Yuval Naaman, 80 years old - the last interview. Published in Galileo, May 2005

And still wants to make prophecies that can be confirmed or disproved in an accelerator that will operate starting in two years at Tsern, and besides that it operates simultaneously in 13 completely different fields

"The Odessa Case" (by Frederic Forsythe) is just one of the many books that Prof. Yuval Neman has in the three libraries in his home, along with the political books, the history books and of course the scientific professional literature; However, this does not necessarily imply his fondness for suspense books. Yuval Na'im is simply used in this book as a hero who appears in the middle of the plot as a guest. There are several books in which Prof. Neman stars as the head of the Mossad, as the person in charge of Israel's nuclear program and more.

This is just one facet of the many faces of Yuval Neman, who will achieve heroism in May 2005. In his life, he managed to be an engineer, the military attache in London and an expert in the field of subatomic particles, who in one year (!) finished his doctorate - for which he did not receive the Nobel Prize in Physics together with Gel- Mann in 1969 received critical articles in the world press, for example in the Parisian newspaper LE MONDE and in books about science. For example, the British couple John and Mary Gribbin, authors of many books about science and the personalities who contributed to it, expressed their astonishment in their biographical book about the great Jewish physicist Richard Feynman: "For this and other work in the sorting of elementary particles, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded in 1969 to Gal-man; To everyone's surprise, the award committee ignored Naman."

Naman had time to develop an academic career that began in London and continued in Tel Aviv, engaged in public activity for the Jewish immigration of the Soviet Union, turned to politics and founded the revival movement, and as the first Minister of Science also founded the Israel Space Agency, SLA. We asked to wonder a little about Yuval Neman's past, but he says that his present is no less important - he devised a new theory in subnuclear physics for which he developed an original system in mathematics, in a field that bridges geometry and cluster theory. Only in about two to three years, when the new particle accelerator opens in Zern, Switzerland, will it be possible to confirm or disprove the physical hypothesis, whose conclusions and predictions he presented in several scientific journals (the mathematical development will remain valid in any case).

He remembers little Tel Aviv very well, also the number of generations in Israel on his father's and mother's side.

"Zarakh Moshili, who placed the clock on the tower in Jaffa. He is the father of my grandmother Sara Mosheli who became a trustee. He married Yochaved Fishman of Mitzvah, from the Mitomat Ha'Raesh. In the old cemetery in Trumpeldor there is one grave surrounded by a fence - she died in 1890 and was buried in the cemetery of the Jews of Jaffa in Menshiya. In 1916, the British shelled the port of Jaffa and the Turks expropriated the cemetery to turn it into a cannon position for the defense of the port and allowed those who wanted to save a grave to move it or the body buried in it from the cemetery in Menshiya. They moved the tombstone with the body as they were and went as far north as they could. And this actually created the cemetery in Trumpeldor, a grave that confused Tel Aviv history researchers because it is 20 years older than the rest of the cemetery and even older than the city itself. My grandmother had two brothers - Mordechai Mosheli who moved to Egypt and settled in Port Said, bought a department store there when every ship that stopped bought supplies from him. He was the breadwinner of the Port Said Jewish community. Einstein stayed with them upon his return from Israel and we have a photo of him with my father who accompanied him to the ship in Port Said. Sara married a faithful father who immigrated to Israel in 1890 and the couple was one of the 66 couples who founded Tel Aviv. Faithful father founded a pump factory in 1900.

"During the expulsion from Tel Aviv during World War I, my family moved to Damascus and my father saw the hanging of the three Nili people there. When they returned from Damascus, the financial situation was difficult and they sent him to work in Egypt with his uncle and help support the family. This is also the reason that the stay in Egypt continued intermittently until 1935. My mother was born in Jerusalem to a descendant of Israel B.K., who arrived in Safed in 1811 and moved to Jerusalem after the Resh and founded a printing house there. I have a book he printed in which he thanks 'Sher Moshe and Sarah Yehudit' [the Montefiore couple] for sending him a new printing press. My mother's father was Avraham Sofer ben Yaakov, one of the first teachers of Hebrew, grandson of Rabbi Yitzhak Makhslavitz, one of the Gara students and the leader of their aliyah in 1806. My mother moved to Egypt when she married my father, but returned to Israel to give birth to me. We went back and forth between Egypt and Israel and from the age of 5 to the age of 10 I studied in Port Said at a French school run by the French government for the employees of the (then French) Suez Canal Company. I studied in classes where there were only French people except for one Jew. That's why French is rooted in me.

