God? This criminal?

Zvi Yanai, one of the most independent and sexiest great minds, celebrates his 70th birthday and retirement with a book about the state of science. He still strives to obtain the "secrets of the old man", as Einstein defined the riddles of the universe, he just doesn't think there is an old man

Miron Rapoport
Zvi Yanai. Why does the phone cord get tangled around itself? It's really annoying and disturbing

Photographs: Eyal Tuag

"You said I only ask big questions," Zvi Yanai called and said in a voice that had a slight hint of insult in it, two days after our second meeting in a Tel Aviv coffee shop with no citrus and almost no name. "So here's a little question that has been troubling me for many years: Why does the phone cord get tangled around itself, even if I never curl it? Why does it have to be untied every time? Why don't they make smooth telephone wires? I have already asked several experts and have not received an answer. It's really upsetting and disturbing."

Even this phone call can't deceive. Yanai, the Israeli "Mr. Science" - the one who edited for 20 years the journal "Thoughts" of the company IBM and the one who served for four years as the director general of the Ministry of Science - is interested in the big questions. Technology is racing forward, but it never really interested him: for him, the computer is just a "plug that you plug into electricity", and he only uses a mobile phone when he's traveling, in the car. Yanai wants to know how the universe was created, what happened just before the big bang, how life was created and how the program works that makes the cells of the finger know to be a finger, how the brain works and how the millions of neurons running in it know how to turn from matter into thought, into emotions. But the answers he receives are becoming more and more detailed and confusing and contradictory. More and more small.

The new book he is publishing these days, "Journey to the Consciousness of Nature" (published by Am Oved), tries to give an overview of the state of science today. It was born out of Yanai's inner need, who testifies to himself that during the years he was in the Ministry of Science ('97-'93) he basically cut off from reading pure scientific material, because he was busy with more useful, more applied (and more boring, he says) research. Now, at the age of 70, he is retired, both from the Ministry of Science and from IBM, and he has time to dive back into the things that have always interested him, first of all for his own good. The result of this renewed diving is the book.

As in an old Russian novel, sometimes the reader drowns in "Journey to the Consciousness of Nature", Yanai's fourth book, among the many heroes: quarks, leptons, gluons, photons, positrons, protons and antiprotons, axions, muons, tau and neutrinos - to give only a partial list , exclusively from the field of physics, and before we got to the names of all the things that run around in our brains and bodies. But the whole thing is fascinating, especially the two gates dealing with evolution, DNA and the brain. There, it turns out in a conversation with him, he also feels more comfortable theoretically. The randomness of evolution seems logical, complete, aesthetic to him. With the randomness of quantum mechanics he feels less comfortable.

IB-thoughts

Yanai arranged the meeting at the "Howard" cafe in Tel Aviv in the afternoon. He described the place to me, I arrived and couldn't find it. I went out into the street and saw Yanai walking briskly towards me. In sandals, he looks much less threatening than the figure with the bald head and the black turtleneck reflected on television and in the newspapers. Looks a bit kibbutznik. It turns out that even the cafe he sent me to has some kind of random law. "In the morning we are called the 'Ba Li' restaurant, in the evening we are called the 'Rose Cafe,'" the waitress explains why I couldn't locate the place. "And what are you now?" Yanai is interested. "Now we are in the middle", replies the waitress.

He became famous as the legendary editor of "Mechvot". Not many read "Thoughts", but many talked about it (and even more talked about those who did). In the 70s and 80s, there was a kind of general agreement among knowledgeable people that "Thoughts" was the best and most serious magazine published in Israel: discussions on science, philosophy, and everything in between. How did IBM Israel's rather casual Bitone become such a central and important journal? Coincidentally, says Yanai. How did he reach it and become an authority on scientific matters? Also by chance.

