The History of Creation in Three Words
The history of Creation can be expressed in three words (not even words but mere conjunctions): “and,” “or,” and “and/or,” whereas the history of physics may be expressed in two of them: “or,” and “and/or.”
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 [...]
Schrödinger Menorah: Burning and not Burning
The miracle of Chanukah revolves around a single-day-supply of olive oil burning for eight days during the rededication of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem (Bet HaMikdash), after Maccabees liberated Israel from the occupation by the Greco-Syrian Seleucid empire. Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson There are countless explanations of the miracle of the oil lasting eight days. The Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, offers a unique explanation. The Rebbe dismisses any explanation of the miracle that relies on the miraculous nature of the oil itself. The Rebbe maintains that to be kosher for the Menorah, the oil had to be natural olive oil, not some miraculous oil. According to the Rebbe, the miracle was that natural oil was burning and not burning at the same time. The Rebbe draws an analogy with [...]