Do Jews and scientists – and Jewish scientists – do a lot of the same things? Evidence points to “yes.” Being logical, systematic and organized is a large part of the Jewish intellectual tradition, just as it is also integral to science. Knowing that, the strong Jewish representation in the sciences begins to make more sense. Questioning vigorously, but also sometimes accepting not knowing, are spiritual practices in and of themselves.
Stephen Rosen: In the 1900s, they thought that they knew everything about physics. And then Einstein came along in 1905 and showed that they were wrong. And every so often people say, “Well, now we know everything,” and they’re always wrong. And I think that’s wonderful.
Michael Fel: There is something powerful about saying, “I don’t know. I have no way of proving this. I’m just really curious about this.”
Victoria Templer Rotkow: Science is a pursuit where you don’t know where you’re going to find. And kind of the joy of that, I think, is that usually you design a study – you know, real simple. “If you get A, that means B. If you get C, that means D.” And of course, you end up getting X. How do we make sense of these results?
Natalie Rudolph: And so being systematic and organized and, you know, understanding how to ask questions, how to answer the questions, how to collect the data and analyze the data to let you draw conclusions to answer the questions – that’s all part of what I do as a scientist.
Rachel Gurevitz: When you’re a scientist, you do need answers. But I think most, if not all, scientists would admit that a lot of their answers are the answer for now.
Daniel Geffen: There’s always more to investigate. And even when you’ve figured out the equation, you haven’t figured out how that equation affects the next one – or the next one after that, or the next one after that.
Stephen Rosen: Science is all about questioning, and sometimes not coming up with answers. I like that about Judaism. It feels like science to me.
Annie Tucker: There’s a lot of gray in Judaism – there are a lot of questions. There’s a sense that questions and not knowing – it’s not just that it’s okay, but that it’s actually sort of admirable, and that the work is to grapple and to ask the questions and to explore.
Natalie Rudolph: And the whole process of looking at something, asking questions, trying to understand what it means – it’s very similar.
Daniel Geffen: You know, the Talmud, for example, is really a series of questions, many of which are not even answered. Asking those questions, whether they be about the biggest of them, right – God’s existence, “Where do we come from?” – to the smallest questions, which is, you know, “Can I eat this?” or “Can I eat that?” They’re asked, and they’re opined, but they’re not really answered in any kind of definitive way.
There is still a sort of mystery component to both the religious life and the scientific life. The one that says, you know, that there’s always more to investigate. And, you know, no matter how much we may seek meaning, no matter how much we may want to know, no matter how many things in our age we have learned, there is always going to be some question mark at the end of some equation that requires us to go further. And, you know, to me, I’m excited by that rather than held back by it.
Scientists in Synagogues programming has tackled the topic of questions and inquiry in many different ways over the years:
Examining the relationship between the sometimes grueling trials and failures of scientific research and the “miracles” of its eventual application
Bonnie J. Buratti, PhDis a planetary scientist in the Division of Earth and Space Sciences at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, where she leads the Comets, Asteroids, and Satellites Group, and a member of Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center.
Bonnie Buratti: Yeah, this does happen. It is rare because scientific discoveries are rare. Most of it’s just drudgery. You know, wasn’t it Edison that said, “It’s 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration?” That’s true.
But there are a couple of things I do remember quite vividly. One of them was when I was on the Cassini Mission. This is a mission to Saturn and an investigation of not only the planet, but the moons and the rings. There is a kind of giant moon of Saturn, called Titan, appropriately – I mean, it’s really planet sized, it’s bigger than Mercury. And it has an atmosphere, mainly nitrogen.
And when we first got there, we saw what looked like lakes at the north pole, some kind of liquid. It’s not water because water is rock-solid there, but some kind of lake there. And you know, like, scientists love to disagree, and we couldn’t agree if they were really lakes – maybe they were just, like, smooth sand or something.
And one of the members of my team had observed an image we took of Titan, and it showed a glint, just like when you see the sun glint off of a lake or the ocean – this very bright glint.
The image that was taken by the instrument I was working on, which was an infrared spectrometer, showed this bright glint. And she sent this image around to just a few members of the team one night. And I remember seeing that on my computer and there was this bright glint in the north pole of Titan.
And that was positive proof that this was liquid – that there were liquid oceans. There were lakes on Titan. It was methane and ethane, not water. But this is the only object other than the Earth where we know there is actually a liquid on the surface. So that was one of them. I think that’s probably the most memorable time when, you know, here was a discovery, and there [were] only maybe five or six people in the world that knew about this discovery. Of course we put out a press release in a couple days, but yeah, I mean, that was one such incident where you’re just the privileged few that makes all the drudgery worth it.
Dr. Bob Pollack is Professor of Biological Sciences at Columbia University, a AAAS fellow, and a former member of Advisory Board of the John Templeton Foundation. He has also previously served as Acting President of West End Synagogue.
Bob Pollack: I think it is valuable, as a scientist, to acknowledge the differences among what is knowable, what is not knowable, and what is known. What is not knowable is not going to become known. The work of science is to go from not known to known with what is knowable. And what is knowable is subject to experiment.
An experiment is the creation, a human creation, a beautiful creation, of the idea that to understand something which is knowable, you must come up with an explanation that’s a hypothesis. That explanation must be disprovable if it can be tested by experiment. The experiment is a disprove attempt. When you cannot disprove your idea, you now know something. That scientific process for generating knowledge from what was unknown but knowable is not applicable to what is not knowable. So the category “not knowable” is not subject to science.
There are no ways to do disprovable experiments of what’s there after death. It’s unknowable.
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