Physics and Faith on a New Scale: A Conversation with Michael Dine, PhD

Geoff Mitelman: Welcome, everybody, to Episode 44 of Sacred Science, gleaning wisdom from science and religion. I’m Rabbi Geoff Mitelman. I’m the Founding Director of Sinai and synapses, and I am very excited to be sitting here. First of all, I’m sitting in my office, which I haven’t done in about two years. So hopefully everything’s going to work well, although in previous episodes, I didn’t have to deal with sirens outside of my office in New York City, so hopefully the audio will be okay here.

But I’m in New York, and sitting in Washington, DC is Professor Michael Dine, who I’ve known – actually I’ve known through his wife, Rabbi Melanie Aron, who is the emerita rabbi of Congregation Shir Hadash in Los Gatos, California, which was part of Scientists in Synagogues, one of our big projects of integrating Judaism and science. And Michael is the spouse of Rabbi Aron. So Michael is the distinguished professor of physics at the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics, University of California at Santa Cruz. He’s also served as chair of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Silicon Valley, and is the author of the brand new – and when we say brand new, we mean it just came out a week ago – This Way to the Universe, which I have here, which is a fascinating book. It’s subtitled “a Theoretical Physicist’s journey to the Edge of Reality,” trying to explain so many of the complicated nuances of cosmology and quantum physics and theoretical physics in ways that laypeople can understand. And so, Michael, I’m really excited to be sitting here with you, talking about all these kinds of questions.

Michael Dine: I’m excited to be here, too.

Geoff Mitelman: So I want to start by hearing a little bit about your story as a particle physicist and as somebody who is a spouse of a rabbi, how do you think about these kinds of questions? You have such a unique perspective of this view of Judaism and science. I would love to hear just a little bit about your story, and the way that you integrate questions of Judaism and science.

Michael Dine: Sure. And just cut me off if I go on too long. But this is obviously a theme in much of my life. So I would start by saying that at some level, the two things are kept somewhat separate in slightly different boxes. If you know – and I know many Orthodox scientists, and they seem quite successful in compartmentalizing their work and what might be their religious beliefs. It’s not so complicated in a Reform household, which is not to say that there aren’t sometimes issues. But my wife, in fact, has actually, in many ways, a very scientific outlook. She is the daughter of an oncologist, and issues in science inform a lot of her work as a rabbi. So there’s not real severe tension of that sort. In fact, she sort of early on said to me, in effect, that “any religion that requires you to believe in something that goes against the evidence of your senses is problematic.” And so this is not to say that she’s necessarily interested in every nuance of the work I do, but this does inform a lot of her work.

The congregation, under her leadership, has done a lot of work in health care, on environmental issues – questions of climate change, things like abortion, are informed by questions, both of Jewish tradition, but of concerns about public health and bioethics. So there’s a range of activities which are sort of quite compatible between the two. And I don’t think that these statements apply just to Reform Jews by any means. So I don’t think there’s a big tension there. What sometimes one means by this is, or one can mean by this, is there a tension between some kind of belief in some all-powerful creator, versus what modern science teaches us? And there surely are such tensions, I would say. And to some degree, one sort of compartmentalizes those, I think.

Geoff Mitelman: Well, there is a challenge, and we’ve spoken with a couple of Orthodox Jews and traditional Jews about how they think about these questions. Where do you see moments of tension? There are kind of the obvious ones that come up, of Big Bang cosmology and Genesis 1. For some people, it actually can be quite an easy resolution of just saying, “Well, Genesis is not meant to be a science textbook”, and that’s how it resolves.

But how do you think about these kinds of questions? Your work is in particle physics and origins. And so, how does that come [up] when you’re doing research, doing work on these kinds of questions, and then coming in at Simchat Torah and you’re starting Genesis 1 all over again?

Michael Dine: Yeah, well, I think, again, it sort of is to say this remark about, well, you can’t really believe things that are against the evidence of, in this case, the extension of our senses. But I think that there is an issue also, maybe a larger issue, than really whether one has a literal belief in some creation, particular creation mythology – in that, how do you deal with the notion of humanity as in some sense central?

