Uncertainty

 

I was made aware recently of just how difficult it is to stay with the fundamental uncertainty of life as it really is. I was sitting in our zen meditation group (via zoom), and one of the participants had some computer problem (I guessed) that was causing the light on the screen to brighten and darken every second or two. It was disturbing because I could perceive the recurrent flashing in my peripheral vision. My impulse, of course, was to do something: either alert the person vocally that her screen was flashing, or write a chat message, or otherwise try to take care of the problem. But I could do none of these things without interrupting others and making the problem worse. As I sat there, I became aware of how often this happens. I am constitutionally committed, I realized, to procedures being followed, to order being maintained, to being on time, to things going as they’re supposed to. And when they don’t, I register upset to one degree or another. The same is true of my expectations about sentence structure in a newspaper, and/or grammar or spelling in an online article, and so on (I’ve been trained as an editor). Or the way people drive. Or dress themselves; or groom themselves; or behave in public; or a million other actions or circumstances that we wish to conform to our expectations of what is “right.” We use the word “appropriate” these days, of course, to avoid the appearance of being a moral ‘auntie’ trying to enforce standards of “right” and “wrong,” or “good” and “bad,” but the moral judgment is usually what we mean. 

The source of this discomfort soon became apparent. Like most other humans, I have little tolerance for uncertainty; for disorder; for chaos. “Chaos is come again,” says Othello, referring to the time when he shall not love Desdemona; and we understand that, in his mind, his love for her and hers for him is what keeps his world orderly, from dissolving into chaos. Like Othello, we all insist on some sort of order to keep our lives afloat, and we also tend to insist that the amount or degree of order that we demand is not too much or too little, but just the “right” amount. And, of course, we get into endless trouble by insisting that ours is the optimum amount, and that others, if they knew anything, would insist on that same amount of order for themselves. In fact, the whole of what we call “civilization” is fundamentally the assertion and implementation of various degrees of order imposed on the randomness of reality. But a little reflection shows us that there is really no optimum balance between our preferred order and the chaos, or uncertainty, or randomness of life as it unfolds. And there is no way, either, of making certain that our expectations for order will be met. We want order and predictability, basically so we can be prepared for what’s coming, i.e., to control our world. We demand this “right” order, and if we cannot get what we want, if too much collapses, we tend, like Othello, to despair about continuing our lives in any reasonable or “respectable” way. 

Nor is it just weak or unintelligent humans who feel this way. The classic genius we all acknowledge, Albert Einstein, was so put off by Werner Heisenberg’s “uncertainty principle” as it relates to the quantum world, that he, Einstein, spent most of the rest of his life trying to prove how wrong that principle was. Heisenberg’s principle, that is, asserts that one cannot know both the speed and the position of a given particle at the same time—indeed, that the more we know about one, the less we know about the other. In response, Einstein retorted with statements like: “God does not play dice with the Universe.” What he meant was that chance cannot be the governing principle of the universe; that there must be some way to calculate both the position and the momentum of elementary particles, but scientists just haven’t found the right formula or solution or hidden order yet. But almost a hundred years later, Heisenberg’s principle stands on firmer experimental ground than ever, and Einstein appears to have been wrong. So perhaps we lesser mortals should not despair, or judge ourselves too harshly.

On the other hand, most of us would like to, if we could, have an accurate picture of real reality. At least I would. And the truth seems to be that we’re all, to one degree or another, deluded about reality. That is, we all demand that our view of the world include some kind of reasonable and knowable and predictable order. We like calendars and we like clocks for this reason, and take ever greater pains to be certain that they are correct: we now have atomic clocks, for example, giving us ever more accurate ways to measure time. But do they? Clocks are, after all, arbitrary impositions of order on what we call the passage of time. And what about Daylight Savings Time? Does it really save time? Does it have any effect whatever on the amount of sunlight that hits our part of the world? Not a bit. It affects only us, and the arbitrary time on our clocks we choose to get ourselves into and out of bed. The same is true of calendars: does the New Year on January 1 correspond to anything like a beginning in nature? Not at all. It doesn’t even coincide with a solar event like the solstice. It is an arbitrary starting point that we then imbue with all kinds of meaning—drunken celebrations, bidding goodbye to a bad year, hoping for a better year, resolutions for us to keep in the new year, and so on. In short, we humans seem to need these arbitrary markers in our lives to give them shape, to keep them from seeming formless, chaotic, without definition, and essentially infinite. For infinity terrifies us (which may be why death terrifies us as well.)

