Dear young friend!
Shalom aleichem! Peace to you!
Have you ever thought why among the Nobel Prize laureates there are so many Jews? Because Jewish children ask many questions.
During the Passover service, the youngest child in Jewish families asks four questions. So, our Jewish traditions stimulate us to ask. If a child asks a question, he expects a reply, and this stimulates his imagination. Every time you ask a question and seek an answer, you act like a scientist.
What is the scientific and technological news around the world and in Israel? News in physics, mathematics, chemistry, biology, bioinformatics, computer science, cosmology, medicine? What is the role of Jewish scientists in the latest scientific and technological achievements? We are waiting for your questions.
We shall try to give replies to these questions. But the development of our site will depend on your interest and your questions. Please, write to us and ask. Certainly, we should not be able to answer all your questions. We shall retain such questions for the next Jewish child who will receive the Nobel Price.
Joseph Brodsky, a very interesting poet and thinker of the 20th century, Nobel Prize Laureate, said in his Nobel Lecture on the 8th December 1987 :
" …We should understand Dostoyevsky`s remark that beauty will save the world. It is probably too late for the world, but for the individual man there are always remains a chance." You are young and you have a great opportunity to investigate, to understand, to create and improve our world.
There are so many questions and problems, for which mankind is waiting for the answers. Here are some of them: cancer, AIDS, heart, attacks and other illnesses, profitable use of energy, water purification, protection of the environment from pollution. There are many mysteries, paradoxes and disagreements. You will resolve them, but new ones will be born. The next generation will decide them (please, leave some of them for your children and grand-children).
I would like to mention that there were many paradoxes in the lives of famous scientists. For example, Galileo Galilei (1564 -1642) initially refused to accept the elliptical orbits that Johannes Kepler (1571 - 1630) proposed for the planets.
The famous English scientist Kelvin (Lord William Thomson) who formulated the 2nd law of thermodynamics and the absolute Kelvin temperature scale, stated in 1895, that "heavier than air flying machines are impossible". He said in 1900, that "there is nothing new to be discovered in physics now". Therefore you have to be careful not to be too conservative.
Many great scientists had their interest in science sparked by a book. Michael Faraday first read the article about electricity in the Encyclopedia Britannica. The French physicist Andre - Marie Ampere took up science after finding in his father's library a eulogy of Descartes, which convinced him of the nobility of a life in science. Who knows, maybe among the physical units that we use today, a Volt, an Ampere, an Ohm, a Coulomb, a Farad, a Maxwell, a Newton, a Dalton, a Curie, a Kelvin, and an Einstein, will be your name?!
We want to help to you to investigate and to understand the world around you, in order to improve it.