So one of the things that’s happened – it’s not really a subject of the book, but I certainly mention it, and it certainly happened within my career and happened, in no small measure due to people – I can boast about UC Santa Cruz, due to people at Santa Cruz – has been the discovery of large numbers of extra-solar planets. So it’s not really a big surprise, but it’s now a sort of fact that we have to live with – that there are many, many planets in the universe, typically several per star. Surely many of those are capable of supporting life. Surely many of those are in some ways like Earth.

And we were talking before the program about the James Webb telescope. This is an instrument which, among the things it will do, it will find more of them, and it will tell us more about them. So that’s one area. So we live in – there’s a phrase, and there’s a little reading in the Reform prayerbook, where it [says], at some point, “a vast universe. Who can know it?” And I think that it is truly vast, and how you view that? Do you view that as diminishing human significance, or do you view it as meaning, as putting a stress on, that we have only this planet, and that it’s fragile, and that we need to take care of it? These are very different outlooks that one could take.

So I think that one of the things I quote in my book is this statement of Steven Weinberg – and it’ll probably come up again – but in the context of thinking about nature, he says something to the effect that “the more we understand about nature, the more pointless it seems” – that there isn’t a grand direction. And this is actually not my own personal view. My own personal view is, “Ah, the fact that we can understand these things about nature is itself wondrous,” and while perhaps not exactly godlike, is somehow spiritually significant. I think of this quote, that you should, on the one hand, repeat that “the world is just dust and ashes,” and then the other, that “I’m created in the image of God.” So we have to live with this. I’m sort of willing to live with that tension. I don’t see much choice. But there are more extreme views, clearly, on either end, of the pointlessness of it, or of ignoring the evidence of our senses and saying that somehow we’re here divinely. So, it’s complicated. Unless we just choose to ignore things, we’re not offered a simple spiritual answer.

Geoff Mitelman: It’s reminding me – there are a couple of astrophysicists that I know who are actually Evangelical Christian. One is Dr. Jennifer Wiseman, who’s at NASA and directs the Dialogue on Science, Ethics and Religion of the AAAS. And another is Dr. Deb Haarsma, who directs Biologos, which was actually co-founded by Francis Collins. And if I’m understanding them correctly – and if I’m not, hopefully they will see this and correct me if I’m incorrect on this – but one of the analogies that they often draw is the relationship between, we’ll say, God, or at least a view of how special is Earth as compared to other planets, because there are however many planets that are out there. Is there life? I think, from what I understand, most astronomers would guess to say there is probably life somewhere else in the universe. Intelligent life is a different kind of question, but just sort of the numbers, it seems likely that there’s some sort of life somewhere else.

Michael Dine: Yeah. I would pause you a second, just getting back to this question of our responsibility. Intelligent life somewhere else – what I sometimes worry about is there may be, at short periods of time on many of these planets, intelligent life, how long it survives and so on. That’s another question.

Geoff Mitelman: Yeah. And I think Adam Frank has actually done a lot of these questions also, and he’s done some really interesting writing about climate change and the environmental crisis from the perspective of astrophysics, and “What do we know about the trajectory of planets, at least now that we’ve learned so many over the last ten to 15 years?”

But what Dr. Wiseman and Dr. Haarsma have said is that it is possible for God to have a relationship with this particular planet in the same way that God, at least in the text, has a relationship with the people of Israel. Whether we view that as Jews or Christians, that’s a whole other kind of conversation. But that God has a special relationship with each people there. It doesn’t say that all the others are bad or don’t exist, but that there is a relationship there. And so the specialness has implications that are broader than just saying, “we’re the only” or “we’re the most important.” We can analogize there. I’m curious as to how that analogy sits with you.

Michael Dine: I certainly agree, as a kind of logical way of thinking about this issue, that there’s no reason why an omnipotent being should be limited to one particular planet. And that’s okay. I think, as I say, I mentioned this remark of Weinberg’s, and I mentioned I’m sort of caught in the middle. So I have a much more sort of cautious or tentative view of where it seems that humanity may somehow be special. And this, for me, lies in the very fact that we can understand what we do about nature. And it drives, I think, myself and a lot of scientists in the work they do.

