Dr. Andy Goldfinger: Should We Believe in an Invisible Spiritual World?

i see that i am being recorded um that is an issue that will come up a little bit later in this talk so let me start from somewhere else um tara tells us that this world that we perceive daily the things that we touch the things that we see the physical world is just the tip of an iceberg that there is a an invisible spiritual world which is infinitely greater than this physical world which we encounter every day not only is there an invisible spiritual world but it affects us very deeply on a daily basis um this is the 21st century um unless you're listening on watching this video in the 22nd century um can we believe in something which is invisible that surrounds us that is with us all times because we we sort of learn from an early age that those are the things of fairy tales and the things of science are real you can touch them you can see them they're they're as real as a bottle of ketchup yes i like ketchups can we believe in a invisible world that surrounds us and somehow affects us well let's go back to a somewhat earlier scientist than a 21st century scientist a 17th century scientist and his name was he was dutch so his name was antonio if there's any dutch people out there they can probably pronounce it this is what his name uh was uh antonio fun his name his name was tony and uh he was a scientist who used a new invention which was called the microscope to look at very very small things and he was amazed to see that there were little things moving around that were too small to be seen by the naked eye which is what most of us are equipped with um and uh he called them he had a name for them little animals i forget exactly what he called them and what he was seeing basically were bacteria uh bacteria are one form of microbial life life which is too small to be seen with the with the naked eye um another type of micro by life that we're all familiar with are viruses and the the type of microscope that tony was using uh was not powerful enough to see viruses viruses were discovered much later and it was discovered that when you built filters that could remove bacteria sometimes things still got through that made other things sick and there was something getting through the filters and discovered these are viruses uh and it became apparent to scientists that we are surrounded by something which is invisible which affects us very much uh but which we can't see now this is being recorded in tamus of 5780 and i am inside my house right now where i stay most of the day because of the a covert 19 pandemic which is caused by a little teeny virus which i have never seen in my life maybe some pictures from electron microscopes and since i'm at home and a lot of us have been davening at home not going to shul one shabbos shortly after the quarantine began i was saying um which was the the morning um uh psalms that we say on on shabbos morning and um sometimes frankly they go kind of quickly but i was by myself and i had the success and i spent an hour going through these through these psalms in a way i'd never done before and they talk about the grandeur of god god created the mountains god makes the sea smash against the land and we're told that the land says you know has has protected active sand to keep the it's from being destroyed god made the entire cosmos the sun the stars the planets everything is made by god and we see god's grandeur and yet i was staying home because god created something which is not huge and magnificent but very very teeny and so teeny that i can't see it and no one around me can see it it's called a type of coronavirus and because of this lino teeny teeny thing that we can't even see the world has been brought to its knees commerce around the world has halted to a large extent and none of us here in tamus of 5780 know where this is going you my dear listener or watcher who may be watching this a few years from now know but but i don't and i'm seeing the power of god through teeny little things that i didn't know existed i'm not going to go through the story of eliahu of elijah the prophet elijah on mount carmel but you should look into um the prophets in the bible and read it it's an extremely important story and after it's over eliahu runs away from his mission he he can't do it anymore and he goes into the desert and there's a big storm and it doesn't impress him and then there's an earthquake and it doesn't impress him and then he hears a still small voice and he recognizes god's presence and that impresses him and as i was sitting there saying these psalms on a friday night by myself i was less impressed by god making the cosmos and the mountains and the seas than i was by god making a little teeny teeny thing which is invisible that is surrounding lots of places in the world and i will not show you the mask and face guard that i have that for the occasions where i dare venture out that i use and i certainly hope that year from now nobody needs to use those anymore please god so that was one of the first examples in science of things that we can't see but are real and affect us another one kind of came in the in the 19th century my favorite physicist was a man named richard feynman and i i can't talk about it here but f-e-y-n-m-a-n if you look him up you'll find him i think the greatest physicist was isaac newton but my favorite favorite is um richard feynman and he was asked who he thought the greatest physicist of all time was oh by the way i should tell you that i worked for 40 years as a physicist