by Avi Loeb
It is commonly thought that life is a collection of the places you visit. But this is an illusion. Life is a collection of events, and these are the results of choices, only some of which are ours to make.
There are, of course, continuities. The science I do is connected by a direct line to my childhood. It was an innocent time of wondering about the big questions in life, enjoying the beauty of nature, and, among the orchards and the close neighbors of Beit Hanan, not caring about my status or standing.
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The chain of causation that brought me to Beit Hanan began, proximately, with the decision of my grandfather (and, in Hebrew, my namesake) Albert to flee Nazi Germany. More clear-eyed than many, he foresaw the likelihood of cataclysm, the fast-moving drift of events that, even before the outbreak of the Second World War, promised an ever-narrowing range of choices for Jews, an ever-growing risk of dire consequences if he did not select the right path.
Luckily for him, and for me, Albert made the right choice. He left Germany in 1936 and moved to Beit Hanan shortly after its founding. Although it was largely unsettled and, like the world, buffeted by the rising winds of war, the farming community was a comparatively safe haven. Soon after his arrival, he was joined by my grandmother Rosa and their two sons, one of whom was my father, then age eleven. When he transitioned from a German to a Jewish society, his name was changed from Georg to David.
My mother, Sara, came to Beit Hanan from afar as well. She was born and raised in Haskovo, near the Bulgarian capital of Sofia. The coincidence of geography that made her a Bulgarian and not a German saved her and her family during the war; although it allied itself with the Nazi regime, Bulgaria retained its sovereignty and thus some of its ability to resist Adolf Hitler’s mounting demands for the country to deport its Jews to Germany. As the rumors of death camps circulated, the Bulgarian Orthodox Church protested deportations, and the Bulgarian king summoned the resolve to refuse Germany’s requests. To be clear, he did so by declaring that Bulgaria needed its Jews for its own labor pool, but the consequence was that he managed to protect many of the nation’s Jews. My mother was therefore able to enjoy a relatively normal childhood. She studied at a French monastery school and eventually entered college in Sofia. But in 1948, with postwar Europe a ruin and the Soviet Union expanding westward, she left school and emigrated with her parents to the new nation of Israel.
Beit Hanan’s earliest founders were from Bulgaria, so the fact that Sara’s family ended up there was not surprising. But the farm village was very different from the cosmopolitan city and university studies she had left behind. Her new home had its charms, however. Shortly after her arrival, Sara met my father. They fell in love, got married, and had three children—my two older sisters, Shashana (Shoshi) and Ariela (Reli), and, finally, me in 1962.
In those early years, my mother devoted herself to her family and the community. She was a locally renowned baker, and my wardrobe attested to her talent for knitting sweaters, but even in the relative isolation of Beit Hanan, she remained dedicated to a life of the mind. By this I mean not just a bookish interest in scholarship but a desire to apply her intellect to the world. And it was this, and her integrity, that caused her balanced judgments to be trusted by everyone who knew her, from the leadership of our village to visitors who came to our farm seeking her advice. I was a direct and daily beneficiary. She made clear how much she cared about my path in life, my choices and interests. Like a gardener watering and nurturing a plant, she was dedicated and meticulous in cultivating her children’s curiosity.
She also followed her own. When I was a teenager, she went back to university and completed her undergraduate degree. She then went on to graduate school, earning a PhD in comparative literature. These were not undertakings that kept her at a remove from us; indeed, at her encouragement, I sat in on her undergraduate philosophy classes, and at her urging I worked my way through many of the books on her reading lists.
It was my mother who caused me to fall in love with philosophy, especially existentialism. I dreamed of thinking for a living. On weekends, I would grab a work of philosophy, most often something by the existentialists, including the novels they wrote and inspired, and then, with my chosen book, I’d drive our tractor to a quiet spot in the hills and read for hours.
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It has occurred to me since these halcyon days on my family’s farm that if humanity ever finds a habitable planet on which to establish an outpost of our civilization, the people who populate it will likely look and act much like the people of Beit Hanan. As human history shows, the immediate demands of settling outposts of a civilization recur.
Of necessity, they would focus on the growing of food and the collective effort of supporting one another, from eldest to youngest. They would each need to be resourceful and multitalented, capable of repairing and engineering machinery, cultivating crops, and educating the young. I believe, too, that they would accommodate the life of the mind, even in their remoteness. And, I suspect that when their children came of age, they would be met with the same expectation I was: mandatory service to society.
My plan to become a philosopher and address some of the fundamental questions that humanity had grappled with for eons was delayed owing to Israel’s conscription of all citizens over the age of eighteen. Service was expected of everyone. Because I had shown promise in physics during high school, I was selected for Talpiot, a new program in which two dozen recruits per year worked in defense-related research combined with intense military training. My academic ambitions had to be set aside; the study of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, the existential philosophers whom I’d read in my youth, did not fit the new role that had been assigned to me. Focusing on the study of physics was the closest I would get to an intellectually creative activity during my years of military service.