"When in 1933 (and I was 8 years old) a French admiral passed through the channel and visited the company, I acted as a 'representative' of the school, I talked to him and answered his questions. You can say that this was my first public appearance... At Uncle Mordechai's house I also met Haim Arlozorov and Itamar Ben-Avi, my parents' friends and other people who were staying with him before leaving for Europe or on their return from there. We used to have 'Hapoel' sailors with Aharon Denin. From the age of 7, they would send me every holiday alone to Israel and I managed by train. There was a direct train from Port Said to Kantara. In Kantara I had to cross the canal by ferry, and wait a few hours for the train from Cairo to Israel.

"When I returned to Israel at the age of ten, I entered the Nordic Gymnasium for a year as a free student just to learn the Hebrew subjects because I had already learned the rest of the material at the French school in Port Said. I joined grades 30-15 to complete Bible, Hebrew and grammar. In the meantime, I was interviewed by Haim Bogarshov and Ben Zion Mosinzon - the two principals who ran the Herzliya Gymnasium for XNUMX years and decided to admit me to the XNUMXth grade, I was three years younger than the rest of my classmates. Because of that, I graduated from high school at the age of XNUMX."

After that, Naman studied at the Technion. His goal in life was to continue the factory founded by his grandfather in 1900. "My father continued the factory and I was supposed to continue after him, so it was natural for me to go to the Technion to study pump engineering, which is part of mechanical engineering. 16 is the minimum admission age for the Technion, and I had to wait a year, a year in which I worked in a factory and joined the Hagana. I studied at the Technion from 41 to 45. While studying at the Technion, I was drafted into the defense, and among other things, I instructed Hana Sanesh before she left for Europe, in the use of small arms. After the Technion I spent half a year in the family factory and designed three types of pumps that worked for many years later. This is where my engineering career ended, until I returned to it in 1970 when I established the Faculty of Engineering at Tel Aviv University as the first dean and in 1977-1983 as the chairman of the Sea Canal Steering Committee. By the way, the canal was fully justified in terms of energy production for peak consumption hours, water desalination, saving the Dead Sea and even revitalizing the Negev. I also returned to engineering in the years 2002-1997 when I was elected president of the Chamber of Engineers, Architects and Academics in the Technology Professions.

As mentioned, the engineering section was interrupted in 1946 in preparation for the establishment of the state, but then the military section began. During the War of Liberation Na'am went through a series of command positions in Givat. David Ben-Gurion writes in his diary in September 52 in his meeting with Chief of Staff Mordechai Maklef: "Yovel Ne'man graduated from Staff College in France, lifted, finished high school at the age of 13.5 [this is an exaggeration, they took me down another year and a half. Y.N.], was Avidan's chief assistant. M.M. Talk to him."

Develops the idea of ​​the reserve system

Indeed, a trustee was appointed head of the planning department. "I developed the idea of ​​the reserve system. I wrote an assessment because the borders we had and the map is such that the country could always be finished in a chic. In the reserves, you could change the ratio between the Arab armies and ours 1 to 3 instead of 20 to 1953. The trick is to build a country where you don't spend everything on security and also take advantage of the civilian facilities." Another plan that Neman developed during his tenure as head of the planning department (now a wing) was a contingency plan for an all-out war with the Arab states. It was in 14 - XNUMX years later the IDF acted according to the contingency plan that outlined nothing less and nothing more than the Six Day War.

After the planning, he was the deputy head of the Intelligence Division and in 1956 he was tasked with the secret link with France, including Operation Kadesh. But the military episode was not long either. At some point in 1957, Yuval Neman requested a two-year leave to study for a doctorate in physics. Young Naman was torn between three directions at the time: engineering in the context of the family enterprise, the science he was most attracted to, although he was divided between mathematics and physics, and the military service which he believed was essential in the young state of Israel. He was drawn to science from the age of 13, when he first came up with an innovative idea in arithmetic, an idea that remained in his notebooks. He debated the question of how to combine a scientific career with a military career.