An example I like to talk about is quantum mechanics. And here I borrow a remark a colleague of mine made to me some time ago, which is – “Quantum mechanics is really quite remarkable. But what’s really remarkable is that humanity figured this out, because it’s quite bizarre.” It’s something I talk about in the book, and I explain this a little bit, and I’m happy to go on about it here a little bit. But the fact that things just don’t move like the things of our day-to-day experience is something that is quite remarkable. And as I say, the rules that people uncover to understand this are, as I say, quite bizarre. And there was a period where people – like, some of the leaders in the field of that era, like Niels Bohr – worried that, in fact, maybe the understanding of atoms and things smaller was beyond human comprehension, that somehow our brains just weren’t wired to do that.

And as a colleague of mine, Tom Banks, likes to remind me, the fact that we understand the motion of projectiles – I mean, that took a long time and was hard. But still, that’s kind of within our evolutionary programming. We can understand why natural selection favored beings that could follow the trajectory of an arrow or watch a gazelle leap through the air or something like that, whereas nothing in our evolutionary programming requires us to understand atoms. And the fact that we can understand something like that, things like that, is something I don’t want to – I’ll be a little careful and not call it Godlike, but it is very remarkable. It is something [that] in some ways seems elevated.

The remark I quoted of Steven Weinberg’s is, in some sense – and I should say, by the way, this was a view held by Einstein, and held by a number of other very notable thinkers, certainly not original of me. The remark I quoted of Weinberg’s (who, by the way, rather sadly passed away a few months ago), is a reaction to that, is a statement that, “No, it’s not remarkable. It’s all just, in the end, it’s all just pointless.” And I don’t share that view, but I have a hard time imagining accepting a being that really rather directly intervenes in our affairs. So I’m sort of caught in the middle somewhere.

Geoff Mitelman: Well, when you’re talking about “caught in the middle,” and you’re referencing this a little bit, is that we as human beings are designed to be able to deal with things at a human scale. And so much of our liturgy and phraseology, particularly in Judaism and Christianity, reference God as the infinite, or infinity. And you use the word omnipotent of an all-powerful God. I tend to think that we don’t use infinity when we talk about God, the way we think about infinity. We use infinity to mean “really really really really big,” because we can’t really conceive of anything huge, let alone the size of the universe. And the universe is nothing compared to infinity here.

And so I’d love to hear, how do we talk about some of these huge scales of time and space and the origins of the universe and 13.8 billion years. I think the latest number I heard was some sextillion number of either stars or planets – there are many more planets than there are stars. And then also on the quantum side, and the atomic scale, which is so small, that we have the most we can think of is, like, the width of a human hair. How do we talk about these questions that are so big or so small that all we can talk about is in human language?

Michael Dine: Okay, this is a good question. Following, actually, a suggestion I received, I should say – when I conceived the book, I was thinking a lot about these questions of large and very small. And what I wanted to convey was our understanding of phenomena on very large scales, scales the size of the observable universe – something like 13 billion light-years or so – and scales far, far smaller, hundreds of times smaller, than the nucleus of an atom. So I wanted to convey that, and then I wanted to convey the idea that on larger scales and smaller scales, there are many mysteries, things we don’t understand. So we have this exquisite understanding on scales, which, as you say, we can’t really conceive of.

So one suggestion I got, which I eagerly took up, was to reference a wonderful video from the 1970s called Powers of Ten, which I saw – I was then a graduate student. I actually saw it displayed at the Smithsonian at that time. And what it does is it really does explore these very large and very small scales as they were understood in the late 70s, starting with two humans sitting and having a picnic in the Boston area.

And it’s hard. So we have these tools. We have tools of language and tools of mathematics to describe them. Really conceptualizing them is a challenge. One of the things I like to talk about when I talk to students, lecture and so on, I like to force them to think through what the numbers we toss around so casually mean. So never mind the scales of the universe; you could say something like the federal budget. “If you took the federal budget, and you wanted to look at it in single dollar bills and count them one a second, how long would it take you?” Is kind of question I ask, and it’s a very long time, it’s many, many lifetimes. And so getting one’s hands around that is not easy. And certainly for conceptualizing some kind of God, this is clearly harder. And this is clearly what – and some people will say, “Well, nature has laws and so on. Isn’t that maybe just what it is?” And I think, again, I keep referencing this remark of Weinberg’s, but I think that, again, part of that is a reaction to that, is to say it is just all sort of a machine, and it just marches on. And it’s not clear.