Though we wore the uniform of the Israeli Air Force, we were introduced to all branches of the Israeli Defense Forces. We underwent basic infantry training, took combat courses in artillery and engineering, and were taught how to drive tanks, carry machine guns on night-long treks, and parachute out of planes. Thankfully, I was athletically fit, so the physical challenges were demanding but bearable. And alongside these responsibilities, I avidly embraced my academic studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
Talpiot mandated that we study physics and mathematics, which sounded close enough to philosophy, and studying anything at the university seemed far more exciting than slogging through the muck with a rifle on my back. Given the opportunity, I did my best to justify the government’s faith in me. It was also at this time that I started to realize that while philosophy asked the fundamental questions, it often couldn’t resolve them. Science, I was learning, might put me in a better position to pursue answers.
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After three years of study and military training I was supposed to start working on an industrial or military project that had immediate practical applications. But I sought a more creative path, one that posed greater intellectual and research challenges. I visited a facility that was not on the official list of research destinations, then drew up an outside-the-box research proposal. By that time I had established a track record of accomplishments, both in the classroom and in military training, and the Talpiot brass approved my idea—at first on a three-month trial basis and eventually for the remaining five years of my required service stint, from 1983 to 1988.
My work quickly evolved in new directions, some of which the military found quite intriguing. Through the thrill of scientific innovation, I developed the theory for a novel scheme (leading to a patent) to use an electric discharge in propelling projectiles to higher speeds than achievable with conventional chemical propellants. The project grew to employ an entire department of two dozen scientists and was the first international effort to receive funding from the United States’ Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), also known as “Star Wars,” the ambitious missile-defense concept announced by President Ronald Rea
gan in 1983.
At the time, the Cold War, the decades-old contest between the United States and the Soviet Union, between democracy and Communism, between West and East, seemed a fixed feature of world affairs. Both sides had amassed vast arsenals of nuclear weapons, sufficient to destroy each other many times over. The Doomsday Clock, the brainchild of the members of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and intended to warn humanity of the likelihood of a man-made catastrophe, was almost always set at seven minutes to midnight.
SDI was one part of that much larger contest. It envisioned using lasers and other advanced weapons to destroy incoming enemy ballistic missiles, and though it was dissolved in 1993, it had a major political impact on hastening the end of the Cold War and collapse of the Soviet Union.
This work also formed the backbone of my PhD dissertation, which I completed when I was twenty-four. The subject was plasma physics, which concerns the most common of the four fundamental states of matter; it’s the stuff of stars, lightning, and certain television screens. (In case you’re wondering, my dissertation was entitled “Particle Acceleration to High Energies and Amplification of Coherent Radiation by Electromagnetic Interactions in Plasmas”—a much less catchy title than this book’s, to be sure.)
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Even with my PhD in hand, I was unsure what my next choice should or would be. I wasn’t married to a career in plasma physics. There was always the attraction of returning to Beit Hanan. And a big part of me wanted to change course dramatically and return to philosophy. However, a chain of choices, only some of which were mine, set me on a different path.
It started on a bus ride during my military service. The physicist Arie Zigler, seated next to me, happened to mention that the most prestigious place for postgraduate work was the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, New Jersey. Later, during one of my visits to meet SDI officials in Washington, DC, and then at a plasma physics conference at the University of Texas at Austin, I crossed paths with the “pope of plasma physics,” Marshall Rosenbluth. I knew that his past academic home was the institute, and I asked him for details. He quickly endorsed the idea that I go there for a short visit. Inspired, I immediately called Michelle Sage, the administrative officer at IAS, and asked if I could visit that coming week. She replied, “We do not allow just anyone to visit us. Please send me a copy of your CV and I will let you know if you can visit.”
Undaunted, I mailed her a list of my eleven publications and called her again a few days later. This time she allowed me to schedule a visit at the end of my stay in the United States. When I arrived at her office early on the appointed morning, Michelle said, “There is only one faculty member here with available time, Freeman Dyson. Let me introduce you.”
I was thrilled. I remembered Dyson’s name from my textbooks on quantum electrodynamics. Soon after I sat down with Freeman in his office, he said, “Oh, you are from Israel. Do you know John Bahcall? He likes Israelis.” He must have seen the curiosity on my face, for he elaborated: “His wife, Neta, is Israeli.” I confessed that I had never heard of the man, let alone of his wife, Neta.
John Bahcall was an astrophysicist, I learned, and shortly thereafter I had lunch with him. It ended with him extending an invitation for me to return to Princeton for a monthlong visit. I learned that in the interim, he undertook an overseas reconnaissance, asking the most notable Israeli scientists, such as Yuval Ne’eman, what they thought of me. Whatever he was told, at the end of my second visit, John invited me to his office and offered me a prestigious five-year fellowship—but on the condition that I study astrophysics.
Of course I said yes.