"Actually, I entered proper science, systematically, only when I went to England and started the work in physics. The year was 57. After Operation Kadesh it was quiet. Until then I could not disconnect from the security system. I saw this silence as a last chance. I heard that Prof. Natan Rosen [a student of Einstein and his partner in several articles and an important physicist in his own right. A. B.] came from America and they opened a physics faculty at the Technion and I wanted to join it. I studied the theory of relativity in a math school and I knew that Einstein tried to unify gravity with electricity in the 'unified field theory' but did not finish.

I asked Moshe Dayan for a two-year leave to do a PhD in physics at the Technion. Dayan asked if I could do it in London as well (it was then necessary to replace the attaché in London, Michael Ben Gal, known as "James"). I intended to research a topic in the field of general relativity, perhaps in the above direction. I knew that in England there were Herman Bondi and Thomas Gold (both Jews) and Fred Hoyle, the creators of the 'stable universe theory' which was based on the theory of general relativity (in fact Fred Hoyle was later a close friend of mine. He was a man with a lot of imagination. In England they didn't like him because he was a MAVERICK – not systematic). Dayan emphasized that as an adjunct I would not have much work, and the rest of the time I could study. When I arrived in London I looked for Bondi, it turned out that he teaches at King's College in the east of the city and the embassy was in Kensington, in the west end of London. I looked for something closer and found Imperial College - a five minute walk from the embassy. I took a catalog - I knocked on the door of Prof. Brockman, who was mentioned there as being in charge of theoretical physics, I said that I was interested in doing research in the field of 'unified field theory'... He said he did not know what unified field theory is, but we have someone here who specializes in quantum field theory - Abdus Salam - the only Muslim who later received a Nobel Prize. I did my doctorate with him. He was Pakistani. I had recommendations from two teachers at the Technion and a letter from Moshe Dayan. He wrote that I succeeded in my military duties, and he is sure that I will succeed in physics as well. Salam asked 'How does a general know what physics is?' But he still accepted me."
At first everything went well, but the work at the embassy became difficult in a short time following the murder of the king of Iraq and its prime minister and the seizure of power there by Qassem.
There was a fear that the entire Mazat would fall into Nasser's hands, the USA landed a force in Lebanon and the British came to the aid of King Hussein of Jordan. In exchange for an Israeli permit to fly two battalions over Israel to the Kingdom of Jordan, the British for the first time allowed Israel to purchase two submarines and 50 Centaur tanks, and Naman was busy organizing their training. In the end he pressed and the IDF gave up on continuing his work. May 1960. Naaman stayed in London on a scholarship for one year as a student. In that summer of 1960, he invented what was supposed to earn him the Nobel Prize in Physics, which was finally awarded to the American Jewish physicist Murray Gal-Man who came up with the same idea separately and independently, and this despite the fact that Neman preceded him both in the discovery itself and in its publication.
What exactly was your achievement?

"The work I did, and which Gal-Man came to at the same time as me a little later, is similar in software to what Mendeleev did in chemistry and Linnaeus in the life sciences - finding order in an accumulated sea of ​​items discovered in experiments without a theoretical picture.
In chemistry, every time an element was discovered and they did not know how many elements should exist and which properties existed or were not yet known until Dmitri Mendeleev understood the order in 1868 and left empty slots that were indeed filled later and verified his table of elements. Carl von Linnaeus, a Swedish biologist ("Linnaeus") came up with the system of animal and plant species. I did this in the field of particles at the subatomic level - protons, meson neutrons, etc. When I entered the subject there were already about a hundred types, it was a complete "mess" and my first published work was a solution to this matter. The key tool here was mathematical in nature, I used "bunch theory", where I found a suitable "bunch" called SU3, one of its "presentations", a frame that has 8 slots into which I placed the proton and neutron and 6 more particles as the system that defines and identifies a "family" of 8 particles (Hence the other name known to this order, the "EIGHTFOLD WAY". In this order, I left an empty slot in another "family" of 10 particles for the particle that was later discovered and was named Omega Minus. As mentioned, Gal-Man came to the same conclusion after (we both sent our findings each One separately, as articles for publication in two different scientific journals, and here they indicate at the top of each article the date of receipt (mine February 13 and his March 27, all in 1961).

