Tickling the Tail of a Sleeping Dragon

On Hubris and Humility

It has a nice ring, doesn’t it? In fact, it very well may be the name of a children’s short story. Before any of that every happened, it was uttered by famed physicist Richard Feynman to describe an experiment that was performed by Louis Sloton a renowned scientist known for his work at Los Alamos. After his work on the Manhattan Project with Oppenheimer, Sloton remained at the lab to continue his research.

In addition to the more well known fissionable materials that we know of being used in the Trinity test and for the two bombs that were dropped in Japan, there was another sphere that remained at the lab because no one knew what to deal with it. Reflecting the uncertainty and wariness around it, it also had the moniker of the Demon Core because it seemed to attract bad things as a few different scientists tried their hands at various experiments with it that resulted in their early deaths, but Sloton remained undeterred.

He insisted on attempting to understand more about this core. In specific, Slotin really wanted to understand the levels of radiation that could be attained just previous to actual criticality. To do this, he needed to introduce two pieces of a beryllium alloy around a plutonium core. In essence, those two halves of the beryllium needed to be as close together without touching in order to measure the high level of radioactivity safely. I am no scientist but, um, that sounds like tempting fate and indeed, Feynman attempted to dissuade Slotin by arguing that performing this experiment was like tickling the tail of a sleeping dragon. As you might have gussed, he was not convinved.

Normally, there was a tested instrument use to keep the two spheres apart, but Slotin thought better and surmised that he could more effectively keep them apart using a screwdriver…Yes, you read that correctly. It will not shock you to hear that the screwdriver slipped. The story is told that Slotin quickly leaped forward, covering the experiment with his body, absorbing much of the radiation, and saving the lives of the others in the room. It has been calculated that Slotin received an astonishing 10 sieverts of radiation, whereas someone standing one kilometer from Hiroshima ground zero would “only” have received 4 sieverts.

Why in the world would someone as accomplished as Slotin with as much scientific knowledge that he’d amassed have acted with such reckless confidence? Well, it turns out, you may have done the same. All of us, including the greatest and most knowledgeable people in the world suffer from the illusion of knowledge. We think that we understand the world in much greater detail than we actually do.

A great example of this is right now, try to explain how a toilet works in as much detail as possible…go ahead, do it aloud. Maybe one of my readers is a plumber but probably most of you like me started a sentence using words like bowl, water, pipes, or gravity and then failed. We think we know but we really don’t. I’ve written about this concept a lot here but it keeps nagging me as a major root cause of so much of what plagues our world.

I’m not sure there’s one clear solution to this beyond learning how to say I don’t know a whole lot more but I feel strengthened when I think about this upcoming combination of the start of a new book of the Torah, Bamidbar-in the wilderness, with the holiday of Shavuot, where we celebrate the receiving of the Torah, our great wisdom tradition.

Wondering why in the world the desert is an apt setting for revelation of the Torah, the midrash in Bamidbar Rabbah (1:7) teaches the following:

Anyone who does not make herself open to all [hefker, literally ownerless] like a wilderness cannot acquire wisdom and Torah.

That word hefker/ownerless is striking. It usually refers to property, and it technically means, 'ownerless,’ or 'up for grabs.’ But to make yourself hefker implies some kind of total surrender, an annihilation of the self. The idea here is that unless you are willing to be completely empty, to let everything go, you cannot expect to be able to receive divine wisdom. While that last clause is perhaps a bit aspirational, we can temper it by saying that our world could be a whole lot healthier if we recognized that there’d be healthier communication if we all strove to be a bit more like the wilderness: up for grabs, open, filled with exploratory spirit. Whether it’s ideology, practice, or just knowledge, aspiring for hefker-ness might be one key.

The other teaching that resonates comes from a commentary on the beginning of Pirke Avot, the section of the Mishnah known as Ethics of our Ancestors. There, we learn about the transmission of the Torah:

משֶׁה קִבֵּל תּוֹרָה מִסִּינַי, וּמְסָרָהּ לִיהוֹשֻׁעַ, וִיהוֹשֻׁעַ לִזְקֵנִים, וּזְקֵנִים לִנְבִיאִים, וּנְבִיאִים מְסָרוּהָ לְאַנְשֵׁי כְנֶסֶת הַגְּדוֹלָה.

Moses received the Torah at Sinai and transmitted it to Joshua, Joshua to the Elders, and the Elders to the Prophets, and the Prophets transmittedit to the Men of the Great Assembly.

Notice that it’s only Moses for whom the verb ‘receive’ is used. The Noam Elimelech of Lizhensk picks up on that and wonders if this text is teaching something deeper. He recognized that there’s an interesting parallel between Moses and Mt. Sinai, the mountain where the Torah was given. Another midrash exists that imagines a competition between the mountains at which one is most fitting to have the Torah given on it. Mount Sinai wins because while other mountains laud themselves for being the grandest among the others, God chooses it specifically because it is the lowest among the mountains. Its humble nature elevates it.

Riffing on this, the Noam Elimelech connects the two teachings. He argues that only a person who lowers themselves in humility can merit to receive Torah. It’s also important to note that it’s still a mountain so even though it’s humble, it still stands tall and has strength. There’s a balance there.

So when the text in Pirkei Avot tells us that Moses received the Torah from Mount Sinai, the Noam Elimelech wants us to read that as Moses received Torah like the way Mount Sinai received the Torah. Humble yourself and you will gain wisdom.

This is hard work and as we’ve discussed here, there’s no magic blueprint. Steven Sloman, a professor of cognitive science at Brown University, has some simple but powerful suggestions:

People who are more reflective are less susceptible to the illusion. There are some simple questions you can use to measure reflectivity…

The trick is to not only come to a conclusion, but to verify that conclusion…You just need one person to say, “are you sure?” and for everyone else to care about the justification…

My colleagues and I are studying whether one way to open up discourse is to try to change the nature of conversation from a focus on what people value to one about actual consequences.

Pausing before we say or do, ritualizing curiosity, and thinking about the conclusions rather than the values can get us a few steps closer. None of this is quite as dangerous as it was for Slotin in that lab who tragically died nine days after that incident but it does feel so important. Tickling the tail sleeping dragon is not a good idea, certainly not when it comes to radioactive materials and even when it comes to dangerous ideas.

Find opportunities for humility. Make yourself a little ownerless. Be like the desert. Learn from a mountain; or just simply say I don’t know a few more times.

Shabbat Shalom, Chag Sameach, and have a lovely weekend!