and now i have achieved my my life's career goal which is to be a retired physicist which is much much better but anyway feynman was asked whose favorite physicist greatest physicist was and he said james clerk maxwell now i don't know to what extent the average person have heard of maxwell but every physics major has heard of maxwell maxwell unified electricity and magnetism now what does that mean we all know what electricity is you know we have static electricity you walk across the rug and you get a shock and we have uh electricity that comes in our house through wires and so on we all know what magnetism is it's a force that a magnet holds things to your refrigerator now what's amazing is that maxwell studied uh magnetism long before there were refrigerators so i'm not quite sure what he had to stick his magnets to but but that's besides the point they seem like different things magnetism electricity he showed that they're this part of the same phenomenon which is now called electromagnetism and every physics major learns about learns about this the first year that they're studying physics and they learn about something which i'll put up now which may look confusing to some of you but every physicist who sees this will immediately say what it is right here it is okay all you physicists out there what have i put up these are called maxwell's equations and they were his magnificent contribution to physics uh e over here means an electric field b means a magnetic field and as to the rest of it well take a course in physics and you can understand what that is these showed that electricity and magnetism are again a single phenomenon that sometimes has electric effects sometimes has magnetic effects and maxwell was able to unite those and i think that one of the reason that reasons that feynman regards him as the greatest physicist to ever live is that the goal of physics as it's usually stated is to unify all the forces of nature and show that they're all the same thing we now know pretty much of four forces which are electromagnetism gravity which makes um things fall down attracts us to the earth and then two other forces that we don't encounter because every in daily life unless we're physicists called the strong force in the weak force um the goal just as maxwell unified electricity and magnetism and showed there really one phenomenon um electromagnet magnetism was um unified with the weak force uh back i think it was the 60s don't quote me on this uh by weinberg and salam and i forget who else it's been a while since i retired and they showed that they're really the same phenomenon but come out different ways people are working on on what they call gut which is the grand unified theory to show that electromagnet electromagnetism and the weak force now called the electro weak force are really part and parcel of the same as the strong force and now you would have two forces the electro weak strong black force and gravity and then the goal of physics would be to form what is uh show that gravity is really the same phenomenon as the other forces and achieve what is called t-o-e the theory of everything now we are not there yet we're pretty far from it um it's interesting that physicists kind of assume that there is an underlying unity in the world um and even when i've spoken with physicists who are atheists or professed to be atheists they believe that there's an underlying unity why should that be to us as torah jews well why would there be an underlying unity because the whole world proceeds from a unity which we call the rebonus of allah which we call god and as you get deeper into some of the more kabbalistic or mystical ideas and and these are things which i don't know they're things that i speak about but don't know about it's a lot of things that i speak about that i don't know about this is one of them um we see that there are all sorts of ideas about how this multiplicity in the world came out of the unity but the assumption is there's a unity there and the physicists all believe maybe not in god but in there being an underlying unity now one of the things that maxwell did with his wonderful equations and i'm going to show them again because they're really when you get into these and you you really study these a lot in physics they are what is technically known as cool and neato and they show a lot of stuff and from his equations maxwell is able to show that the magnetic field and the electric field okay there they have directions can oscillate in space and form waves and from these equations he was able to calculate how fast those waves move and it turned out that they move at the speed of light and people had always wondered light what light was and in the 19th century at that time it was believed light was a wave uh nowadays we know it is a wave but it's also a particle and if that bothers you well that's quantum mechanics it's been said if you don't you're not disturbed by quantum theory you don't understand it we won't get into the here we did that in another lecture um it occurred to him that light was an electromagnetic wave and that there that that because that's the speed at which it moved sorry i dropped something which i will need so excuse me for one moment uh we'll find it we'll find it in just a minute when the time comes okay so um he predicted that in addition to light which would move at the speed of light there would be other waves that would move at the speed of light and they might have a different frequency they might vibrate at a different rate light vibrates at a