should all take a few moments to contemplate how quickly nature can become our greatest adversary. Water is both the source of all life and the greatest destructive force on earth. I ponder the paradox in these reflections from after the Pacific Rim tsunami of 2005.

Volcanoes. Hurricanes. Earthquakes. Fires. Tornadoes. Blizzards. Drought.