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I heard a Chuck Klosterman interview about his new book about humanity's tendency to be wrong, which sounds fascinating. Klosterman is a fascinating writer, someone who is deeply obsessed with and passionate about all the ebbs and flows of popular culture, but who is capable of stepping back from that passion to be strikingly dispassionate. I do not say what follows to criticize Klosterman.

But Klosterman said something about how the world believed Aristotle's ideas about gravity for 2000 years and has only believed in Newton's for a few hundred, and... I think this is worth picking apart. Call it an addendum to my post on Einstein overthrowing Newton (http://seekingferret.dreamwidth.org/165355.html).

I think this is a wrong way to think about Aristotle because it misunderstands the ancient world and therefore leads us to incorrect ideas about how science works.

Aristotle ascribed to materials some sort of natural desire to move toward the center of the Earth. He did so, one assumes, based on making the following observations: If you take an object and elevate it, it will fall toward the Earth. A person is capable of moving upward and downward depending on what naturally suits them. Therefore, one may guess that objects that move are impelled on similar principles, and if we only observe them moving downward, it is because their natural inclination is to move downward.

This is not a very sophisticated argument. A modern 10 year old with a little sophistication can conduct the experiments that guided the Newtonian revolution. But it's an observational argument from analogy. I've seen much, much worse from modern social science theorizing. It's not super terrible to believe this if you haven't performed the Galilean and Newtonian experiments. The consequences of believing this wrong theory are not particularly dire, unless you think that failing to achieve the Industrial Revolution until 1750 was a dire failure for humanity.

But my intention isn't to defend Aristotle. It's to say that it's silly to say that everyone believed this for 2000 years, just because nobody came up with Newtonian mechanics until the 1600s. I don't believe it's true that everyone believed this.

First of all, the Asian, African, and American worlds had never heard of Aristotle. I don't say this to score cheap PC points by biting back at someone for suggesting that the West was the whole world. I think there is something more fundamental here. Because large parts of Europe probably also hadn't heard of Aristotle. This was not an era of mass media, this was not an era of globalization. Suggesting anything about what large masses of people believed is wrongheaded. For the most part, peoples' beliefs were probably informed by the people in the village around them and not much else.

And second, as a consequence of this and of the kind of world they lived in, people probably had simple and particular ideas about how gravity worked. It's not like it was impossible to work with gravity before Newton, it's just that there wasn't Newton's powerful and useful mathematical system for calculating the force of gravity. So when an engineer designed and constructed a water-wheel to turn a mill, they made determinations about gravity that were functional. They had observations about how the wheel turned that were dependent on an in some cases very intricate empirical understanding of how gravity behaved.

So I'm not sure how productive it is to say that the ancients believed in Aristotelian gravity. They believed in a combination of Aristotelian gravity and empirically observed gravity, a theory of gravity we might call 'Carpenter's Gravity'.

And recall what I said in my last post in this series: "The value of science is not its elegance. The value of good science is its descriptive power, which endures even after good theories fall." What's important to recognize about pre-Newtonian physics was that in limited ways it was productive in terms of descriptive power. It did have an observational truth to it: Objects tend to move toward the ground, at a speed that can be measured in order to build mechanisms. And in some ways that pre-Newtonian Carpenter's Gravity remains productive to this day. Can you go to the moon with Carpenter's Gravity? No, but there are many simple mechanisms that can be designed without specific reference to Newtonian mechanics by trial and error and simple gravitational intuition. I know lots of actual carpenters who couldn't hack a high school physics class but are plenty clever when it comes to how things move.

And I think it's bad to go around telling each other that until Newton showed up, everyone was wrong about gravity. It gives a false sense of superiority, and a false sense of the narrative of scientific history. I think there is a problem when we exclusively think of science in terms of paradigms supplanting paradigms, because some component of the past paradigm always remains: the part that was productive. As an engineer, that's the part I usually care about anyway.

Shavuos

I participated in my shul's Tikkun Leil Shavuos again this year- a program designed to assist in the communal tradition of staying up all night on the first night of Shavuos, studying Torah. There are shiurim from various Rabbis and scholars, food and caffeine provided, access to sefarim, access to people to learn with. It's a very good time, if you are a Bible-nerdy Jew. The program drew about a hundred people.

I attended two shiurim and spent most of the rest of the night reading Rabbi Natan Slifkin's new Torah Encyclopedia of the Animal Kingdom, which is a pretty excellent work of scholarship on mentions of animals in Torah.

The first shiur was from the shul's Rabbi, and it was titled "Making Judaism Great Again". It was a sort of hashkafic survey of traditional Jewish approaches to questions about Democracy and elections, starting with the question of whether traditional Jewish can support democracy at all, given the mitzvah in Deuteronomy to establish a melech in Israel. He started with Rambam's clear assertion that appointing a King is a mitzvah, but quickly moved to post-Enlightenment thinkers like the S'fas Emes and Rav Kook who found ways to understand a democratic government as viable within Jewish thought. The S'fas Emes says something like (all assertions I make in this post have the caveat that I am writing from memory two nights after I learned this stuff at 2 in the morning) "I have seen countries that would have fallen apart without a strong monarch to lead them, and countries that would have been torn to shreds if you tried to impose a monarchy on them." Rav Kook, trying to essentially invent from scratch a religious Zionism compatible with the secular Zionism that had taken over the land of Israel, argues that in the absence of a monarch, the Torah obligations and powers given to the melech fall to the democratically elected leadership... in other words, that the secular authority of the Knesset and the Prime Minister is Torah-derived. So we get to a place where Torah scholars accept that democratic authority is a theologically acceptable substitute for monarchy, and in some cases may even be a mitzvah.

