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Morning Reflection
July 4, 2025
“This was the creation story, and the creation story was pretty exciting and pretty amazing and pretty mysterious.”
Reflection: Jo Ann B. Jones
George Anders said this of his father, Edward Anders, who spent his professional life peering into the solar system, in his obituary in the New York Times on June 19, 2025.
Edward Alperovitch was born on June 21, 1926, in Liepaja and changed his surname to Anders when he became a naturalized U.S. citizen. When Edward was 14 years old, Soviet forces occupied Latvia. In June 1941, the Soviets began mass deportations of Jews to Russia. Edward’s family was on the deportation list and received orders to pack their belongings. After Germany invaded the Soviet Union and occupied Latvia. Edward and his family thought their days were numbered. Then his father created a story, explaining that his wife was not the biological child of Jewish parents, but rather an Aryan found on their doorstep in a basket .That made Edward and his brother half-Jews, which saved Edward. His father was not so fortunate. His was a conscious decision to save his family.
Edward never finished high school, nor did he receive a bachelor’s degree. After the war, he studied chemistry at a school in Munich affiliated with the United Nations. He later taught himself chemistry as a lab assistant at the University of Munich. After emigrating to the United States, he earned a doctorate from Columbia in 1954.
Professor Anders spoke about the cosmos whimsically, with a sense both of curiosity and awe. He marveled at this notion that influenced his state of mind: that everything about Earth — on it, in it, under it, around it — was unoriginal. “The material in the solar system is secondhand,” he said. “All of it originally was older than the solar system, but most of it has been reprocessed.” In an interview with Discover he posed this question: “What was the raw material of the solar system?Where did it come from? What were the nuclear and chemical processes in the parent stars? And how was this material altered in the early solar system?” Professor Anders’ life’s work was spent in an attempt to answer these celestial, yet seemingly impossible questions. It would seem that his exploration of the solar system held an almost spiritual quality for him. What is so captivating is the wonder and awe with which he approached his explorations of the universe. While not a deeply religious man, for he did not practice Judaism, he was not completely overcome with what science did reveal. This did not dominate his outlook on the universe. Rather his explorations of the universe left him open to ponder both what it revealed in ways that he could explain and understand and those that eluded him simply because they were mysterious. And the mysterious always seemed to energize him. At the heart of it though, there is his reverence for the mystery. He did not allow the hardships of his life to render him so cynical that he lost a sense of deep appreciation for the mysteries that the universe holds that escape the explanations of human beings. What a sense of wonder!
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