very fast frequency some of them might be slower and um it turned out that that later on people like like hertz were able to actually produce and measure these waves and in addition to light we have other names for them we call them x-rays and we call them radio waves radio waves microwaves these are all electromagnetic waves that come through space uh and we can't see them um and can we believe in them well i have here a box and as you can see nothing up my sleeve that's why i'm wearing short sleeves it's an empty box there's nothing in this box is there well is there really nothing in that box i have here a small radio and let me put this radio in the box and uh the radio is working inside the box because these radio waves go right through the sides of the box and even when the radio is turned off this box is filled with radio waves they're going through it right now and my brain has radio waves going through it right now um physicists refer to radio waves as rf stands for radio frequency and we live nowadays bathed in rf we have radio stations we have television stations we have microwave stations that are transmitting information such as the internet and internet information is going through my brain and your brain right now we have um cordless telephones we have cell phones we have um remote controls we have a myriad of things that are producing rf at all times in our lives and we live um literally bathed in rf and does it have any effect on us um not that i know of but there are some people who are concerned with what happens when you take a a cell phone and put it next to your ear and you you get more radiation in your brain nobody has shown that that is really harmful but the fact is we don't know um it's an open question about whether we're affected by this or not we certainly are affected by what we listen to what we see on the internet um this is another example of something which is with us all the time and it's real and it is totally invisible and right now it's here i am recording this on july 15th and it is to be put on on the internet on july 16th so let me say something about july 16th july 16th of 19 um excuse me july 16th of 2020 all right happens to be the 75th anniversary of the first man-made nuclear explosion during world war ii the americans and the germans by the way but that's a whole other story worked very hard at the manhattan project to produce the first atomic bomb and it was tested on july 16th of 1945 exactly 75 years ago at a place called alamogordo new mexico and the place where it was um where it was uh tested was called the trinity site now at this point i have to leave this a minute to look for what i dropped which i need and the question is where did it go excuse me one moment please maybe this can be edited out for a short time there you did not see me because the camera was not pointed at me and therefore even though i continued to exist i was invisible how's that for trying to make this look like a demonstration huh okay um the trinity site still exists in alamogordo new mexico you can go there not allowed to go to the actual site anymore because people have been picking up relics of it and it's a desert so there was and now the atomic bomb made an explosion which was pretty hot as they say there's different degrees of hot and physics there's there's hot and then there's a higher degree which we call takahat well the atomic explosion was hot hot momish it was so hot now what happens when you really get sand hot well it's made out of silicon dioxide it melts and it produces something which we call glass uh it's quite an old technology making glass in the time of the gomorrah it was it was well known and um some of the sand that was at the trinity site became melted and fused into glass now not real high quality glass and it had a greenish tint to it and it came to be called green glass uh it is now called trinite a mineral found only at that site this melted glass it's interesting that um there were some people who were arrested and two of them executed um as the so-called atomic spies in america the rosenbergs um julius and ethel rosenberg a whole whole story in itself and um and i and one of the relatives i believe that it was ethical ethel rosenberg's brother i think um was named david greenglass and that stuff which is found that the trinity site is called green last just an interesting uh coincidence um from a terror viewpoint we don't believe there are coincidences in the world but it doesn't mean that we understand them when they occur we don't and uh being that i am a physicist rather than a normal person a friend gave me a very nice gift guest in a beautiful little gift box i don't know if you could can you see what it says probably not but it says trinite july 16 1945 and inside this box is a little uh velvet bag and inside this velvet bag is the kind of gift you would only give to a physicist and it is a small piece of green glass of trinidite from the trinity site now um shortly after the explosion this was pretty radioactive uh not as radioactive now i can hold it in my hands now i have here a little um geiger counter which i'll turn on and if i put the trinity near it let's make sure this is on just a minute yeah um yeah every time it makes i'm sorry every time it makes a little a little blip it is because there's some little particle subatomic particle passing through it these that we're seeing right now are due to what we call natural radiation some of the natural radiation comes from the house that i'm in some of it comes from outer space as