Now, I should say, though, that there are, in terms of this vastness of scales, we confront, as we think about interesting questions in cosmology and interesting questions in particle physics, we confront scales which are vastly larger and vastly smaller than those even we know from the scale of the universe. So, as I say, we know the universe is a little over 13 billion years old. We can see out the things that are kind of that far away from us in terms of light-years. But beyond that, we think that the universe might well be far vaster – things that are really beyond our ability to see, even in principle. And this takes us into the realms of speculation, what it means. And certainly, if you want to think about what that means for our – what is the significance of humanity and in relationship to what? These are hard questions.

Geoff Mitelman: What’s amazing to me, and I’m thinking about a professor named Stephen Goldman, who’s written some really interesting work, and talks about the importance of measurement, and the role of scientific measurement, of being able to see things or experience things that we’re able to do because of human technology. And an example he gives is knowing that the boiling point of iron, which I don’t remember the exact number, but I think it’s somewhere in the thousands – hundreds or thousands, that’s not something that you’re able to put your finger in and go, “Oh, that’s clearly 1189 degrees.” You’ve got to be able to have different measurements. And you can’t say, “Well, okay, this star is far away,” and it’s only until the better and better instrumentation to be able to find all the very large scales, the very small scales. They’re extensions of what we’re able to do as human beings.

Michael Dine: Right.

Geoff Mitelman: Which is absolutely fascinating to me.

Michael Dine: Right. One thing that I like to talk about – I talk about it in the book as well – is in our understanding of the universe. The universe on a large scale – this has been very much the story. So, one story I like to tell is that when Einstein – so, Einstein put forward his theory of general relativity, his theory of gravitation, in about 1915. And a question that immediately comes up there is, “how do you think about the universe as a whole?” And he and others quickly started to think about this, and they did something that, when I first read about it in a textbook as a graduate student, seemed to me utterly bizarre. They said, “Okay, well, to make any progress” – the equations are complicated, certainly in those days, particularly so without computers and so on – “so to make any progress, we have to make some simplifying assumptions. And so we need to adopt a simplified view of the universe.”

So what Einstein basically said [is] he adopted something called the cosmological principle and said, the universe looks the same in every direction in which you might look – up, down, side to side, and anywhere you are. So as you move around, it should be the same. Now, this looks totally crazy. I mean, certainly as we look out the window, the universe doesn’t look like that. And at the time, he really had no justification for that, other than to simplify his equations. Over the subsequent century – a little more than a century – that’s all changed. In fact, we know that on very large scales, on scales of order, hundreds of millions and billions of light years, that the universe is very much what they call homogeneous. So think of homogenized milk and isotropic. It looks the same every which way. And that’s a result of experimental developments, observational developments, really, over that intervening century. That’s why I say a lot happened that enlarged one’s view.

So, Hubble, who’s so famous, among others, who first found evidence for the expansion of the universe, also was really the first astronomer to really convincingly demonstrate that there are galaxies beyond the Milky Way. So that was something that really wasn’t understood when Einstein and others were playing around with these equations.

But what’s really sort of clinched the story was the study of something called the cosmic microwave radiation background. This is a low-frequency electromagnetic radiation – low frequency, it’s microwaves, like in your oven – which bathes the entire universe. It has a temperature which characterizes the universe. It’s characterized by a temperature. So the universe has a temperature, which today is about 2.7 degrees Kelvin, like 2.7 centigrade degrees above absolute zero. And this is remarkably well measured. And the isotropy and homogeneity of the smoothness of this radiation has been studied in exquisite detail. So, as you say, our tools have just evolved in an extraordinary way and continue to. So satellites first were able to do this in the 1990s, but this is just an area of continuous progress, enormous progress, over the last few decades.



Geoff Mitelman: And one of the wonderful things about science is that anytime there is more information about science, it creates new questions. Anytime there’s a new answer, it generates a whole new host of questions. And one thing that we’ve found to be a great bridge between the worlds of religion and science are awe and curiosity. And we quote Heschel here all the time, Rabbi Abraham, Joshua Heschel has a great line of “You praise before you can prove.”

