Parashat Terumah – The Ark and Quantum Theory |
Scientific discoveries come in numerous forms. Some are achieved through careful observation and disciplined experimentation. Others, far more rare, erupt into history as sudden and unimaginable visions of reality—revelations that expose dimensions of existence no one suspected.
There are “known knowns”—things we know that we know. There are “known unknowns”—things we know we do not yet “know”. But then there are the “unknown unknowns”: realities so far beyond our conceptual framework that we do not even know that we do not know them.
Such was the case in 1905, when a young patent clerk named Albert Einstein flipped our understanding of the universe. In a series of papers written within a few months, he shattered conventional notions of space and time. Special relativity was not merely a refinement of prior knowledge, it was an eruption from the realm of the unknown unknown.
But, in some sense, even Einstein’s revolution pales beside what emerged in the decades that followed: quantum mechanics.
Quantum theory did more than simply revise our understanding of matter—it destabilized the idea of objective existence altogether. Particles behave differently when observed. Their properties are not fixed “out there” in some independent world but appear to crystallize through the act of observation.
The American physicist John Archibald Wheeler called this a “participatory universe.” We are not detached spectators of the cosmic drama; we are participants in its unfolding. Suddenly, humanity—so degraded by Copernicus and Darwin—is once again reinstated at the center of existence.
As Niels Bohr wrote, reflecting on quantum theory: “In the drama of existence we are ourselves both........