cosmic rays now let's see what happens if i put the trinitide over here not a long spot if if you watch this over the period of a few hours you will see that you do get a few more particles in it then then then you do just from this background radiation there you're seeing a few of them now okay more than we saw before it's not terribly radioactive um but um putting my my valuable physicist gift away i have something else over here which is a little piece of uranium ore and if i put this next to the geiger counter well there's a lot of radiation there all right not enough to be dangerous to handle a little bit like this but this got a quite a bit of radiation now what's happening here is little invisible particles are traveling out of the uranium which is in this uranium war my geiger counter which is registering them and so on by the way i will tell you that i had to go for a certain type of cardiac stress test where they inject radioactive material into your body and they have gloves and protective equipment and everything and they said that i was the first patient ever to come to the nuclear medicine center bringing his own geiger counter i took that as a compliment but i am told there there is medication for that now let's look again at this radiation that's coming from the uranium if i put my finger in the way what's happening those little particles they're probably beta particles they're probably electrons coming out of the radioactive uranium here are going right through my finger as we speak they're going through my finger do i feel them no can they affect me let's hold that question for a minute okay but there are in certain places at least like with uranium or little teeny particles that we can't see uh what about the rest of us are we surrounded by them well if i keep my geiger counter going you'll see from time to time it gives a blip from from um there's there's one now that could be a cosmic ray uh that could be a piece a a something from the the granite in my kitchen i've granted countertops and granite has some natural radiation to it it could be from some of my food because we do eat things that are radioactive like do you like brazil nuts well brazil nuts are one of the more radioactive foods that we eat but probably the most radioactive food that we commonly eat are bananas because bananas have potassium in them potassium in them they're not easy for you to say potassium in them and many doctors will recommend that people who have low potassium eat bananas or potassium supplements it doesn't matter which it is it's still going to be slightly radioactive because potassium has a various isotopes and one of them is radioactive and then take it out now is eating bananas dangerous um the radiation levels aren't enough not enough to bother us um because we're getting so much radiation any anyway all the time from around us uh does it affect us now does eating bananas affect us in terms of the radiation what about cosmic rays some of which come from the far parts of the galaxy and i've been traveling literally hundreds of millions of light years to get here and then they come into my geiger counter and it goes and they're gone um these types of radiation are with us always we are bathed in various levels of radiation uh does it hurt us well if you were to speak to any nuclear scientist or any person who works with nuclear materials they would say that as long as the radiation you're getting from something is low compared to our background radiation don't worry about it it's a reasonable thing to say since we always have the background radiation and we can't do anything about it unless we live in a deep lead house you know or go down underground more of that later uh then um it doesn't make any sense to worry about it but does the background radiation having any effect on us the answer is probably yes because when um people reproduce we know that there's uh genes that come from the father and genes that come from the mother and they combine in certain ways and mutations can occur one of the possible causes of a mutation is a particle high energy particle that you can't see in other words some radiation um interacting with the with the molecule so radiation can cause genetic change we know that high degrees of radiation can cause enough genetic genetic change to cause cancers um in the years following world war ii it was very tragic but people would wear watches in those days the watchers had the watches had hands that were painted with radium and with radium and a phosphorus so they would glow at night and this was done by women with brushes painting this radioactive material on them and they would very often straighten out their brushes with their mouths and a lot of these women became very very sick with cancers and it was just not known at the time that how dangerous this was uh when i was a boy i used to go to uh the shoe store with my mother children's shoes should store and i love going because they used an x-ray machine to look at your feet to see how the shoes fit and you could look through a little a little viewpoint as this it was actually a fluoroscope and i could wiggle my toes and see them going and nobody knew how dangerous the radiation of x-rays was at that time it was just fun to do in a shoe store i don't know if anyone's ever done a study of whether people who owned those shoe stores had more illnesses associated with radiation so it's here radiation's here pretty much can't stop it don't worry about it hashem's got it here for a reason um can it cause mutations kind of cause