But being able to see the different scales and the vastness and the minutiae creates a level of awe – and also a level of curiosity, which is really intrinsic to Judaism also, of being able to ask in the Talmud all the time, the question is, min ayim, “how do we know this? How do we know this? Let me ask this question. I’m going to probe this. I’m going to push this a little bit.” I would love to hear how you see these roles of. The role of awe and the role of curiosity in both your scientific work and in your Jewish life.

Michael Dine: Well, this is sort of paramount in both. I think, actually, we started out with a little bit about  “how does this play out in my life at home?” And I think so there are two. I think there are different elements in the pursuit of science. So there are elements which are rather pragmatic – we’re living them now. How do you develop a vaccine to deal with COVID? How do you manage the pandemic? This is a very critical realm of science. It’s in large measure driven by existential needs and demands.

Then there are other elements of science which are more curiosity-driven, or wonder driven. And certainly, a lot of what goes on in the fields I work in is in this category. So it’s unlikely, except in rather indirect ways, that we’ll see important technological developments from particle physics. As an example, we’re studying now energy – there’s a large hadron collider at CERN, studying physics at energy scales, which are deeply out of line with things that are likely to be of direct technological significance. That’s not to say that the equipment that’s developed, that other things may not be important [or] have significant applications. We’d like to point out that the World Wide Web emerged from experimental collaborations in the same laboratory in the 1990s. But that’s indirect. That was because scientists in various countries and large collaborations needed an efficient way of communicating.

So, that sort of distinguishes different areas of science. It certainly also distinguishes areas of cosmology and astrophysics. Again, there may be indirect outcomes, but it’s curiosity-driven. I talk about this in the book a little bit – a great deal of the effort in my own field of these days is directed at the question of “What is the dark matter?” So we know that there’s much more of the so-called dark matter, also dark energy. But let me focus on the dark matter than there is ordinary matter, protons and neutrons. And we don’t know what it is. And this question fires up a lot of people. There’s a lot of work, both theoretical and experimental, looking for, trying to figure out what this dark matter is. Is it – a variety of candidates I could go through? But we don’t know. This is an example of a sort of curiosity-driven question, which is not likely to have any direct implications in terms of something we do to our houses, or the way we protect the environment or something else.

Geoff Mitelman: Yeah. So much of study is for its own sake. And look, in Judaism, we talk about this of Torah L’ishma, of Torah. You study Torah because you study Torah. And a lot of science is, you study science to study science. And at the same time, anything that you’re studying is going to link to something human, right? The only way science advances is because of scientists who are human beings. And the only way that religion moves forward is because it’s impacting people’s human lives. And so, some of that is we’re studying this because it generates new questions and excitements, and just for the sake of the joy of discovery, that there’s value for that as well.

Michael Dine: Absolutely.

Geoff Mitelman: So I’m curious as to what’s something that surprised you in writing your book, either in any of the research, or any of the response that you’ve gotten – would love to know what changed your mind or what surprised you in prepping for this book.


Michael Dine: That’s a good question. I’m a little hard-pressed to think of something that really took me by surprise. I mean, the process of getting the book from a conception to reality certainly contained elements that I did not expect.

As I tell the story, the first version of the book that I wrote was – I approached an agent, a well-known agent, who was not interested, who felt it was a little too dry or something. But I got to know an author who helped me a great deal in thinking about how to communicate with the public, and who introduced me to his agent, and the rest of the story followed. Some of those things were surprises to me. So again, I’m hard pressed to think about surprises. In the book I tell – the book is full of stories, and certainly there are things that were surprising to me in those stories at the time.

So I noticed a colleague of mine, Joel Primac, is on, and he figures in one of these – probably more than one, but the one I’m thinking of. And this was the discovery of the dark energy. And so there was a period in the 90s where there were a number of paradoxes – I should back up, and I should say the dark energy is something that probably is something known as a cosmological constant. It’s something that Einstein introduced early on and then discarded, calling it the greatest mistake of his life. And many of us believe, basically, because while it turns out it’s a lot of the energy density of the universe, the energy of the universe, it’s really a lot smaller than you would guess it should reasonably be. So a lot of us just assumed it wasn’t there for some reason we didn’t know.

But in the 90s, there were a number of puzzles – many of them called to my attention, as I say, by Joel Primack, who’s on this call, and other colleagues – George Blumenthal, who was part of the car pool, which I described in the book. And it turned out – and I was very resistant. It just seemed so absurd, and it turned out to be true. It’s just a fact. It’s worthy of a Nobel Prize, and it’s worthy of continuing the subject of continuing observations and experiments.