He then moved on to the case of American democracy, which poses slightly different questions as Jews are living in a non-Jewish society and one might think that Jews should withdraw and only participate in their own communal governance. So he brought a letter from R' Moshe Feinstein arguing that it's actually an obligation, the mitzvah of Hakarat Hatov, to participate in American democracy by registering to vote and voting, because of our gratitude that America's bill of rights so strongly protects our right to practice our religion. In an alternate approach to the same question, R' Joseph Soloveitchik argues in his famous essay "Confrontation" that the obligation to participate in American democracy is not a Jewish, religious obligation but rather a human obligation as part of an American Jew's dual consciousness.

And he concluded with a series of thoughts on what criteria a voter should use to elect representatives. There is a consistent thought in the early Haskalah thinkers that the consideration should be to elect representatives "Shem Hashamayim", in the name of Heaven, which is vague and ill-defined but seems to mean that the representatives should be acting in the interest of the people and the greater good rather than their personal gain. I raised the question of whether this precluded 'tactical voting', voting for a candidate you judged didn't represent the best ability to act "Shem Hashamayim", but who was more likely to win and was superior to the other likely-to-win candidate. People seemed to think this approach probably was, in fact, compatible with "Shem Hashamayim", which we concluded was outcome-driven rather than about a specific moral principle. But though the Rabbi specifically noted that he was precluded from making any endorsement, he concluded with a line of thinking on Pirkei Avot and mussar that seemed to me to be directed against Trump, noting that per Jewish moral thought, one who publicly humiliates his enemies is considered as a murderer. A line of thinking I definitely agree with, as I am not constrained to avoid making political endorsements.


The second shiur was a detailed practical analysis of the kashrut issues raised by Starbucks. This was fascinating. In the early days of Starbucks' growth, they mostly served beverages, most of which were certified kosher, so the folk wisdom that circulated in the frum community was that it was acceptable to get drinks at Starbucks, as long as you didn't eat the limited baked goods. The ground has unfortunately shifted underneath us rendering that folk wisdom a little out of date. Starbucks now serves hot meat sandwiches involving non-kosher meat, and the dishes used to cook these sandwiches are washed in the same hot water that is used to clean some parts of the coffee makers and blenders. The laws of the transfer of tumah (ritual impurity) from vessel to vessel are incredibly complicated and my understanding of them is limited, so it was very educational to go through the very specific example of how Starbucks cleans dishes in context of the laws of tumah.

The ultimate conclusion is that in Starbucks kiosks where they don't serve sandwiches, pretty much everything is still fine to drink, except for frappes, which use an unkosher base. In full service Starbucks, only the Espresso machine and the hot water tap for tea are not at all suspect. However, the Star K endorses a 19th century leniency with respect to coffee that says that since the problem of Starbucks dishes is based on a safek, a hypothetical, not actually observed situation in which a meat dish and a coffee maker part are cleaned at the same time, and since in general no goy is going out of their way to put anything unkosher into unflavored coffee, it's okay to assume that the coffee maker is not tamei when you are travelling and limited in access to other sources of coffee.

Since I am not a coffee drinker and only drink tea in Starbucks, this doesn't have a huge impact on me either way, but it was really interesting to work through the logic.



And then I read Rabbi Slifkin's book, which was terrific. I expected based on my past knowledge of Rabbi Slifkin that there would be a greater focus on the minutiae of identification, since that's the controversial stuff he gets into fights about online all the time, but while there was certainly a robust section on identifying each animal, that wasn't the point of the book. The meat of the book was in analysis of Biblical symbolism involving animals, and using zoological and historical knowledge of these animals and their interaction with people to delve deeper into the meaning of these metaphors. So he talks about how when the Bible mentions bears it often uses the figure of the mother bear bereft of her cubs, and he explains based on zoological observation of mother bears what the import of this metaphor is, how bear cubs are tiny and helpless and mother bears forge a deep bond with their young while protecting their helpless cubs for as long as two and a half years, often giving up as much as forty pounds of weight to feeding their cubs. I really enjoyed my reading and look forward to continuing to delve into this work.


And then at the strike of 5AM, we said shacharis, in one of the weirder davening experiences of the year. Since everyone hasn't slept, we had to have a 'designated sleeper' to recite Birchot Hashachar and the rest of Pesukei Dzimra, a fact that reinforces my longstanding point that the reason I won't change from saying "Shelo asani Isha" is that the Birchot Hashachar is a very specific sequence commemorating waking up, and tampering with it messes with its integrity. And "shelo asani isha" is not about inequality, it's about urination, just as "she'asani kirtzono' is a slightly more delicate euphemism for that same urination.

The weirdness continues as our 5AM 'vatikin'-ish davening is probably the fastest davening of the year, since everyone wants to get to sleep. Despite Hallel, a layning, a haftarah, several extra piyutim for the chag, and mussaf, we did all of Shacharis in an hour fifteen. Which is crazy. And then I schlepped home and slept. A lot.