There are many articles and books available on the interplay between science and Judaism. Very often they come in the form of a halachic discussion of applying science to be able to resolve a halachic issue e.g. medical ethics (see techumin series for a whole collection of such essays). This avenue of interplay is useful, because the interplay directly sheds light on one another i.e. in terms of halachic decisions.
There is another area of interplay - in the realm of the esoteric and mystical, whereby science and Torah cannot be literally resolved. Often, in the form of 'sensationalist writing', authors will try to fit science into an esoteric understanding of Judaism. I will give an bad example in order to prove my point. This article asserts that the periodic table is found in the Torah:
Rabbi Akiva first identified and then elevated all the water parts of reality, the hydrogen element. In chemistry itself, hydrogen is no. 1 the most abstract of all elements. Hydro means water and hydrogen is the essential component of water, the oxygen part is the air element that we breathe but the hydrogen element of water is the water element. Even in chemistry, all elements are just composites of the hydrogen atom because hydrogen is one, one proton and one electron, and all others are just additional atoms of hydrogen, as it were.*
I often read sensationlist essays like this and think "is there any gain in doing something like this"? Is it a legitimate approach to take a theory in science and give a Jewish esoteric spin on the topic, even if it is never mentioned anywhere in scripture?
There is an interesting passage in Torah Umadda by Rabbi Norman Lamm which sheds light on this:
...The view some ascribe to the Gaon, that there is no autonomous wisdom outside of Torah, because all is contained in Torah, would leave committed contemporary Jews profoundly perplexed. No amount of intellectual legerdemain or midrashic pyrotechnics - or even sophisticated but capricious computer analyses of sacred texts - can convince us that the Torah somehow possesses within itself the secrets of quantum mechanics, the synthesis of DNA, and the like...
Do we have poetic license to invent otherwise non-existent connections between science and Torah, or does the Torah really 'know' about these things? There is an understanding that Hashem's 'unity' (including a revelation in His creation) will be revealed in the end of days - in what form will this revelation come?
*inaccuracies and non-truths in the quoted article: what is 'most abstract'? Hydrogen is not a fundamental particle in any case, and, as science understands it, was not the initial building blocks of the universe. 'Hydro' - the latin meaning of a word doesn't impinge on any Jewish importance, so far as I'm aware. Hydrogen is as essential as Oxygen, in water - not as asserted by the author. "All elements" are certainly NOT composites of hydrogen; in fact, all elements (except from hydrogen) contain neutrons... etc. etc.
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