After a few years of wandering around the country on a Vespa between odd jobs, Yanai got married, today he is divorced and a father of four, and decided that he needed to work in a regular job. He started working in a spinning mill, even though since his kibbutz days the only work that seemed worthy in his eyes was working in the fields. But after a short time, he had an argument with the owner of the laundry ("I wanted to make a double cover and go home early, he wanted me to stay until the end of the shift"), and decided to leave. He saw an ad in the newspaper for a "press officer" position in an advertising agency, was accepted even though he had no prior knowledge, moved from office to office and in 1970 received an offer from IBM to come manage their public relations department.

IBM then published a kind of newsletter about what was going on in the company, which was distributed among managers in the economy. His name was "thoughts". "It was a marketing bulletin," says Yanai. "The news looked like this: 'In the dairy industry in Tnuva, they put in an IBM system, and today the produce is sky high.' That was the style, more or less. It

Yanai I would sue God at the International Court of Justice in The Hague

bore me." He started incorporating articles of a different kind into the bulletin. A conversation about science and morality with Isaiah Leibovich and Aharon Maged, for example. At first, the company turned their noses up a bit, they didn't understand the connection between their company's bulletin and these articles. But the reactions of the clientele were enthusiastic and the managers gave him a free hand, "and for that they deserve all the respect".

Even so, he had no shortage of problems with the company's global management. In one of the issues, Yanai published an article about "Nude Maya", the famous painting by the Spanish painter Goya. "At IBM, there was a very strict code of conduct, a whole book in which it was written what was allowed and what was not allowed for an IBM employee to do. A letter arrived from the global management wondering what an abominable drawing was doing in their magazine. I answered them that what is accepted in all museums in the world can also be accepted in 'thoughts'. They replied to me that IBM is not the place to present this kind of thing."

From one article on matters of science it expanded to two articles and then the entire booklet dealt with matters of science and culture and the relationship between them. From here to there, "Thoughts" was a hit, printed in 15 thousand copies even though it was not sold in stores and glittered on the letter of everyone who considered himself; Yanai himself became a sought-after lecturer, consultant and media person, and in the countless articles he wrote became the guru of popular science in Israel. In fact, thanks to "Thoughts" he was reborn, at the age of 35, as a scientist. "Science was as far from me as east from west, I had no access and understanding to it. What interested me was plays, movies, books in general. Little by little, while working on this paper, the curiosity started. First to the technological matter and then from technology to pure science. It was accidental."

The advantage as an outsider

He also came to Israel and the kibbutz by chance. His story is amazing, really. No wonder he sits today and writes the story of his family based on a bunch of letters sent to his mother, so he doesn't want to expand on it. "Wait for the book," he says. He was born in 1935 in Pescara, Italy, a small port city on the Adriatic coast, to parents born in Hungary. His mother was Jewish. "My parents were traveling artists, my father was a singer, my mother was a dancer. They moved from place to place, in several places they gave birth to children and left them with a nanny until the age of three and then picked them up. This is how I and my two sisters, who are older than me, were born. I moved with my parents in all kinds of cities until we settled in 1939 in Castiglione Fiorentino, an ancient town near Arzo and Florence. I stayed there the whole war until I ran away from the British to the north."

Did you run away from the English?

"We were Christians. We prayed and went to church. My parents were protégés of the Germans, so we fled with them in a convoy to the north."

So World War II for you is fear of the British?

"Yes. There was a single plane that flew at night and wherever there was light, it would bomb. The B-17 planes would pass over us in the direction of Rome. One day they dumped their baggage on us, on Castiglione Fiorentino. The school was destroyed, many were killed. We had no great love for the British and the Americans. There were stories about their cruelty, and about the blacks raping white Italian women."

What do you think the fascist regime looks like?

"He was the best thing that could happen. My mother bought me D'Amicis's 'The Heart', and the book captivated me. This is a fascist book of the first order. Motherland is the mother. Each individual child can be broken, an association of children cannot be broken. Stuff like that. I myself was in the fascist youth and Mussolini was a role model. I have a picture with the uniform, saluting with raised hand. We had a singular pride. And understand that at the same time my grandmother was sent to Auschwitz."