About a month after I arrived at Imperial College in the spring of 1960, I was drawn to the problem of order. I talked to Salam, but he tried to divert me in another direction. and offered me such a topic. When I insisted, he responded, "You tell me that you only have a scholarship for one year and I offer you something easy that you can finish in a year. But if you insist on continuing in the direction you have chosen, know that you are embarking on a very speculative journey, and you may not find anything even in a few years. But if this is your wish - please do it thoroughly, learn the necessary mathematical tools beyond what I know and have taught" and left for the summer in the USA. When he returned at the end of October, I submitted my article to him. The draft was on his desk until January 1961 and then he offered it to me for publication. Another complication occurred in June 1961, when an experiment was conducted at Berkeley Laboratories that allegedly revealed a complete difference in an important feature between two particles that were supposed to belong to the same "family". Gal-Man retracted his article and instead submitted an article in September 1961 in which he presented two possible solutions, one that we both defended [citing my work and the draft that was withdrawn and was not published at all; And as a second option he presented a model developed by Japanese physicists under the leadership of SAKATA Asher Lee,
When the news of that experiment and its results reached me, I went back and checked the considerations that led me to the Eightfold Path and was convinced again that they were correct. I decided not to deviate from my model and assumed that there was probably a mistake in that experiment and I did not change anything in my article, which was indeed published. Two months later it turned out that it was indeed an error in the experiment, and the "Eight Way" received initial recognition.

Later, Gal-Man won the Nobel Prize for this. A year before the Nobel Prize was received, in 68, an international scientific conference sponsored and financed by the Nobel Foundation was held in Sweden. The conference discussed current issues and we were there, Gelman, Salam and I. During one of the breaks, the three of us were talking together when suddenly a man from Atz appeared towards us and called my name. Two of my friends whispered to me that the man is Prof. Waller and he serves as an investigator for the Nobel Prize Committee in Physics. Waller asked me to take him to one of the balconies and there he would allegedly interrogate me. In fact he was not at all interested in my story, all he wanted was to get a formal answer from me regarding Salam's involvement in my discovery. The British establishment pressed for the awarding of the prize to Salam for his student's discoveries and no one there cared about what would happen to that student. A year and a half later, the award was given to Gal-Man, while at the ceremony itself, in reading the reasons for choosing the winner, Waller concluded with the sentence "A man named Naaman reached the same results some time after Gal-Man" (while in reality the facts were the opposite...)

"I think it was a matter of the weight of the lobby standing behind the winners. The committee takes into account public opinion in the academic community, counting the number of letters received regarding each candidate, etc. And another detail: the president of the Royal Society in England has a special formal status in the award committee. I didn't have a single institutional supporter at the time."
But still, this year two professors from Israel won the Nobel Prize, how come politics didn't interfere with them?

"It's different, because they carried out part of the research in the US and also maintained ongoing contact with the American university. If I had maintained contact with Caltech even after the two years I worked there (1965-1963), it is possible that they would have taken care of lobbying for me."

Naaman's second important discovery during his academic career was finding the reason for such an order. "With Linnaeus, they discovered the reason after Georg Mendel discovered the laws of genetics, when Watson and Crick revealed the genetic code, a total of about 250 years. With Mendeleev - it was Rutherford who broke the atom
and found the explanation for the periodic table, a process that lasted 50 years. In the case of my discovery, I carried out this work myself less than a year after the first discovery, and I included the solution with Haim Goldberg, a young man who at the time finished his doctorate in Jerusalem. It was already in Israel. And it was accepted for publication in February 1962 and I also sent copies to Gal-Man and others. Unfortunately, I didn't give the new concept a name... Two years later Gal-Man published the same idea with the addition of an analysis of the physical meaning. This is about the existence of another level in the structure of matter: particles (molecules) are made of atoms, atoms are made of nuclei and "leptons"
LEPTON (a general name for electrons and other similar particles that do not feel the strong nuclear force) The nucleus is made of "hadrons" HADRON
(That name includes protons, neutrons, and about a hundred other types of particles that feel the strong nuclear force), and the hadrons are made of "subparticles" that Gal-Man called QUARK and in Hebrew I suggest "Kort". In 1968, Stanford experimenters managed to penetrate the proton and neutron and sense the rects directly, and three of them won the Nobel Prize for this in 1990: Jerome Friedman, Henry Kendall and Richard Taylor. And in 1973, three theoretical physicists proposed a description of the force that binds the kerats inside the hadron and won the Nobel Prize for Physics this year, David Gross, Frank Wilchek and David Pulitzer.
By the way - Salam won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1979 together with the two American Jews STEVEN WEINBERG and SHELDON GLASHOW for deciphering the weak nuclear force and its relation to electromagnetism. Salam died in 1996.