things to happen in our body well yeah it can to some extent hashem made our bodies so that genetic damage gets repaired has mechanisms for repairing genetic damage sometimes it doesn't and sometimes you know a child is born with looks a little different than the parents or you know maybe the nose is longer or whatever and it may be a result of some particle that came from outer space and did this and hashem made all of this because it's a way of influencing what happens in the world and it's with us always but it's invisible we don't perceive it we don't see it know what's going on right now talking about right now look at my hand there are some cosmic rays going through it occasionally as we saw in the geiger count but let me tell you something about another kind of radiation and this is one most people have heard of cosmic rays but many people have not heard of the radiation i'm going to talk about and that's called neutrino radiation now most people in high school learned about neutrons that the nucleus of an atom has protons and neutrons and neutrinos are very different than neutrons okay neutrons are fairly heavy particles now when i mean heavy i mean they're so light one neutron is so light you couldn't weigh it but compared to other sub-atomic particles they're reasonably heavy um electrons are a couple of top couple thousands of times lighter than neutrons are neutrinos are at least a million times lighter than than electrons are all right at least a million times and maybe less when i was going to graduate school um and that was in the days where we didn't have notebooks we used to have clay tablets and and you know and keep our notes that way it was believed that neutrinos had no mass they didn't weigh anything uh it has since been discovered that they do have mass but it's very very little it's also been discovered there are three types of new neutrinos the electron neutrino the tau neutrino and the um the muon neutrino a fascinating fascinating subject neutrinos are produce a type of radiation called neutrino radiation hey you know you're beginning to get the hang of this and they interact very weakly with matter they rectoract so weakly with matter that a neutrino from here could easily pass all the way through the earth and come out the other side um and almost always will to have a good chance of stopping a neutrino a single neutrino you'd probably need like a half a light year trillions of miles of lead that's how well how do we know that they're there if they interact so weakly it's because there's so many of them because there's so many of them some of them will interact but very very few very few of them do now one of the primary sources of by the way i have to tell you that when i was an undergraduate i worked at for summer at brookhaven national laboratory in long island excuse me it's properly pronounced long island new york and they were doing an experiment to see if there were more than one type of neutrino at that time and they had a source of radioactive particles and they had to filter out to make sure that nothing got through to their experiment except neutrinos so what they did is they had 150 feet of concrete blocks and battleship armor i still have a picture of it and nothing got through there the neutrinos just sailed right through and that's how they they got their source neutrinos to study people who have studied neutrinos have um used other types of filters so for example there's an experiment where they took um i don't know the number in the thousands and thousands of gallons of dry cleaning fluid basically which has the proper composition in terms of the nuclei to occasionally occasionally stop the neutrino and to make sure nothing else another other radiation affected it they did this in a abandoned mine you know like hundreds hundreds of thousands of feet underground so the only thing that could possibly come in there was those neutrinos so they're with us always well where do the neutrinos come from that we experience daily in our lives most of them come from the sun the sun has a lot of nuclear processes going on inside it and it is a fascinating story not only of what the processes are going on inside the interior of the sun but how we know that in many ways we know more about the interior of the sun than we do about the interior of the earth but that's a whole other story and the sun is producing lots and lots of neutrinos and it loses some energy through these neutrinos because it keeps on sending them out there was a famous physicist named george gamov and he referred to this as the akka process and he called it the akka process because it represents a tremendous loss of energy from the sun not enough to make the sun go out don't worry about it um but it reminded him of a casino in a place called akka where he lost a tremendous amount of money and therefore he called this the akka process so so we have all these neutrinos coming out of the sun and even at night time they're coming through the earth and we're being exposed to these neutrinos so we have something else which is invisible this neutrino radiation which is with us all the time even at night when it's dark because neutrinos don't mind the earth being in the way they just come right through and this is with us at all times also um now how much neutrino radiation is there well every second every square inch of your skin every second is being crossed by approximately 400 billion solar neutrinos let me say that again every square inch of your skin right now has about 400 billion solar neutrinos passing