But you didn't know that.

"Mother knew."

So she can't really like the regime.

"No, but she made a living from it, she was an interpreter at the headquarters of the Wehrmacht in his country."

With the British occupation of northern Italy, Yanai and his sisters fled to a monastery, where they of course continued to live a Christian life. "I would have flourished as an exemplary teacher. As a child I had no problem with the Catholic God. God was all good in the world. In the gospels of Jesus, in the words of Jesus, there is a lot of compassion, kindness, love for the weak. As a child you feed on these stories. The church did not come between me and Jesus. I was connected to Jesus as I was connected to Mary and the apostles, an immediate, strong connection."

His mother and father died, and together with his sisters he was supposed to go back to Budapest. But then his uncle, his mother's brother, who was already living in the Land of Israel, discovered them. The uncle managed to send them the Jewish brigade that was in Italy at the time. "The brigade almost kidnapped us from the monastery and took us to Israel. On the way we also passed through Castiglione Fiorentino, the people there looked at us strangely. We were protégés of the Germans, we went north with them and here we are coming back with the British. I had the feeling that I had betrayed the Germans, the Italians, fascism."

The move to Israel was not easy. Yanai and his sister were brought to Kibbutz Ramat David. There, in secret, they continued to observe the Catholic rituals. "Like martyrs", he says. After two years he changed identities, "I made the switch". He exchanged his identification with Italian fascism for identification with Israel. "That's why I volunteered for the paratroopers, I volunteered for the reserves. Today it was very shaken. It is not clear to me how much I identify with the state." Catholicism, he says, he converted to "kibbutznik religion: telling the truth, work, service, norms that accompany me to this day, and for which I owe thanks to the kibbutz." One of his sisters did not make the switch and remained Catholic.

As part of the disconnection from the past, he also disconnected from Italian. He completely forgot the language, and only at a later age learned it again and still does not really master it. He says he also broke away from the Catholic God and the Catholic religion, learning at a later age what a murderous organization the Catholic Church was. "If I could, I would sue God at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. He committed crimes against humanity."

Still, it seems that at least one thing remained for him from Catholicism: the desire for the perfection of the world, the desire to obtain the "secrets of the old man", as Einstein called them, the perception that advocates the supremacy of theory over reality. "Theories are not found in nature, they are found in our consciousness, and the theory dictates everything. The theory dictates to you what you will find and what the face of reality will be. The theories change and reality changes according to the theory. The theory dictates to reality which side it reveals to it".

Not all scientists think like you.

"I think so. Our theory about salt cannot change. We know what it consists of, but in everything that concerns the universe, the mind, life - the theory changes, and with it the reality."

But the thought that emerges from your book is that the more science develops new theories, the more it moves away from understanding reality. Quantum mechanics explains the behavior of particles in laboratory experiments, but cannot explain the formation of the universe, the "big bang". The mapping of the human genome shows us how many genes we have, but also reveals the fact that the genes cannot so much explain to us the difference between us and the worm.

"I think there are two contradictory things here. On the one hand there is the necessity to understand ourselves and the world around us. This deep necessity strives for absolute answers. Science wants to find law and order in all things because without law and order you are in chaos, which is exactly the opposite of what science wants. On the other hand, in the effort to find regularity, you encounter the same element of randomness. Evolution was mainly the result of random mutations. Random events like that meteor that hit the earth 60 million years ago and thanks to which we are here. You encounter the power of randomness in quantum theory. I don't know if the world has become complex because it really is more complex than we thought, or because our theories are becoming more complex. There is a kind of game here where you can't find exactly the end of the thread. There are tens of thousands of threads. There is a huge commotion here, that the more you try to know things more precisely, the more vague and obscure you get them.

