Artist illustration of the synthetic magnetic monopole (credit: Heikka Valja)

Virtually everyone I know has a wish list. Normally these are garden variety shopping reminders or gift registries–the stuff that some dreams are made of. Yet there exists a crucial subset of society which conjures another sort of list altogether. This list is like a flag announcing some future utopia. It promises the missing pieces of an ideal world. The contents of this list are the deeply desired scientific breakthroughs–the cure of cancer, the proof of alien life, abundant clean energy and of course the flying car to name but a few of the most popular ideas.

For those who follow the developments of science standing on front lines of research warfare, or those who feed their curiosity from the arm chair at a safe distance, the currents (particularly of the present age) of technological progress and innovation cannot help but ignite the imagination. If we number amongst the brazen few who are most happy unfettered by fact, whereby we are free to indulge the fantasies of science fiction, then this too may provide a catalyst to scientific discovery. When the world is compelled to try to keep up with our yearnings–for ‘I want to live in a place where this or that really cool thing exists’–are we not bound to follow after our boldest aspirations which serve as the provocations of nature?

If it can be thought of perhaps it can come true! Do we not increasingly reverse engineer objects of desire from the within the kiln of desire itself? At street level, the ultimate ‘revenge of the nerds’ announces itself when the gadgets of Star Trek, Star Wars and Stargate start appearing for real at Vegas tech shows rather than at Comic Con. Haven’t we all seen this? The ‘syndication’ of SciFi takes upon itself the common cause of being the incubator of Silicon Valley startups.

Taking the fantasy seriously, I often think about how nice it would be to have safe, long-distance space travel with ‘deflector force shields’ to produce a sheave of protection from solar radiation. While warding off alien marauders form Alpha Centauri has not yet become a pressing need, the idea of the next leap for ‘NASA’ or some equally legitimate contender in the space race preventing human passengers from experiencing the ship as a glorified toaster oven, does hold great appeal. And for the same cost I will throw in asteroid deflection capabilities.

If we are going to catch up with the movies, then we must ask ourselves: Would it not be nice to park this super cool ‘ride’ in midair whereby it just floats there when you turn the engine off? Think this is nuts? Never going to happen? Well like so many of the miracles of nature, if you can find the smallest opening, a tiny exception to the ordinary working of things, then we can drive an elephant through it. Consistent with our spectacular history of exploiting these soft spots in the classical construction of the universe, scientists have once again copied one of the strangest features of electromagnetism to produce (as of this writing) something called ‘synthetic magnetic monopoles.’ Queue the applause. Seriously, why have you not jumped out of your seat yet?

It would seem that the name alone is sufficient to keep mainstream media away. Only the ‘shadow’ net of academia caught this butterfly. Could it be the rest of humanity is evidently too busy watching 6 second Vine Videos about sock puppets (yes, I love them too) to care about a pivotal announcement that just might change life as we know it? Beyond the aforementioned ‘far out’ applications, magnetic monopoles may hold the key to unleashing all sorts of novel technologies. For years to come we will have to explore the applications of this one discovery as it behoves us to try to understand it from within the context of the inner dimensions of the Torah where we find a striking foreshadowing of ‘monopoles’ as the wave of the future.

Here is the highly abridged version: magnets (assuming you have played around with them) always have two poles (dipole)–a positive and a negative end (or so we thought until recently). Like ends of two magnets repel and the opposites ones attract. Cut a magnet in half and you won’t have one magnet which is entirely negative and one which is entirely positive. Instead you will have two complete dipole magnets. Divide these again and you will have 4 and so on. Our everyday experience of magnets confirms this description.