13 tasks at the same time

Towards his eightieth year, he still works faithfully at Tel Aviv University, and recently he also prepared the celebrations of the International Year of Physics on the 13th anniversary of the "wonderful year" in which Einstein published five of his important articles. But that's just one of XNUMX projects that Naman is working on at the same time these days.

Among other things, he is trying to bring together selected articles in some of the scientific fields he has researched, and he is also working on an update to the book he wrote on the theory of evolution "Seder from the Random" published by the Kibbutz HaMoheed and the Van Leer Institute - "Since then I have made a lot of progress in ideas in this field, especially in evolutionary epistemology - the evolution of ideas scientific and of the sciences, I am writing a new book on this matter. In fact my wife claims that every book as soon as I finish I start over. In my study there is a big stack related to this. Among other things, I also deal with Judaism's position regarding evolution: there are two very detailed Jewish positions - one by Rabbi Kook who preceded and is similar to Tyler du Chardin - a very important French researcher in the field whose background is Jesuit. Rabbi Kook was full of admiration for evolution and even sang a hymn to it. On the other hand, the Lubavitcher Rebbe denies evolution completely without the subtleties of the creationists.
There are a bunch of five or six biologists that when I progress in the field of evolution I send them the ideas for an opinion, especially in the parts where I am not particularly knowledgeable. The "visitors" are Ephraim Katzir, Alex Keenan, Renana Ben-Gurion to Leshem, and recently, Michel Rebel also joined them - for him it was important, he is a believing Jew and I guess he was happy to have Rabbi Kook's backing in retrospect... Another "visitor" is Cyril Domb, a senior physicist (at Bar Ilan University) and a member of the British Royal Society (we met during the struggle for the liberation of the Jewish scientists in the Soviet Union. He provided me with the positions of the Rebbe of Lubovitz."
In the new book, a physical point of view and not just a biological one will be expressed. Naaman explains: "There is a serious difference in my current evidence since the description I gave in my book,
which was in the spirit accepted in biology today. Define: this is a population of systems (in biology this is the animal) each of which is led by its software (the DNA in biology) and exists in the environment and in addition the system has a routine of processes that open the door to random changes (errors) in the software... this is the accepted paradigm. Now it turns out that the randomness doesn't just come in one pipe but two pipes. We know that in the boundary layer between two geological eras there are huge extinctions of up to a million species. Today we know that in at least one case it was an asteroid that hit the Earth. It is randomness that enters through the 'pipe' of the environment and not of the software. Even today when a bridge or dam is built and they say it will destroy some rare snail - here. The human introduced a random permutation into the snail's environment. The living environment is constantly facing disasters, and we don't just have to wait for a global disaster. Another example - the appearance of a competing species changes the environment regarding this species. As soon as you take the whole picture, it becomes necessary to write a new paradigm for evolution, in which randomness has two entry pipes - entry into the biological software and entry into the environment. I did this and got interesting results in many areas.