"It's a fascinating thing, and there is no other method. Because the other method is to believe that there is some higher power that created the world. But the probability that there is a God is much smaller than the probability that among 100 billion stars and galaxies somewhere there is intelligent life different and different from ours. See Rosenknertz and Guildenstern in Stoppard's play. At first they toss a coin, and sometimes one wins, and sometimes the other wins, and this seems like normal randomness to them. Then the coin falls 92 times on the same side and this is a sign that someone is directing things, and this someone wants them dead."

Do you see beauty in randomness?

"You catch me in something that I don't know the answer to, and it is to what extent the randomness, which has played such a central role in my life, also affects the obsession I have with all the randomness that exists in nature. But if you ask me who I identify with, with quantum mechanics - according to which I can influence a photon by looking through a microscope, retroactively, after five billion years, if it passes between two galaxies or scatters - or if I identify with Einstein who fights against mechanics this one? I identify with Einstein."

In the book you describe Einstein as pathetic.

"He ended his life in a very pathetic way, because he refused to accept quantum mechanics even though it proved itself in a thousand and one experiments. He is pathetic in the sense that he is relegated to the fringes of mainstream physics: his solitude at Princeton, his quirks, his insistence on finding the extended field theory that will restore objectivity to mainstream physics. Sure he's pathetic, but that doesn't mean I don't sympathize with his longing to discover the 'old man's secret'. I'm not that interested in technology. I'm not interested in knowing how a TV is built and how it works, what interests me is how to use it as a tool. I'm interested in the secret, the principle, the law, the theory."

Is it maybe because you are not a classical scientist, that you are not involved in the day-to-day of research?

"No. I hang on a high tree like Einstein who was a classical scientist. I think there is order beneath this disorder."

But the impression, both from this book and from the number of conversations with scientists you published a few years ago ("The Endless Search"), is that today's scientists are actually more interested in the small discoveries and not so much looking for the secret.

"Between my question of how the world was created and the answer, there are a thousand intermediate steps. There are people who can follow a certain protein or a certain molecule all their lives, like two Nobel Prize winners from the Technion. They found some kind of protein, I don't even remember what it is, and devoted the best years of their lives to it. It was boring to me. The research work itself is not much different from what I did in the laboratory at the laundry. I guess I was not interested in deciphering the genome of the nematode worm, despite the enormous importance of revealing the genome of this worm. That's why I'm not a scientist. I'm interested in conclusions, meanings. In interpretations, in metaphors. My advantage as an outsider is the ability to accompany several fields, to see the analogy between them. This is such a luxury that an ordinary scientist cannot afford if he wants to advance and develop a career."

The computers remained stupid

So what does Yanai see from the outside? In physics he sees, as mentioned, theoretical stability and recognizes the mastery of quantum mechanics, for all its peculiarities. He hopes that another explanation will be found for the material phenomena revealed by quantum mechanics, but for now there is no such explanation in sight. He sees a split in biology and life sciences, and it was precisely after the end of the human genome decoding project that so much was invested in him. "There was running after kindergarten because there was a feeling that if you solve kindergarten, you will know everything. Suddenly it becomes clear that the flower has opened and instead of finding one leaf stalk, you find several stalks. And there is not one code, but there are four or five codes, each of which may be much more important than the genetic code."

A similar thing happened in the field of artificial intelligence. The victory of the computer over the world champion in chess has been considered for many years as an important step on the way to the development of artificial intelligence. Seven years ago, the "Deep Blue" software defeated Garry Kasparov, but this victory only revealed the huge distance that lies before the development of real artificial intelligence. "In 1958, one of the artificial intelligence experts predicted that within ten years the computer would beat the world champion. Another expert predicted that five years after the computer beats the world champion, we will have a computer that can think even better than man. It took 40 years for 'Deep Blue' to defeat Kasparov, and seven years after that victory, computers remain just as stupid as they were 50 years ago. After all, if you enter the sentence 'Danny loves dogs' and the sentence 'Danny loves apples' into the computer, it will think that it is the same type of love. The computer is not able to overcome the semantic obstacle that every child understands. True, computers are being built today with a power of 1,000 billion operations per second. There are those who say that with such computing power it will be possible to develop independent intelligence. It seems dubious to me, I don't believe it."