through it every second that's a lot of neutrinos uh do they hurt us no they don't interrupt us very much at all they really um we don't you know i i think we can really make a case that that neutrinos are are relatively harmless because we haven't discovered any effects by the way that's famous last words for any scientist we haven't discovered any effects okay but you can't do anything about it you got your 400 billion neutrinos per second passing through every skin into your skin right now let's talk about something else that we can't see that's pretty small and was discovered only recently and surrounds us and something where we do not know if it has any effects on us or not and something which was discovered recently and has only existed relatively recently in many states i live in maryland they are outlawing the use of styrofoam in packaging if you go to a restaurant they take out it used to come in a styrofoam box now you get it in a recyclable uh cardboard box and one of the reasons that they're um past the law against styrofoam is that many types of plastics can be recycled i know is this anything on it let me see sometimes you'll see on plastic a little number in a in a triangle and this doesn't have it and it tells you what class of plastic that is and how it can be recycled um and um you know you'll notice that here's some um some over here this little a little right over here there's a little triangle with a seven in it and that's class seven plastic can be recycled that way and says that it is bpa free doesn't have any biphenyl something so i'm not a chemist so i can't get into that but at present with present technology we can't recycle styrofoam so what happens to styrofoam well you throw the garbage it goes into a landfill where it stays for a long time um some of it gets in the sewer system and floats out to sea and a lot of plastic that can be recycled floats out to sea now at present there is so much pollution from plastic in the oceans that there is an area of the pacific ocean stretching hundreds of miles in which there is floating plastic pollution um it may be as much as a thousand miles i may be understating it here here but you can you can look this up and the question is what can we do about it and it's only been accumulating you know since we've been making plastics which is you know relatively recently in human history but in addition to that pollution it has been discovered lately that plastic does something else and that is it breaks into little pieces now i don't mean little teeny pieces that you can see it's a little piece of i don't know maybe a little piece of something i can't identify here on my my table i don't know if you can see it's on the tip of my finger all right it could be a crumb of challah left from jabba's it could be a little piece of plastic that broke off something and that's pretty teeny but i can see it now plastic can break into little particles that are so small they're called nano particles that even with a a regular optical microscope you can't see them a microscope can see you know as we pointed out it can see bacteria a light microscope optical microscope can't see viruses these things are down in the virus class that's how small they are and these little um nanoparticles are all over i mean all over all over they went up to the pyrenees which were mountains in france and they discovered that just in the pristine high altitude pure air they would this they discovered that every day hundreds of nanoparticles accumulated on every square meter meter of the of the top of the mountain hundreds of animal articles every day uh in the pristine period pyrenees they're they're all over and when i say all over i mean they're in our air we breathe them in and they're in our food because they get into the water they get into the soil and uh from the soil they're brought up into the plants because they're so microscopic and we eat them we breathe them and we eat them and they're in our bodies right now right now in our brains there are countless numbers of teeny teeny pieces of plastic um we don't know how to stop this there what was it there was an article i saw i saw the cover of consumer reports they had an issue on how to eat less plastic i didn't read the article um are they harmful to us we don't know what happens when a little teeny nanoparticle of plastic gets into the brain where you have two neurons that are connecting to each other through something called the synapse and the way that your brain works is one neutron sends its little message to the next one to make it to fire across something called the synapse what happens if the little piece of plastic gets in that synapse does it affect things i don't know nobody knows again we are surrounded by things that until recently people didn't know about that may or may not affect us that are invisible but let's go further let's go further towards an analogy to the spiritual world okay remember the spiritual world is invisible non-physical everything i have discussed so far has been physical it has been invisible but it has been physical let's talk about something that is not physical let me ask you the following question where is cyberspace cyberspace well i get into my computer and i type into it and i'm in cyberspace no you're not in cyberspace you're on a computer that's connected to another computer to another computer on what's called the internet which is a massive massive um network of computers all around the world and it's fascinating how it works you know i i whole a whole fascinating