Mathematical Creature : Loyal Quillen

A few more examples of the many tasks that Prof. Naman handles today are his predictions - in 1979, during the signing of the peace treaty with Egypt, two things happened to me, one - I entered politics for a few years = and the second - I had a good idea in physics - I published it then in 79 ′. It is called SU(2/1). . We are talking about "a mathematical field called the "Ernlangen program" which connects algebra with geometry. In the physical aspect, this gives new predictions.
Everyone is now waiting for the big accelerator in Sarn, to try to discover the Higgs boson. There was no theoretical prediction that would tell what its mass is, in other words - where it should be. in the field of energy. Look for it so far in the whole field, gradually increase from 1 to
.110 GeV (GIGA ELECTRON VOLT) They already gave the Wolf Prize to Higgs and two other researchers about a year ago, without finding this boson. My new symmetry allowed me in 1986 to calculate the mass and I published the prediction for that mass. This time, about three months after I published the work, an English guy named David Fairlie came up with a similar idea. About ten years ago he called me, came to visit and we have been corresponding ever since. We published our articles in the same journal. In the meantime, two more things became possible. First, I saw that it is possible to generalize this as a method - and this gives the possibility to treat the theory of relativity differently and make new predictions. Each breaking of symmetry takes on a new geometric meaning. And besides that, the search is now being resumed.

With the help of the previous accelerator in the axis, as mentioned, they reached up to 110 GEV in the search for the boson and now they need a new accelerator and are building it in the axis, it will be ready in about two years. On the one hand, this prediction needs to be brought to the attention of the professional public, who will know that there is such a prediction at all. I spoke with an editor of one of the journals about three years ago and he ordered a large and summarizing article from me on this matter. I wrote it with an appendix by David Fairley and another friend to show more examples of why it's good.

But in the meantime 2-3 more things happened. It turned out that I did not intentionally invent something new in mathematics in this matter. I posted it as mentioned
in 1979. In 1990, my friend the mathematician Shlomo Sternberg revealed to me that in mathematics there is a creature similar to this and a Canadian mathematician named Quillen invented it around 1985-1990. I checked, I saw that my build was indeed similar to what Quillen did a few years later. To my surprise, they sent me a mathematical book that came out later and they called the mathematical creature
THE NEEMAN-QUILLEN CONNECTION
The "connection" of Neman-Quilen. The term "connection" means "potential" when moving to physics. I had no idea that the mathematicians knew this creature because the article was published in a physical journal."
Until we know whether the prediction has proven itself, we faithfully hope to complete some more spiritual projects as well. Among other things, he wants to gather in one comparative book the poems written by poets from all over the world about the heroes of the Bible. Hebrew examples of this are "Bain Dor" by Shaul Tscheranhovski or "Bat Yiftah" by Micah Yosef Levinzon. Byron wrote in English about some of these heroes and she was in German etc.

 The origin of Abraham the Hebrew

Another study that Naman follows is in the area of ​​the origin of the people of Israel. On a huge Canaanite library found in the city of Ebla (EBLA) in Syria, the Italian researchers who excavated there 20 years ago discovered a city from the period of 3,000 to 2,000 BC. When one of the researchers started writing about the connections that the discovery has with the Bible, he was expelled from Syria and his friend prefers not to mention these connections anymore. In any case, the material found describes a king named 'Ebar' who lived in 2,400 BC, that is, about half a thousand years before Abraham our father. "In the old days, Abla was at its peak and he had many vassals - among them the king of Jebusi in Jerusalem.
I found signs that I interpret as indicating that he is also like Akhenaten who reigned in Egypt a thousand years after him, he also tried to introduce monotheism and he also did not succeed in this and the idea disappeared one generation after him, "but if there is a small remnant of refugees who continue with the same faith what will you call them, the faithful of the past ? Hebrews, of course. First of all, this explains why Abram the Hebrew is called Hebrew. And explains why the "promise" speaks of the river Euphrates when it is a speech that sits in Canaan, if not only did Abraham come from there, but he bears the memory of an empire that he actually ruled in the past
That explains a lot of things.

"I developed this idea, I published it at the time in one place, but not a place that received a lot of criticism, but in the introduction to someone else's book. I decided that in my eightieth year I could devote some effort and sort this matter out and publish it in archaeological journals and receive responses."

Naam certainly has a lot more to contribute, but even a three-hour interview at his home in Tel Aviv was not enough to even scratch the bottom that would help us wonder about the man who contributed to science and several other fields that are still difficult to talk about even today, unless you want to write it in a suspense book.