Hi. Today’s Sunday. Well, it might be Tuesday or Thursday or Wednesday, but for me it’s Sunday. So how many times have you heard this? “Ma, what are we doing today?” Or, “Dad, where are we going today?” So you say, “I was thinking, let’s go to the park after lunch.” “No, we always go to the park.” Or you tell them, “Oh, why don’t we go out for pizza for lunch?” “Oh, I’m tired of pizza. We have pizza every week.” So what are you going to do with them? What can you do with them? Maybe what you can do is tell them, “How about if we go and see the eighth wonder of the world?” What’s the eighth wonder of the world?
Well, you know that there are seven wonders of the world. Most people are not familiar with exactly what those are. There are actually a few sets of seven wonders of the world. For example, you have the ancient seven wonders of the world. One that everybody knows is the Great Pyramids of Egypt. “Come on, kids, let’s go to Egypt. Let’s go see the Great Pyramids.” Or you can go to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon the next time you’re in Iraq. Kids will say, “Oh, we just did that 1,800 years ago. I’m tired of that.” Or, of course, you can go to the ever-popular Mausoleum of Halicarnassus. I’m not exactly sure what that is, but it’s called the Great Pyramid of the World.
Now, you may not like the ancient wonders of the world, so maybe you can pick from the not-so-ancient wonders of the world, like, for example, the Taj Mahal. Not the Taj Mahal that we see in Brooklyn, but the real Taj Mahal in India, much nicer. Or you can go to the Great Wall of China, or, as they advertise, “4,000 paddle ball courts, no waiting.” Or you can go to the Colosseum—not the one in Rome, because your kids already said that. Sorry, the one in Rome, not the one in Los Angeles.
Okay. But if you don’t like that, you can go to the seven natural wonders of the world. And what are they? Well, we know one of them is the Grand Canyon. Magnificent. Fantastic. If you’ve never been there, absolutely breathtaking. Or you can go to Niagara Falls. Or you can take them up to Mount Everest. And, of course, they’ll say, “Oh, Dad, we always go climbing the mountains. We have to go climb another mountain.” Kids are funny that way.
Or what you can do is, instead of seeing the natural wonders of the world, you can go and see the man-made wonders of the world. Believe it or not, one of them is the Brooklyn Bridge. One of them is the Chunnel. The Chunnel is the tunnel that goes underneath the English Channel and connects England to Europe. It’s called the Chunnel. You can go there. It drives. It looks a lot like the Battery Tunnel, if they’ve ever gone into Manhattan. Again, it could be boring for the kids. But if you want to go there, you can go to the Battery Tunnel. Again, it could be boring for the kids. But this is something for you to do on a Sunday. Or, if you want, you can go and see the London Sewage System. It’s one of the man-made wonders of the world. In total, there are about 50 different wonders of the world. If your kids are tired of doing any of them, maybe just take them out for pizza.
But in truth, let’s say you wanted to come up with—what do you think is the eighth wonder of the world? Take all the others. They’re all wonders of the world. You want to come up with the eighth wonder of the world, something that nobody ever thought of before. So please allow me to make a few suggestions. Number one: the world. The world is just unbelievable. Think about it. Millions and billions and billions of stars. Even if you look it up in Gemara and Chagigah, it tells you they calculated billions of stars in the universe. We have water, stars. Stars are burning gases. Our sun is hydrogen and helium, burning, giving off light, giving off heat. And then you have the moon. The moon is nothing. Then you have the earth. Unbelievable. Hashem created a universe with so many different things, some of them barren, some of them unbearable, unlivable. And yet the earth has everything: man, animals, birds, fish, food—it has everything. What a wonderful, unbelievable. Never thought of that.
Okay. You’ve been to the world before. Try another eighth wonder. What about a newborn child? Take a look at a newborn. Where does a newborn come from? It comes from two half cells, not even a full cell. Half from the woman, half from the man, mother and father. Together, they put together one cell and make a baby. At the time the baby is 10 trillion cells. How does that happen? It’s unbelievable. It’s a wonder. Well, we see it all the time. You know, it doesn’t make the front page of the newspapers anymore because it happens every single day. An amazing wonder.
Okay. That’s humankind. What about in the vegetable world? Fruit, trees. You ever think about it? You eat an apple, and inside the apple, maybe six, eight, 10 different seeds. And you take that apple, you finish it, you throw it in the garbage. You can make a whole farm out of one apple. You take that little seed and plant it in the ground. It’s unbelievable. It becomes a tree with leaves and bark and stems and fruit and more seeds. Wonderful. I never thought of that. Not only does the seed have all the ingredients it needs to make a tree, it also has all the apparatus. A little seed grows into a tree. What a wonder. What does it do? It produces food. Another wonder. Think about it.
Now there are about 7.5, 7.6 billion people in the world. Isn’t it amazing that the world never runs out of food? I would say 80, 90% of the world population eats every single day. There’s enough food for everyone. There’s meat, there’s fish, there’s poultry, there’s water, there’s milk, there’s wheat, there’s barley, there’s chocolate. It’s unbelievable. It’s a wonder. How come the earth doesn’t run out of food? Unbelievable.
Think of another thing. Oh yeah, that’s a thing. Think. The human mind. Where is the human mind? It’s not in the brain. What’s the brain? The brain is electrons and neutrons and protons. You ever get an idea? How do you get an idea? The neutron comes up with an idea and says, “Hey, I’ve got this great idea for you.” And it pops into your head. What’s the mind? You can remember things. You can forget things. You can control things. You can have emotions. You can extrapolate. You can innovate. You can create. That’s all the mind. What’s the mind made out of? Hashem gave us this unbelievable wonder. Whoever thought of that?
Thinking about that, a genius, just over almost a century ago, came up with a formula in his mind. It’s called E equals mc squared. E equals mc squared. Energy is mass times the speed of light times the speed of light. What does one thing have to do with another? Albert Einstein calculated that all of the energy in the world comes from the mass, which started from absolutely nothing. What could that be? You think about the earth. You think about the Empire State Building. You think about people. You think about the train. You think about all the things which weigh thousands and thousands of tons. We’re just one planet. We’re just one mass. Think again of the trillions of stars that are out there. And if all of them are converted into energy, where did that energy come from? It came from Hashem. It’s unbelievable. Einstein proved that, without a doubt, there must be a creation, a creator of the universe, because this all could not have happened on its own. It’s impossible. Where did all the energy come from to create all the mass? Energy becomes mass. Mass becomes energy. His formula changed the world. Those are my votes for the eighth wonder of the world. Not anything that you could do on a Sunday, but then again, the kids probably aren’t going to like it anyway. Have a good day.