On a more down-to-earth level and the level of things that matter for our day to day lives. There’s another thing that surprised me. I don’t think I mentioned in the book, but it was a striking statement. It goes back to the car pool, which I described often in the book, and the question of skepticism about global warming. And this skepticism is also often framed, or has often been framed as a statement that, “Well, the scientists who do this have an interest in getting grants and publicity, so they exaggerate their claims.”

And one of my colleagues in the carpool, a very distinguished high energy experimentalist who’s not an environmental radical at all – a number of years ago, said to me what should have been obvious. He said, “Isn’t it clear that the bias goes the other way, that you don’t want to convey this bad news because no one will want to listen? So you play it down.”

And in fact, I think there’s good reason to think that, if anything, that as a scientific community, broadly speaking, we’ve understated the issues. I remember that conversation very well. It was a very startling realization. And once it’s said, it’s almost obvious – that if you think about the way scientists work, and the way we talk about how humanity enters our activity, it’s pretty clear that looking at really complicated questions, things like this can bias the way you treat them.

Geoff Mitelman: In a couple of weeks, we’re going to be talking with Professors Gail Sinatra and Barbara Hoefer, who have a book called Science Denial. And I believe Professor Sinatra was an advisor for the Netflix movie Don’t Look Up. So we’ll talk a lot with them about those kinds of questions. And I think that’s such a challenge, of how do we communicate science effectively? And I think one thing that – a line that I loved about the COVID pandemic, and I can’t remember who said it – but part of the problem with a lot of the science communication with COVID was that the public was seeing the way the sausage is made, the way science is actually done. And some of that is that it’s helpful to be able to have the transparency of, “well, we knew this, but then this new data came in, and now this raises these new questions.” And most people, they’re so busy in their lives, they want to just know, “Here’s what I should do. Here’s what I need to do with the mask. Here’s what I need to do with the vaccination.”

Michael Dine: No, absolutely. I’ve talked about this quite a bit with people. That one question I sometimes asked is – in a sort of general way, “How does your scientific training inform your outlook?” And of course, that applies to some of the subjects today. It certainly applies to this one, and it certainly applies to this question of how we act as people of conscience, people of faith, or whatever, in the world. And that’s very well illustrated by COVID. And the fact that we don’t know from day to day, that our understanding does progress day to day – and especially on very hard questions. The propagation of an illness like this is complicated, and our understanding does vary. And being willing to adapt is critical.

I should say, as a story of the book – in the book, in discussing this question of Powers of Ten, I illustrate, in some of my introduction, precisely the issue of the exponential growth of the pandemic, and explain a little bit what happened and how mitigations prevented what might have been even more explosive growth. As the publication approached, my publisher in the UK asked that I change that, citing pandemic fatigue in England. So this is discussed slightly differently in the English version of the book than in the US book. But I would guess that already now, in the intervening few months since that happened in both countries, attitudes have evolved as the pandemic has evolved. So it’s been very much a case of seeing how the sausage is made, especially with really complicated issues like this.

And I think it does get back, again, to this question we talked about at the beginning, of sort of what the dinner table conversation looks like in my house. While our interests may be driven by different considerations, some appreciation of the uncertainties in science is very much there. And as they say, it does certainly get, also, to the question of climate change. I think at this point, what we would dearly love to know is really, precisely, which mitigations produce which results, how quickly. And that’s really, at this point, I’m afraid the uncertainty is not that there isn’t a problem. It’s the “What is it we minimally must do to achieve what goal?”

Geoff Mitelman: And we’ve talked with a few people on this show before, and with people who work in the environmental justice movement. And part of the challenge is that all the responsibility is placed on the individuals, when in fact, it’s often corporations and the government that need to be moving here.