The big bang theory, he says, was also supposed to give a convincing answer to questions about the creation of the universe. Looking back, she didn't solve much. If all physical dimensions, including the dimension of time, do not exist at the time of the "big bang", how can we refer to the time that preceded the big bang, to the time before time? In the book he tells how the Catholic Church used the big bang to bring God back into science: if the universe was born from one singular point, the church can claim that God is this singular point. John Paul II even hosted conferences on the "Big Bang".

Yanai is far from convinced. He rejected God when he came to the kibbutz 60 years ago, and he is not going to let him come back through the back door. "Just because I don't know something, it doesn't mean I'm ready to let God enter the arena. Even religious people who deal with science, and there are quite a few of them in Israel as well, do not include God in their calculations. God has to prove to me that he exists, and he hasn't yet. I am ready to live very nicely in a world where there are no final answers, in a world where there is no knowledge, but I am not ready to live in a world where there is God."

He also fears the divine touch of genetic engineering. If there is anything perfect in Yanai's eyes, it is the process of evolution. A process that managed to be perfected all the time, while maintaining variation and randomness. He quotes the physicist Lee Smolin who compared the randomness in the physical world and the process of the development of cities: what makes a city interesting and aesthetic is the fact that it is built from patchwork upon patchwork, dreams upon dreams. This is how evolution also developed: patchwork upon patchwork. Genetic engineering may break this delicate balance. "Part of my reservations about genetic engineering is that it reduces diversity and increases purposefulness. Theists believe in a purpose in nature. Genetic engineering brings purposefulness back to the game."

Race theory, the next generation

Purposefulness was the name of the game even in the days when he was the director general of the Ministry of Science. Despite the inclination of his heart towards theoretical studies, he supported the transfer of budgets to studies that have economic feasibility and not to abstract studies "on gamma rays", thereby provoking quite a bit of opposition among scientists. On the other hand, he is concerned about the growing power of the industry. "The industries are pressuring the research institutions to release the products to the market, so there is not enough time to do the necessary laboratory experiments. We put products on the market that we don't know what their results will be. We rush into genetic manipulations without knowing enough about the delicate internal balances in plants created by nature, without having the test of time and countless experiments. Industries must not be allowed to set the pace and they must not be given a foothold in determining the direction of research."

And this is what is happening now?

"for sure. What biotech companies do is to block the publications according to their marketing plan. They silence the results of studies because the results are uncomfortable for them and stop supporting studies that are uncomfortable for them, or they delay new discoveries so as not to harm existing drugs. The contracts of the research institutes with the biotechnological companies must be published accurately so that the public can criticize them. It's not happening right now."

He sees genetic engineering primarily as a social danger, more than an ethical one. If genetic improvement reaches humans, and it will, he sees a situation where two separate races of the human race may develop within 100 years. A genetically superior race, with "good" traits, and a race of "normal" humans. "Whoever invests a lot of money in improving his son's genetics will not want his son to marry someone who is not genetically developed. And so a new race will be created. Already now the Bioethics Committee agrees that those who have four sons can determine that their next baby will be female. Ostensibly, this is a personal decision, but it means that the front is being shaken."

The pension is good for him. He lives in Tel Aviv, devotes his time to writing and feels "the best he has ever felt". Health is also fine, "until further notice". He is considering leaving the city and moving to the village, and while writing the book about his family's history, he hopes to find the history of his brother who was lost somewhere in World War II. Science gives him fewer answers than he expected, but it no longer bothers him. "I continue to believe in science. I used to believe in him more, but I learned his limitations. Although I don't know if he is able to bring me closer to the truth, I know that he is the only thing that can bring me closer to material reality." *

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