You imagine that I look back on my life’s work with calm satisfaction. But from nearby it looks quite different. There is not a single concept of which I am convinced that it will stand firm, and I feel uncertain whether I am in general on the right track. — A. Einstein, 1949
Uncertainty is healthy. It leaves our minds open to new developments, allowing us to adapt on the fly to the vagaries of life and continue moving forward even when things look bad. When we retain a certain degree of uncertainty about the things we know, we’re better able to consider new ideas and outlooks and to learn from them if they have merit.
Uncertainty is one of the things at the heart of science. Whatever is pronounced a scientific fact is, in reality, being taken as so probably true that we can functionally rely on it for the moment, since so far no reason has come up to doubt its veracity and it’s been tested and shown to work against all the known data.
To become certain, to be sure you have the answers, is to abandon science for religion; I’m not talking about Religion, the various belief systems that humanity has embraced from the start to one degree or another, but dogmatic belief. This applies to anything from deities to politics to the latest developments in quantum theory. If you become so attached to an idea and so convinced that it embodies Truth that you cannot abandon t in the light of new, contrary data, you have abandoned science and indeed abandoned the quest for more answers in the area of your belief because you have, in essence, pronounced them already found.
There is a place for such certainty. sometimes. It can be emotionally comforting to believe in something, to embrace it as solid and unwavering and incorruptible. In fact, many ideals the majority of us share are such beliefs without much hard fact behind them — the notions of fairness, beauty, liberty, dignity and honor among them. We’d be far less noble creatures without such ideas; we’d be less than we are, diminished in some very real ways were we to abandon them and indeed, some of them are embedded so strongly in our psyches that we’d be hard pressed to if we tried. They can guide us toward what should be, give us direction and hope (even when it is irrational to hope) and the will to strive for a better future. Still, when it comes to matters of fact and sorting out what is, certainty can often pose a stumbling block.
Moreover, in our quest toward what should be, uncertainty can act as a moderating device, forcing us to consider fully the ramifications of our actions even within the context of our ideals. It helps quell the drive to force one set of ideals onto someone else “for their own good” and against their will, pushing such matters off the battlefield and toward the arena of public debate. Who kills for an ideal when there’s even a hint of doubt behind it? Far better to compare rationales and try to convince one another that one set of ideals is inherently better than another when all involved admit to even a tiny possibility of being mistaken.
So, for all we hate uncertainty in our leaders and dismiss t as a sign of weakness, for all the bad press phrases like “I don’t know” get, and despite the tendency of many to view “I’m not sure but I think…” to be equivocating and, on some level contemptible, uncertainty and doubt are, in the end, our friends. We need them to move forward scientificly, technologically, even ethically; they are at the heart of the quest to better ourselves and our knowledge of the universe around us. For all our ideals, a little healthy uncertainty might in the long run prove the most disasterous to lose.
Tags: science, uncertainty