subject in itself um but that's not the that's not cyberspace um if i have if i have a computer and i write a program for it um that program goes into the computer to make it operate but the program is not a physical thing it's um can be written in type type on paper can be written longhand it's still the same program it's some information that some abstract information that can be represented by something which is printed by represented by something which is the cyber cyberspace is an abstract concept that can be realized by computers it can be realized by um smartphones which really are computers it can be realized by other types of devices which we have nowadays uh where is it well out in the so-called computing cloud there are computers with memories and the information is in those memories but it's shared it's not you know for it's there are backups any the cloud doesn't rely on one memory for everything they have several of them in case one of them fails and it's the same information what matters is that information that's what the that's what cyberspace is cyberspace is an abstract concept that is brought into real realization um through computers and connections just like uh um the poems of edgar allan poe are poetry once upon a midnight dreary as i pondered weak and weary over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten war that's beautiful it's magnificent when i write it down i am putting that abstract poem into a realization into a physical realization but that paper and that ink is not the poem the poem is the abstract thing cyberspace is abstract an abstract concept an abstract idea and it isn't anywhere and yet it's everywhere it's not physical is it real is cyberspace real even though it has no physical reality yeah it is to the extent that we might ask can cyberspace which is just an abstract concept out there can it affect our daily lives oh you better believe it yeah shortly before i uh i i started recording this i was having trouble transferring some money from a bank which has to go somewhere else and uh i've still got to work on it it's still not happening my my life is being affected by something in cyberspace all right right now i am recording from my house to somewhere else and i don't even know where that is using cyberspace and those of you who are watching and listening to this lecture are using cyberspace can cyberspace have a good effect on our lives oh yes website torah anytime tens of thousands of classes available for free all right uh the bar elan project that has taken tens of thousands of swarming tens of thousands of great hebrew works and made them available through computers what wonderful things what about site what about telemedicine um being able to show something to a doctor and and and find out should i come in shouldn't i come in i had to see a doctor about about a a neurological problem and i was able to show you know i've if you've seen what as we as we as i lecture i have what's called a tick disorder and i could show her oh this is what the dicks are you know and how's it going and you have my eye blinking coming and we could do this via via telemedicine it's a wonderful thing um can cyberspace be destructive can the internet be destructive i don't have to tell you anything about that as to how destructive the internet can be if it is used improperly um cyberspace like many other things in the world can be basically neutral it depends on what we do with it just like this pen is a sort of a neutral thing i could use it for good i could use it for evil i could write la shanhara malicious gossip about someone using this pen and send it in a letter and do terrible things with it i can wrote write torah thoughts with this pen and then use it for wonderful things and then i elevate the pen spiritually it's in my hands what i do with it and what i do we are told just as when i punch my keys or speak as it is nowadays with voice recognition into cyberspace i affect what happens in cyberspace and cyberspace affects me similarly we are told by torah that there is an invisible spiritual world and that the things that we do affect this spiritual world and in turn the spiritual world affects us uh there are some romanians some rabbis who as human technology has advanced said some interesting things um when the telephone first came out uh i don't remember who some of these robonim were who some of these rabbis were but one said that what does the telephone teach us why did god allow us to invent the telephone at this point in our history so that we should be able to learn that you can say something over here and it can be heard all the way over there a lesson we had to learn um what about bugging technology putting a bug in a room okay uh i will tell you that it is nowadays very sophisticated and if you do not know anything about modern bugging technology someone could put a bug in a room and you would never find it never unless you knew the technologies all right so you know uh people go to a um foreign embassy want to have a conversation that is secure they sweep the room for bugs to see if anyone's listening and it's hard to do nowadays um and there was discovered that that during the the height of the cold war the american embassy in um in berlin had lots of bugs in it soviets had an actual tunnel underneath and recording what was said why has god allowed us to produce bugging technology and sound recording again to teach us that everything can be heard and recorded and as they say i always have said that one of the biggest um surprises some people get