Michael Dine: Right. To quote someone who’s perhaps not everybody’s favorite source on this – but I have to say, these days, I like to quote people on the other side to support my views, rather than sort of those I view [as being] on my side. So Dick Cheney actually had an interesting – a remark about personal virtue versus what really is necessary, if you believe this is a problem. And I’d like to say – I’m part of this car pool, and I’d like to believe we should all be doing things to mitigate our own footprint. But it’s also true that as a society at large – and unfortunately, it’s not even just the West, but on a global scale, steps are necessary. And again, it would be perhaps a different conversation even there, if we could say with great confidence, “we must reduce x to achieve goal y.” We can say this with some large errors, and this is, again, an example of sort of science as it’s practiced. But it would be nice to say things with smaller errors and greater certainty.

Geoff Mitelman: Mhm. And that’s a big challenge of just how knowledge progresses. We’re coming towards the end of our time, but before we were going live, we were talking about the Lick Observatory. So I got to go to Congregation Shir Hadash because it was part of our initiative of Scientists in Synagogues. And for those who were interested, we have just opened up another application of Scientists in Synagogues. We’re going to be giving synagogues to do work on Judaism and science. So I encourage you to be able to look at our website and find out about that. But I got to have a site visit there, and go up to the Lick Observatory in Northern California, which was absolutely gorgeous, and very glad I had somebody from the synagogue driving me rather than in my own rent-a-car, not knowing that area, of how wind-y and scary that drive is. But it was just absolutely unbelievable – the telescope and all the work and the campus that’s there. But you had said that you have a wonderful story about being at the Lick Observatory. So I want to give you that opportunity to be able to share that.

Michael Dine: Well, how wonderful I don’t know, but it is a story of being a clergy spouse. And I think of myself as a reasonably dutiful spouse in this regard. And there was an occasion, a number of years ago, where I got a message, an email from my wife, saying there was an event at the Lick Observatory honoring a donor who was also a congregant, would I like to come? And it turned out it was a time and a week that it wasn’t that convenient. And my first thought was, “Well,” and it is, as you say, it’s a challenging drive and various things. And my first response was, “well, maybe not because it’s a little hard time.” And then there was another message, basically from the chief fundraiser, saying, more or less, “you’re going.” And so we went. And this was an interesting event as the rabbinic spouse with two of my children, which was scientifically wonderful, just fabulous. The food was great. My chancellor was there, my dean was there, and I was doing all this in my spouse role. So that is kind of the main point of the story.

There was another occasion – there was a very famous astronomer at UC Santa Cruz, Sandy Faber, who I got to know at a Federation dinner one night. I think in the book, I just mentioned it as an event I attended as a spouse. And I got to know her, basically, because clearly the organizers didn’t quite know where to seat the two of us. So they sat us together. It was very shortly after we had arrived in Santa Cruz. It was my first real opportunity to get to know Sandy, and it was a very memorable dinner. So, again, I’m having these moments as a spouse where I’ve had spectacular scientific experiences sort of serendipitously.

Geoff Mitelman: Well, what’s so great is knowing the two of you and how, as a couple and as individuals, thinking about these questions of Judaism and science.

So, first of all, Michael, I want to thank you for the time and for all the work that you’ve done over your many years thinking about these kinds of questions. And want to thank all of you for joining. If you missed the beginning of this conversation, you can go to jewishlive.org/sacredscience, and you’ll be able to see all the conversation from the beginning. And I want to recommend that people pick up your book – pick up Michael’s book – called This Way to the Universe. And it’s really just a beautifully written book, and engaging, and clear. And so, and if people want to follow you on Twitter, I believe you’re at @MichaelDinePhys, correct?

Michael Dine: That’s right.

Geoff Mitelman:  So to be able to follow Michael. So thank you so much for all the great insights that you brought for us today and over all of your years of teaching.

Michael Dine: Okay. Well, thank you so much for having me and for this conversation. This was a lot of fun. Thank you.

Geoff Mitelman: Thank you. And for those of you who are joining, we hope you’ll join us next week. I believe we’ll be talking to Professors Gale Sinatra and Barbara Hofer, talking about their book Science Denial. In about a month, we’re going to be talking with actually Daniel Pink, who is the author of a New York Times bestseller called the Power of Regret. You can find us each week at jewishlive.org/sacredscience. You can also find us on our website at sinai and synapses.org. And you can follow me on Twitter –  I’m @Rabbi itelman – or at Sinai synapses. And we hope that you enjoyed this conversation. We thank you for taking the time with us today. And Michael, thank you again. This was wonderful to be able to talk with.