A famous scientist once said, "Let rabbis stick to rabbinics and let scientists decide matters of science." A fair comment, at first glance, especially from a biology professor trying to get some wiggle room out of his Rebbe, who had published a serious critique of a popular scientific theory.
But what would that professor say today, now that science itself has come to the conclusion that matter itself does not exist?
Honest, objective, mainstream, nerds are reporting in peer-reviewed scientific literature that all matter is virtual, i.e., non-physical, a kind of intangible energy.
Until recently, nuts-and-bolts materialists could take solace in the notion that although over 99.99% of the atom is empty space with the odd electron whipping around, the atomic core was a nucleus of hard and heavy protons and neutrons.
Now that's changed. Even those protons and neutrons aren't the stuff we thought they were. Each one is made up of three smaller bits called quarks, but they only account for 1% of the proton's measured mass. The other 99% doesn't come from any material at all. It comes from the strong nuclear force.
The strong force comes from vacuum fluctuations, a modern term for creation ex nihilo or something-from-nothing creation. Vacuum fluctuations are unpredictable changes in what is called the "field." Physicists describe this "field" as an indivisible wholeness transcending space and time, a consciousness that connects everything instantaneously, and which is believed to be nothing less than the "ultimate ground of reality." In the old days, we would call this "G-d."
The vacuum fluctuations create virtual or surreal particles called gluons that randomly pop in and out of existence and hold the quarks together.
"Bah!" - you might say - "This is all theoretical! The table is hard, matter does exist, and quantum paradoxes are just logical games contrived by scientists who can't figure out what's really going on. And the proof is," you may say, "that the big world of our experience and the quantum world of the submicroscopic don't intersect. Those darned quantums are good for nothing in the real world!"
Ah, if only life were that simple.
Already existing today are functioning quantum computers that exploit a strange paradoxical property called duality and utilize it to magnify processing power by incredible leaps and bounds.
Duality means that before you observe a quantum, like an electron or a photon, it simultaneously has two opposite and contradictory properties, for example spin up and spin down. The idea behind quantum computing is that instead of the either/or logic that regular computers use, quantum computers can use two or more superimposed states at the same time. That ramps up processing power dramatically with every qubit, ie, every quantum in the processor.
D-Wave Systems, a leader in this field, has already tested 16 and 28-qubit processors which have been bought up by Google and have already solved tricky image-recognition problems that regular computers could not handle. Now D-Wave is testing its new supercomputer (pictured right) with a 128-qubit chip that will simultaneously hold 100 trillion trillion trillion bits of information, comparable to the number of atoms in the earth.
The Zohar says, "G-d looked into the Torah and created the world." Kabbalah teaches us that Torah is the blueprint of creation, so it is not surprising that we find a parallel to quantum duality in Judaism.
In this week's Torah portion, Acharei, we read about the High Priest's service on Yom Kippur in the Holy of Holies, the inner sanctum of the Temple in Jerusalem. It was there that the Divine Presence rested, above the Ark housing the sapphire cubes upon which the Ten Commandments were engraved.
The Mishna teaches that the place of the Ark was dimensionless space. When you measured it, it took up 2.5 cubits; when you measured around it, it took up no space at all. So was it there or not there? It was in two superimposed states, just like the duality of the quantum.
In a talk, the Lubavitcher Rebbe cites various Torah sources that explain how really every Jew's place is the Holy of Holies, and in the future, with the coming of Moshiach, this will be revealed.
In summary, what are some special qualities of the Holy of Holies?
1. It has a sampling of Divine revelation,
2. It has paradoxical properties,
3. It is not accessible to most people,
4. It will be accessible soon when Moshiach comes.
And what is special about Quantum theory?
1. It has a sampling of Divine revelation,
2. It has paradoxical properties,
3. It is not accessible to most people,
4. It will be accessible soon when Moshiach comes.
Science discovering G-d according to Torah generally and Chassidus specifically, is a Kabbalistic end-time prophecy coming to fruition now. The lesson for us is: It's time to let go of our materialistic outlook and just rely on Hashem, the Torah and Soul Power to help us complete our unique mission to bring Moshiach Now!
