da’at tachton

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Miracle of Chanukah—Seeing and not Collapsing

As I wrote in my post, Schrödinger  Menorah:  Burning  And  Not  Burning, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, explains the miracle of Chanukah as a paradox of the menorah (chanukiah or hanukkiah) burning and not burning, thereby embodying the absolute nature of G‑d, who is not limited by His infinity and combines all possibilities including the infinitude (ko’ach bli gvul) and the finitude (ko’ach hagvul). The notion of the menorah burning and not burning easily lends itself to be cast in terms of the quantum superposition of states of burning and not burning. I couldn’t help myself to call it the Schrödinger Menorah. There a couple of problems, however, with this idea. Firstly, as the Rebbe wrote in 1971 in a letter to the editor of the Journal of the Association of [...]

G‑d Collapses Sotah’s Wave Function

The story of Sotah, a suspected adulteress, is very troubling on the first blush. Why would a woman be subjected to such humiliation?  The Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, points out that, to the contrary, the story of Sotah is the story of the boundless love of the Creator for his people. Notwithstanding the strict Biblical prohibition of erasing G‑d’s name, to vindicate the wrongly accused woman, G‑d allows and, indeed, decrees to erase His holy Name by dissolving the scriptural verses written on a parchment in the water that the woman would drink to clear her name. For as long as a woman is being suspected of infidelity, she cannot be intimate with her husband.  It takes a Divine intervention, whereby G‑d sacrifices His honor in allowing erasing His holy Name, [...]

A curious Case of Retrocausality—Dead Inherit the Living

Pinchas You shall apportion the Land among these as an inheritance, in accordance with the number of names. To the large [tribe] you shall give a larger inheritance and to a smaller tribe you shall give a smaller inheritance, each person shall be given an inheritance according to his number. Only through a lot shall the Land be apportioned; they shall inherit it according to the names of their fathers' tribes. Bamidbar-Numbers 26:53-55 Albert Einstein and Kurt Gödel in Princeton Einstein once said that he only went to his office at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton to have an opportunity to chat on the way home with his friend, Viennese mathematician, Kurt Gödel. Once, the story goes, Gödel came to Einstein's birthday party with a present – a new cosmological solution [...]

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