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When I was first encouraged to dedicate my professional career to astrophysics, I didn’t even know what made the Sun shine. That Bahcall’s area of expertise was the generation of weakly interacting particles called neutrinosin the Sun’s hot interior made my ignorance about the topic all the more embarrassing. Up to that point, my focus had been on terrestrial plasmas and their more Earth-bound applications.
To be clear, Bahcall knew my area of past research. He extended the offer despite this fact. That he took the risk struck me as remarkable then and seems even more so now. (The state of academia has shifted since, and I doubt it would be possible to make a similar offer to a young scholar today.) I was and remain grateful. I accepted, determined to demonstrate that Bahcall’s instincts—as well as the instincts of all the remarkable scientists who had helped me along this path—were justified.
Although I had to work to learn the basic vocabulary of the field so that I could begin to write original papers, the area was familiar. Plasma is a state that matter reaches at high temperatures when atoms are broken into a sea of positively charged ions (atoms that have lost some electrons) and negatively charged free electrons. Even though most of the ordinary matter in the present-day universe (including the interiors of stars) is in a plasma state, the field focuses on laboratory conditions, which are considerably different than those in space. Playing to my strengths, the first major research frontier that I pioneered as an astrophysicist centered on when and how the atomic matter in the universe was transformed into a plasma. So began my fascination with the early universe, the so-called cosmic dawn, or the conditions under which the very stars were formed.
After three years at IAS, I was encouraged to apply to junior faculty positions, including one at the Harvard astronomy department. I was their second choice. The department rarely offered tenure to junior faculty, so some candidates—including the person who was offered the job before me—thought twice about taking the position.
For my part, I gladly accepted. I recall thinking my decision through very clearly. I realized that if I wasn’t offered tenure, I could always go back to my father’s farm or take up my first academic love, philosophy.
I arrived at Harvard in 1993. Three years later, I received tenure.
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I have since come to believe that John Bahcall not only had faith that I could handle the shift from plasma physics to astrophysics but also saw in me a kindred spirit—or perhaps even a younger version of himself. Bahcall had entered college intending to study philosophy but quickly concluded that physics and astronomy provided a more direct route to the most basic truths of the universe.
I came to a parallel realization not long after bidding farewell to John and the institute. When I took the junior faculty job at Harvard University in 1993, I decided it was too late to make a big career shift back into philosophy. More important, I had grown convinced that my “arranged marriage” to astrophysics had actually reunited me with my old love; it was just dressed up in different clothes.
Astronomy, I was coming to understand, addresses questions that were previously restricted to the realms of philosophy and religion. Among these questions are the biggest of the big—“How did the universe begin?” and “What is the origin of life?” I have also found that staring out into the vastness of space, contemplating the start and end of everything, provides a framework for answering, “What is a life worth living?”
Often the answer is staring us in the face. We need only summon the courage to admit it. During a visit to Tel Aviv in December of 1997, I had a blind date with Ofrit Liviatan. I liked her immediately, an appreciation that changed everything. Despite the geographical distance between us, we allowed our friendship to deepen. I had never met anyone like her and was convinced that I never would.
Long before I confronted the evidence presented by ‘Oumuamua, I had learned that across all facets of life, taking the evidence presented to you and pursuing it with wonder, humility, and determination can change everything—if, that is, you are open to the possibilities contained in the data. Happily, by this point in my life, I was.
Ofrit and I were married two years later and, like me, she eventually found her place in the orbit of Harvard, serving as director of the university’s freshman seminar program. In our old house near Boston, which was constructed just befor
e Albert Einstein derived his theory of special relativity, Ofrit and I have raised our two daughters. That a causal chain runs from my grandfather’s decision to leave Germany in 1936 to my parents’ meeting in Beit Hanan to Ofrit and I raising Klil and Lotem in Lexington suggests to me that only a thin line separates philosophy, theology, and science. Watching children step slowly into adulthood reminds me that the most mundane acts of our existence suggest something miraculous that can be traced back to the Big Bang.
Over time, I have come to appreciate science slightly more than philosophy. Whereas philosophers spend a great deal of time inside their own heads, scientists are all about having a dialogue with the world. You ask nature a series of questions and listen carefully to the answers from experiments. When done frankly, it is a usefully humbling experience. The success of Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity was not due to its formal elegance, which was developed over a series of publications from 1905 to 1915. It was not accepted until 1919, when Sir Arthur Eddington, secretary of the Royal Astronomical Society in England and an astronomer in his own right, confirmed the theory’s prediction that the Sun’s gravity would bend light. For scientists, what remains of a theory after its contact with data is what is deemed beautiful.
Although I am wrestling with the existential questions of my youth in a markedly different way than Jean-Paul Sartre or Albert Camus did, I believe the boy on the tractor in the hills of Beit Hanan would have been pleased with this outcome. He would have admired the sequence of opportunities and choices that started with a blind date and led to a family in Lexington.
But I understand, in a way that my younger self could not, another lesson of our family’s story, one that I have kept at the front of my mind in recent years as I study interstellar visitors to our solar system.