However, there has been a prediction dating back to the early 1930s by theoretical physicist Paul Dirac (1902-1984) that maintains that it might be possible, under certain exotic conditions, to detect naturally occurring magnetic monopoles or even create artificial ones. Over the past few years a number of experiments have been run to confirm the naturally occurring ones and now a team has managed to produce synthetic ones which have been identified and photographed. With the monopole configuration we can direct the electromagnetic field in ways that were previously unimaginable. As U of A Physics professor James Pinfold put it: “Monopoles could make materials strong enough to withstand a nuclear explosion and could also enable magnetic levitation.” [Source: http://phys.org/news188655693.html]

In Chassidic thought we find that every metaphysical concept has both a psychological and physical analogue. Where is it that we see the establishing of dipoles or ‘binaries’ as the dominant or central feature of human reality? Taking another look at the opening of the Genesis narrative when Adam and Chava (Eve) encounter the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, the implication highlighted by the rabbinic commentators becomes clear.  We have a situation where there are two poles which have become entangled and which will remain entangled till some future time. In the simple reading ‘Good’ is never entirely separated from ‘Evil.’ In slightly less moralistic terms: the positive and attractive is always bound up with the negative and repulsive. No matter how much we ‘divide’ this reality, we will always encounter both together at smaller and smaller scales.

On the face of this episode, Good and Evil represent psycho-dynamic energies at work within the soul of each one of us. We can never relax this tension. It denotes the fundamental lines of spiritual force that run through our experience of life. Nonetheless, on a physical level they translate into electromagnetic properties that hold matter together or accounts for how it falls apart. Attachments and detachments, attractions and repulsions, inform all relationships. The parallelism between the psychological and the physical warrants further exploration for another time. For now, suffice it to say, that we cannot think one extreme without the other. They are inextricably coupled conceptually.

How then could we ever entertain the notion of a monopole state existing? The allusion to this can be found in the Divine commandment to refrain from eating from the Tree of Knowledge. This imperative, which is handed down to our primordial couple, (who themselves negotiate periods of attachment and detachment) ultimately represents a primal pairing or core magnetism as the glue in the basic building blocks of the nuclear family. God’s directive is expressed as follows: “…you may eat from any tree of the garden. But from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil you shall not eat from it…” (Genesis 2:16-17). Warning us away from bi-polarity, we are given a heads up to the potential for opposites to not only attract but also to nihilate each other. This dualism may in the end become a dual. Each state is know by comparison and contrast; having tasted of the negative I now appreciate the positive or in enjoying the positive I fear the negative.

Evidence of a magnetic monopole: decay of a doubly quantized vortex (credit: M. W. Ray et al./Nature)

Notwithstanding this inevitability, one of the great Chassidic masters known by the name of his famous work, the Mei Shiloach (Rabbi Mordechai Yosef Leiner 1801-1854), explains that these verses have an alternative reading in the future–one which will reflect all of the refinement of the physical world, the self and our network of relationships. This redemptive future also revisits the primal human condition enjoined to ‘eat from all of the trees of the garden’ including the Tree of Knowledge. The only difference is that the Tree of Knowledge is now known as the Tree of Knowledge of Good. The part which was evil is rooted out. In place of the “but” which conditions or qualifies which tree we may eat of, we reread it (the vav at the start of verse 17) as an ‘and’. At the same time, the “and” that falls out between “Good and Evil” is read as a “but” which transforms the syntax and re-breaks the sentence with a pause. Thus, in the Mei Shiloach’s future version “You may eat from any tree of the garden. And [emphasis mine] you may eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good…but [emphasis mine] the evil you shall not eat from it….” In other words, the dipole of the Tree has been switched into becoming a monopole.

For the Mei Shiloach this syntactic shift is tantamount to the introduction of a novel reality. It implies that we can have an upside without the unintended consequences that attach or connect with a downside. The development of ‘existence’ itself brings us to a possibility of consuming the Good without having to swallow the Evil along with it. Symbolically these ‘trees of the garden’ are intended as ‘complex systems’ that are cultivated from out of the ground of the natural world. They are famously filled with glitches that need to be debugged. With successive revisions they grow and ideally become more appetizing yet they continue to operate with flaws. Despite this, we long for a future update which finally works. Things will do what they are supposed to. The errors in the code are gone. Then and only then can we enjoy in good health and without risk the fruits of our labor. Such miracles imply monopoles.

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