The Phystics

The timeline, storyline, of the Torah takes 2488 years.  That is, from the completion of the universe,
the creation of Adam and Eve, until Moses death, 2488 years.  There are, within the first six days,
questions of course.  Some read those
passages literally and think those six days took what we consider to be six
days.  Others choose to read the passages
precisely and compute the actual elapsed time to be closer to 10 to 20 billion
years.  I’m a believer in reading
precisely as opposed to literally, just to makes things clear right away. 

Nachmanides read and commented on the same passage and
explained what he was taught as the real interpretation—and so in the 13th
century he explained, with no fanfare, what is essentially the Big Bang
Theory.  So, he asks, why doesn’t Gd just
explain it more clearly (translation: 
why doesn’t He just state outright the Big Bang Theory)?  Because in the future, Nachmanides writes,
when nations dispute who owns the land
of Israel, the Torah will
be the proof.  I, Gd, created the
universe and it belongs to whoever I say it belongs to.  Not bad work, sensing life and knowledge 700
years into the future.  And I bring this
up to give a whiff of science to what can be a most unscientific way of
thinking and reading.

The Torah is given near the end of the Torah, in 2448.  Being a people who respect a good question,
the question is why not sooner?  Why not
give it to Adam, to Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob? 
There are opinions that carry more weight than mine, a group generally
defined as All Other Opinions, but I think it’s because Gd is saying in bold
letters and italics that you really have to know things before you can pick up
the Torah and understand it.  You have to
know a lot, and it’s going to take some serious time.  That’s what’s happening in the 2487 years,
the great folks chronicled are spending their time learning things.  And we don’t find out what they’ve been
learning until Gd begins to teach it. 
That’s what the word Torah means, Teaching.  And the method of teaching is indirect, not
at all like the instructions for assembling a swing set.

Except that the expectation is that the swing set will be
built, and some pretty rough consequences will follow if it’s not built.  Fear not, say the rabbis, the mystics, and
the Kabbalists, we shall explain it all to you—and they have done such a
wonderful job that a typical Jew, fastened to a theism-meter, will lean toward
atheism.  In other words, after all the
words of those teaching the meaning, they are accomplishing the opposite of
what they intend, convincing folks that there is no meaning. 

The believers end up creating non-believers.  So, of course, it stands to ironic reason
that the non-believers should help to create believers.  Exit rabbis, mystics, and Kabbalists, enter
Phystics, physicists who actually explain the Torah better than the
rabbis.  They don’t intend to do
this.  But they do this.  I suspect there is a Grand Joke afoot.

Beginning the twentieth century, Max Planck, Albert
Einstein, Arthur Compton (now we’re up to the 1920s), John S.
Bell (1960s), Edward Lorenz (1961), Mitchell Feigenbaum (1974),
and Benoit Mandelbrot (1977) completely turned the universe upside down,
regarding the real life relationship between cause and effect.  Well, actually they turned it right side up,
since our default common sense is upside down. 
But it’s okay, because we see things the same way Isaac Newton saw them,
back in 1688.  Aren’t we the modern ones? 

In other words, how we think
things should go, how we plan for things to work—more often than
not, our plans fall apart, and things don’t go as we expect.  That’s because we think in linear terms, we
think that cause and effect happen directly, pool cue ball hits the triangle of
balls, direct, geometric, measurable cause and effect.  Nice, orthodox Newtonians we are.

And so, here is a brief, no way to do justice to, summary of
the new discoveries of cause and effect, which, if you apply these discoveries
generously over your reading of the stories and laws of the Torah, should actually
help it to make sense and become logical. 
(Do not proceed any further if you still think the world is flat.)

Max Planck and the
Quantum Leap—things don’t change gradually. 
They don’t go through small modification over a period of time, even
billions of years. They simply jump to the next level, skipping every
conceivable step in between.

Albert Einstein and
Space-time—there’s no nothing out there. 
There’s no nothing anywhere.  But
everywhere there is a fabric of space-time, flexible, and changeable, like a
big curtain with bends and grooves. 
Remarkably, for each person, who sees it from a different perspective,
it is in fact different from every perspective.

The Compton Effect
(won the Nobel for this)—that X-rays (which everyone just knew were waves) will behave as either particles or waves,
depending upon how you want to see it. 
Do not interpret this as you see what you want to see.  He is saying that the physical world around
you behaves differently according to
the way you are.  Compton said that this principle applies to
all forms of energy, since Einstein showed the same effect with light (which
everyone knew were waves).   Changing how you see things, knowing what
you want—not at all easy tasks.  I
believe he’s touching on Karma here.  Just
brushing up against it.  Barely.

Bell’s Theorem—Things
haven’t even begun to get weird yet.  Now
they get weird.  Two things, particles in
this case, joined together and then split apart will change the same way
simultaneously…simultaneously…no…matter…how…far…apart…they…are.  This would have even blown Einstein’s mind.  No Matter How Far Apart They Are.  Even light years.  Flush the pool table.  It’s gone. 
Cause and Effect are indirect.

Chaos Theory (Edward
Lorenz)—Very simply, if you drop a pebble in a brook you will get a
Tsunami.  Get used to it.

Chaos Theory
(Feigenbaum)—could easily be named Not Chaos Theory.  All of the random events and shapes around
you (like the growth of trees, the shape of mountains, your system of arteries
and nerves) aren’t random.  They are
behaving according to mathematical equations. 
Feigenbaum actually began to discover those equations.  If you feed different values into the
variables, and graph the outcomes, you get Norman Rockwell-like pictures of
trees and mountains, clouds, basically everything not man-made.  Think how great this would look on 3-D graph
paper.

Chaos Theory
(Mandelbrot)—The whole is greater than the sum of the parts?  The whole is equal to the sum of the
parts?  Except that there are no parts,
just microcosms of the whole.  The whole
is made of microcosms of the whole.  This
is demonstrated in fabulous psychodelivision in a group of pictures called the
Mandelbrot Set, and laid the groundwork for the field of fractal geometry.

Happy 21st century.  I didn’t even scratch the surface.