“The physicist … engages in complex and difficult calculations, involving the manipulating of ideal, mathematical quantities that, at first glance, are wholly lacking in the music of the living world and the beauty of the resplendent cosmos. It would seem as if there exists no relationship between these quantities and reality. Yet these ideal numbers that cannot be grasped by one's senses, these numbers that only are meaningful from within the system itself, only meaningful as part of abstract mathematical functions, symbolize the image of existence.”

Source: Halakhic Man (1983), p. 83

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Joseph B. Soloveitchik11

American theologian 1903–1993

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Joseph B. Soloveitchik11

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