Tuesday, Jul 8, 2008
Kabbalah and nanotechnology share unexpected common ground: They are testament to the incomprehensible infinite.
Oct 7, 2004 | Back in 1984, IBM sent an obscure University of Kentucky professor on a mission to study the flow of toner in copy machines. To any other scientist, the project might have been seen as "busy work," void of significance. But to Mike Roco, now the chief architect of the U.S. National Nanotechnology Initiative, nothing on a small scale is ever insignificant.
As Roco spent hours contemplating tiny specks of toner, he had a revelation. Something really bizarre was happening once he zoomed in to the nanoscale, a realm where distances are measured in atomic lengths. The bits of toner transformed themselves from solid to liquid depending on their dimensions, shapes, or the distances between them and their neighbors. He saw for himself that the building blocks of nature -- whether liquid, solid, plasma or gas -- could theoretically be manipulated into, well, anything. All things converged on the nanoscale.
Two decades later, Roco's larger mission in U.S. nanotech policy is to bring about the conditions for differing schools of technology to converge. Physics, chemistry, biology? Don't mind the gap. It doesn't exist.
Or, according to one nanotech observer:
"The genius of nanotechnology is the reduction of space. Smaller is infinitely more powerful ... Today, scientists recognize that less matter and less space, not more, equals more raw power." And the closer scientists look, "the more they realize that it's not about physical matter at all, but about energy."
The observer quoted here is no scientist: He's Rabbi Yehuda Berg, Madonna's personal guide into Jewish mysticism, or Kabbalah. Madonna's rabbi sees incredible similarities between Kabbalah and nanotechnology, similarities that bring the worlds of science and spirituality into unexpected harmony.
Today, Kabbalah is enjoying a surge in popular interest and appreciation. Nanotechnology, on the other hand, is often viewed with suspicion: How will these new materials interact with the human body and the environment? Could run-amok nanotech replicators turn the world into gray goo? Nanotechnology has a P.R. problem -- could a little spirituality help?
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To a Kabbalist, the Torah has many tiers -- and the Bible stories that have come down to our generation are only the most simple, literal translations. To these scholars, every single word, letter, number combination -- and even the spaces between them -- bring with them different levels of truth. The most brilliant men of Medieval Jewry, shut out of any other profession in which their intellect could be used, employed their mind power to reflect on not only the minutiae of Jewish law but also the way in which the laws were written.In Hebrew, each character can also represent a number. So, the math savvy among them, as they contemplated God, could not help but contemplate infinity as well.
Kabbalists believe that "Creation" is constantly taking place, that the universe itself exists on a continuum of interdependent realms. God, they say, is a "verb," not a thing but the sum of all things -- a process that ties all things together at its most basic level. Like the famous "butterfly effect," your actions, your thoughts, your deeds, have ripple effects. But if God, or nature, is infinite, how can that ripple have had a beginning or an end, and how could it have moved from point A to point B with infinite fractions in between?
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