Pedro Lilienfeld

In late 19th century, the prevailing view of scientists, especially physicists, was that science had, at last, reached a full understanding of the laws governing natural phenomena and that we needed to simply work out some details, i.e., “dot the is”. This was, in retrospect, a complete misreading of the status of extant knowledge. I…

To me, the most spectacular manifestation of the awesomeness of our Universe is the photographic view of a galaxy, of almost every galaxy. There is an inherent beauty in its majesty, its largely symmetrical shape, its brilliance and, foremost, the implicit realization that its apparent fuzzy glow represents billions of suns sending us a stream…

For several years we have been exposed to the deluded idea that humanity must travel bodily to, settle on, and colonize other bodies of our Solar System, specifically those two on which we can land without being fried or swallowed, i.e., the Moon and Mars. It should be noted that I have a long association…

For a much more detailed discussion of this subject I refer the interested reader to my Covid period essay Are We Alone? Where Are They? Here I will merely summarize my present thinking about life beyond the boundaries of our planet. To set the stage, we must distinguish between two fundamentally different categories: basic microbial…

In Chapter 9 of my autobiography I mentioned my teenage involvement with two then extant and competing theories about the universe: the steady state theory, advocated principally by the British astrophysicist Fred Hoyle, and the then newly minted, and eventually, triumphant Big Bang theory. At the end of that discussion I stated: “Much more about…

When Armin, my younger son, was about 2 1/2 years old, I remember distinctly that as he looked out of our living room window in New Rochelle, NY, one evening, he saw the Moon, pointed at it and asked: “Moon not fall down?”. With a mixture of fatherly pride and surprise I tried my best…

Repeatedly we hear these days about the damaging effect on the education and future prospects for a successful career that children would suffer if normal schooling and exposure to other children were to be stymied, delayed or interrupted due to the limitations imposed by Covid-19 preventive measures. I would like to disagree about the inevitability…

In February of 2007 Evelyn and I travelled to the Middle East for the first time and this is a summarized travelogue of that trip We just spent almost three stupendous weeks in the Middle East, specifically in Jordan and then Egypt. We would like to share some of the salient – as well as…

The following was a letter that I wrote to the local Lexington weekly newspaper where it was published in the early 2000s I live in a Lexington neighborhood blessed with a canopy of trees, an unusual feature in a world of ever growing asphalt and concrete jungles. Recently, however, the ever present and unbearable noise…

I have avoided until now to write about a subject that is rather painful to me: animal suffering. My awareness to their predicaments probably started with my witnessing the painful death by poisoning of my beloved dog, Putzi, in Quito, when I was 14 years old. It was a shock which remained a searing memory…