The kugel remains

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein apparently isn't in Ian McEwan's league, as I hopefully suggested on January 13 that she might be. I'm not much enjoying her 2000 novel, Properties of Light, and the review I just read of her newest, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, doesn't inspire me to read it. In the review ("Prove It," in the January 31 New York Times Book Review), its author, Liesl Schillinger, writes:

...Goldstein's lofty psycho-religio-philosophical subtext, or rather metatext, doesn't gray her roman à clef about love, Jewish cultural identity, and academic infighting. She sews her philosophical inquiry to the material of everyday life...All the same, the stitches that join Goldstein's men, women, and themes show more in this novel than they do in her others....
    In 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, Goldstein shows that philosophers and scholars may construct as many proofs or disproofs of divinity as they like. But to people of faith such questions remain as inarguable as the persistence of kugel. [emphasis mine]
    [An] "Extreme Distinguished Professor of Faith, Literature, and Values," [a character who Schillinger says could have been based on Yale's emeritus professor Harold Bloom], or someone uncannily like him, [proposes to a graduate student that he write his dissertation on] the traditional Jewish Sabbath meal of cholent (bean and potato stew) and kugel (pudding)....[p. 10]

Sorry if my January 13 post got you all excited.

And me. Still, though, reviewers often mislead us. I'll browse the book when I find a library that has it. Anyway, the novel is said to come

with an appendix that lists and refutes 36 arguments for the existence of God...To taste their rigor, sample No. 20, the Argument from the Intolerability of Insignificance, which travels from Premise 1 ("In a million years, nothing that happens now will matter") to Premise 4 ("It is intolerable...that in a million years nothing that happens now will matter") to Premise 8 ("God exists"). [Goldstein] dismisses this argument as "the fallacy of wishful thinking."

That has to be fun.

Seriously, though, it's true. We humans, thrown here as we are, with our artistic consciousnesses, our imaginations, how we do rail against that and other intolerabilities. The intolerability that really bad people won't be punished (beyond what minor pains of conscience they may succeed in feeling before they die). The intolerability that our parents' bodies lie in cold graves back in our hometowns, that our bodies will lie somewhere too, someday, if we don't try to ensure that they will be cremated.
    Can our sadness at these intolerabilities be all we need to know of why religion has such a tight grip on some of us?

Still trying to figure it out

For the week preceding his birthday on Friday, my friend Jim was a week younger than I. His daugher's birthday gift to him was the book Why Does E=mc²: And Why Should We Care?, by Brian Cox (the physicist, not the Scottish actor). Jim says that his daughter remembered that he's "still trying to figure out relativity."
    One of the things that I've been trying to figure out is sort of related to relativity: What did physicist David Bohm (1917-1992) contribute to our understanding of reality? I've seen references to Bohm for decades, prominently in books like Fritjof Capra's The Tao of Physics (1975) and Gary Zukav's The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics (1979).
    Being told of Jim's birthday present, I rushed to tell him about the Rebecca Goldstein novel that I said the other day I'd asked my local library to hold for me: Properties of Light: A Novel of Love, Betrayal, and Quantum Physics.
    I had picked the book up from the library on Jim's birthday and started reading immediately. Trying to comprehend what I'd gotten myself into as I read the first chapter—whose opening sentence is, "The essential fact is that I hate her"—I'd skipped ahead to Goldstein's afterword [pp. 243-44]. I wrote to Jim:

Did you see my post about Rebecca Goldstein? I've started reading her novel, and it has a character based on David Bohm. In the afterword, Goldstein says that,

though Einstein himself had early on declared Bohm his successor, Bohm spent the great bulk of his life in embittered obscurity, in his last years residing in England and teaching at a night college in London.

Had you ever heard of David Bohm? I've seen many references to him over the years.
    She says that in 1952 he'd presented a "hidden variables" formulation of quantum mechanics, but his former mentor, J. Robert Oppenheimer (they'd both worked on the Manhattan Project),

perhaps more than any other physicist, was responsible for Bohm's being buried alive. He was quoted as suggesting that "if we cannot disprove Bohm, then we must agree to ignore him."

    Goldstein quotes from a personal letter of Bohm:

"I have only one strong emotion left, and that is hatred for the forces that have destroyed so many human beings, including myself. For relative to what I could have become, I regard myself as destroyed."

    But Bohm's ideas are still alive, Jim. Goldstein concludes the afterword:

Only relatively recently have a growing number of "respectable" physicists begun working with what they have taken to calling "Bohmian mechanics."
    The formidable problem of reconciling quantum mechanics with relativity theory still awaits a solution.

Maybe learning something about Bohm can help you figure out relativity?

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein

To my probably deserved embarrassment, I'd never heard of Rebecca Goldstein. But I've heard of her now, from my intellectual alter ego Sam Harris, in an email from samharris.org:

New Novel about the New Atheism: Rebecca Goldstein's, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God
"So extravagantly witty and smart that it's making everything else I've read recently seem drab."
    —Ron Charles, Senior Editor at The Washington Post Book Review

"Comic and supremely witty, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God is both a satire of the academic world and a feast of philosophical and religious ideas."
    —Alan Lightman, author of Einstein's Dreams [an excellent work, which I have read; by the way, Lightman is on the MIT faculty, along with Goldstein's husband, linguist Steven Pinker]

"You do not have to perpetrate an act of faith to confront the question of why there is something rather than nothing. It is faith itself that consists of nothing. Rebecca Goldstein, on the other hand, is quite something."
    —Christopher Hitchens, author of God Is Not Great [ditto]

"Rebecca Newberger Goldstein does it all. She has written a hilarious novel about people's existential agonies, a page-turner about the intellectual mysteries that obsess them. The characters in 36 Arguments for the Existence of God explore the great moral issues of our day in a novel that is deeply moving and a joy to read."
    —Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Everything Is Illuminated [not yet]

    I get from these recommendations the same thrill that I got from the ad I saw (in 2005?) in The New York Times Book Review for Harris's book, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. I knew it would speak to me on my own wavelength.

And the list of Goldstein's publications is intellectually provocative. From a research university's online library catalog:

Goldstein, Rebecca, 1950-
Betraying Spinoza : the renegade Jew who gave us modernity
    New York : Nextbook : Schocken, c2006. [Spinoza!]
The dark sister
    New York, NY : Viking, 1991. [according to Wikipedia, "a postmodern fictionalization of family and professional issues in the life of William James"]
Incompleteness : the proof and paradox of Kurt Gödel
    New York : W.W. Norton, c2005. [a filched book about Gödel's incompleteness theorem graced my summer of 1965]
The late-summer passion of a woman of mind
    New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, c1989.
Mazel
    New York : Viking, 1995.
The mind-body problem : a novel
    New York : Random House, c1983. [don't you worry about this too?]
Properties of light : a novel of love, betrayal and quantum physics
    Boston : Houghton Mifflin, 2000. [let me know if you can explain quantum physics to me]
Strange attractors
    New York : Viking, 1993.

An Ian McEwan-class novelist? I'm rubbing my hands in anticipation, having this morning requested Properties of Light from my local library.
    36 Arguments for the Existence of God sounds like some excellent "talk about faith," possibly of the sort Russ Douthat had in mind in his op-ed piece, "Let's Talk about Faith", in Sunday's New York Times:

When liberal democracy was forged, in the wake of Western Europe’s religious wars, this sort of peaceful theological debate is exactly what it promised to deliver. And the differences between religions are worth debating. Theology has consequences: It shapes lives, families, nations, cultures, wars; it can change people, save them from themselves, and sometimes warp or even destroy them.