I always thought the Shabbos goy was a cunning plan to ensure that pious Jews got to know the more helpful of their non-Jewish neighbours.
I was talking to an old client last year when it turned out we both came from roughly the same part of North London. He’s non-Jewish but his after-school job was working for a kosher butcher. This included doing the Shabbos goy job on Saturdays. He liked his employer and enjoyed the job and his attitude is “so long as people treat other people decently it doesn’t matter if their religion seems a bit odd.”
I suspect that “rules lawyering” and the Jewish intellectual tradition go some way to explain why, though it was people like Galileo and Newton who got it started, Jews are proportionately over-represented in physics. It’s like the entire cultural history prepared for it. While fundie Christians were saying “the nature of the world is a dark mystery known only to God and it is blasphemous to inquire further”, Jews were saying “Now we can really look at the fine print in this contract.”
Plenty of others, some much earlier: Aristotle, Tartaglia, da Vinci, Descartes; Ptolemy, Copernicus and Kepler if you include astronomy; etc.
I’d be very surprised if there weren’t at least a few significant pre-20th C Jewish natural philosophers working in physics, but none are springing to mind. Anyone know of any names?
Other than Carl W.B. Goldschmidt and Tullio Levi-Civita (who did most of his best work in the 20th Century), I really can’t think of any, but this isn’t my area.
I tried “Category:Jewish Physicists” and got a lot of 20th Century and 21st Century physicists. Physics didn’t really exist as such before the 20th Century, and science didn’t exist as a term before the 19th Century.
It also seems, to my outsider perspective, that really thinking deeply about one’s religion is a good thing. High levels of engagement would seem to confer more meaning and value than unquestioningly following the words of whoever is on the dais during the service.
None of these are generally regarded as physicists. They described, they did not perform experiments and induce physical laws. Galileo is on the margins, he was getting to a concept of kinetic energy. Aristotle’s fysis may have given rise to the word physics, but his concepts were anything but scientific.
I venture to disagree, even though I started this.
Newton’s work was definitely physics; Newtonian mechanics had a theoretical basis, physical laws expressed through equations, and clear definitions of mass, length, time, momentum and force. Newton’s Opticks is more descriptive but describes the behaviour of lenses and prisms. Cavendish did solid work on electricity and gravitation. Hooke and Boyle established physical laws about matter, though the explanation had to wait till later. Physics was well developed by the end of the 19th century. Also, the word “science” is not necessarily a useful marker. Scottish universities used the term “natural philosophy”. Cambridge came up with the term “natural sciences” in 1848, by which time the commercial importance of subjects like geology had been long established. Until 1833 scientists were called “natural philosophers”, but they were doing the same job.
In the UK, France (and I think Germany), educational and other disabilities levelled against Jews were generally repealed in the 2nd half of the 19th century. That goes a long way to explaining why Jews were much less represented among early scientists, and why this situation rapidly changed. People like Spinoza simply didn’t have the educational opportunities of a Newton.
I know I am riding my hobby horse (the interaction of the development of religion and science) but in my defence nobody but me has to read it.
I played almost every day for two years (during my 1.5 hours of daily walks for cardio) but lost the bug about seven months ago and pretty much stopped.