after their life is over in this world and they move to the next world and are before the based in shalmala the heavenly court judging their lives they are shocked to discover that there never was a right to privacy uh one of the things we learned from bugging technology one of the great fassida grabbies excuse me one of the great rebbies of 20th century uh he may not have been hasidic it may have been for the time i'm not sure said why were movies invented why didn't hashem allow movies to be invented um in order to show that something can be recorded everything that's seen can be recorded okay now why in our days has cyberspace come into existence i would like to speculate the following god teaches us sometimes through what's called a martial martial is a parable and the meaning of the martial is called the nimshot when it came to the telephone he taught us you know you can speak here but it's heard over there uh i don't know if we learned that lesson well enough that's what the nimsho was that were being heard so he moved on to um movies we can see and record everything you're doing that's the muscle so too in this world everything you see and do is recorded did we get the message well some movies out there are pretty awful um then we come to cyberspace one of our present marshalling why are we being shown that this exists brought the existence of cyberspace now because it shows us that there is a reality and it is a reality that is not physical it's not physical at all it's here always it is affected by us and we are affected by it and that is real the cyberspace is real can we believe what we are told in torah that there is an invisible non-physical spiritual world that is affected us by and that we affect can we believe that such a thing exists oh you better believe it because we see through cyberspace god is teaching us that such a world not only is possible but does exist and everything we do affects those higher worlds now those higher worlds there's a number of them there's this five higher worlds we live in the old messiah the islamic sierra bariata these are kabbalistic ideas and um i know some of these words i can't say i know what they [Music] mean i will say that there are many many many many many more people who say they know something about kabbalah than there are people who really know anything about but what we can take away from this is that everything we do here affects the spiritual world on its different levels and those levels in turn are affecting us and what i might see i went to my rabbi and i said to him in my my life i'm 75 years old and at this time you start looking over your whole life i have seen that hashem that god has been showering me with brachas with blessings from my whole life in ways that it would take me hours to even describe how i know them things that some people would call accidents you know lucky accidents the way i met my wife long story the way i got my job i was in the same job for 40 years all of the and on and on and on and on and on and here i sit in quarantine needing food and from the local kosher supermarket i get on my computer i click on what i want and i get it delivered to me and i have lots of food that hashem has given me and there are people here in town who don't have as much food because they can't afford it so that leads me to what any scientist or physicist would want to do in the closing of the talk and that's to give a demonstration at some point you know i gave a demonstration my gargoyle counter i gave them my radio i want to give a demonstration of how we can affect and change what's going on in the higher levels of reality okay i'm gonna do it for you right right now and i'm not joking this is not a joke okay um i mentioned that here in baltimore there are many people who cannot afford to buy food like i can't and there's a wonderful tsudako wonderful charity here called abbasi's royal and it provides money to help these people and they need help a lot of people who need help here's my pen my neutral pen okay here's an envelope all right it is addressed to the other side um here is another item which is fairly um neutral it is a a checkbook before your very eyes i'm going to write a check to this ahva's israel charity uh um just a minute ahavas israel and the amount okay i have now written a note a a check to that charity which i have here i have again elevated the spend depend spiritually and now i am in the midst of an act of tzedakah and when you do tadaka when you do a mitzvah when you do any mets when you have a wonderful meal on friday night and enjoy yourself it's a mitzvah you've done something that improves the world what a concept we could talk for hours about this so i'm in the midst of a mitzvah and i'm going to take this check and i'm going to put it in this pre-addressed envelope and i'm going to seal it and i know that the um use some cellophane tape on this because the the sealant on the envelope is not so good and now in order before well not your very eyes because you can't see it but to do a real life demonstration of affecting the invisible spiritual world in a real way that will not only affect me but and please learn about this as you learn torah it will affect you i'm going to take this check to tadaka and i'm going to go out and put it into the mail thereby doing the mitzvah of tsudaka and you can't see this and i can't see us but the upper worlds are changing and through them the world is changing it may be a small effect i don't know i'm gonna do this now so therefore in conclusion i'd like to say goodbye