But if we are at all attuned to the world as it actually is, we realize, at least philosophically, that the world and its events have very little of the order we impute to them. Yes, the earth regularly revolves around the sun in roughly 365-1/4 days, but even that is subject to variation and change. As is the tilt of the earth which gives us our seasons. Yes, we rise at roughly the same time each day, but only because our clocks tell us to; if we set our schedules to the sun’s rise and set, our work days would vary with the seasons. Which they no doubt did in the past, e.g., in our hunter-gatherer days. We would also see—and this is one of the things zen training is meant to make us aware of—that many of our expectations of what will happen in any given moment, or what a person will do in a given situation, are simply mistaken. We base them, perhaps, on what might have happened in the past, but when we do, we remain oblivious to the fact that everything changes second by second, and nothing ever happens in exactly the same way twice. Much, if not most, of our discontent stems from this clash between what we expect to happen and what actually occurs. We want “good” things to happen in the same way, again and again. But if they did, if we could somehow influence life to conform to our expectations or desires, life could not go on. For one example, if we could get the DNA of dreaded viruses or bacteria to stay the same, to stop mutating and infecting us, or any organism’s DNA to remain fixed in the way it suits us, that would be the end of life. All life depends on mutations to adapt to always changing conditions. That is, in a nutshell, what life is. Stop mutations, stop change, and you stop life. The entire world, indeed, is like this. We might want the sun to stop burning—because we know that in four billion years or so, its fuel will run out, and it will first expand—incinerating us and all the planets—and then explode into a supernova or a black hole. In either event, this development of the sun will put an end to earth and to human existence. But would we really want to stop that? Would we really want the sun, or any other entity to freeze in place, to stop providing us with heat and light, stop developing as it must to be what it is? Would we want a tree or an animal or ourselves to freeze in place, to stop developing and remain permanently as we want it to at some moment in time? And which moment would that be? And would there even be any moments after that? And, most important, would we really want quantum uncertainty (which amounts to the underlying uncertainty of all reality) to not operate in our world?

A June 12, 2012 article in New Scientist reports on two scientists who have explored this question: “Sorry Einstein, the universe needs quantum uncertainty,” by Jessica Griggs. The scientists, Stephanie Wehner and Esther Hänggi of the National University of Singapore’s Centre for Quantum Technology, report that, with two bits of information (as analogues to the position and momentum in a quantum particle) encoded in the same particle, one cannot decode both bits of information. If you get more information about one, you get correspondingly less from the other. They then tried decoding information from both simultaneously (like measuring both speed and position of a particle), and concluded that this comprises more information than went in in the first place, thus violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics (which states that closed systems always move in the direction of more entropy, or disorder in the system). The article’s summary concludes:

Being able to decode both of the messages in Wehner and Hänggi’s imaginary particle suddenly gives you more information. As demonstrated by the piston, this means you have the potential to do more work. But this extra work comes for free so is the same as creating a perpetual motion machine, which is forbidden by thermodynamics.

 

In short, quantum uncertainty is necessary in order to preserve an even more fundamental principle, the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. And if quantum uncertainty is necessary, then so is the general uncertainty of the world. As corroboration, we might also think of the mysterious imbalance between particles and anti-particles that allowed the material world to come into existence in the first place. As noted on the cern.com website, “The Big Bang should have created equal amounts of matter and antimatter in the early universe.” And if it had, since matter and antimatter particles annihilate one another, the universe should “contain nothing but leftover energy” (ibid). But it does not; it contains more, including us. Somehow, and the mechanism is still not understood, some small portion of matter survived the expected annihilation of matter meeting antimatter, and now, “everything we see from the smallest life forms on Earth to the largest stellar objects is made almost entirely of matter” (ibid). As has been noted in many places, “the origin of matter remains one of the greatest mysteries of physics” (wikipedia). Imbalance and uncertainty, in short, allow us, indeed seemnecessary for us to be. 

            So, much as we might long for certainty in our lives, in our world, it seems that the forces that refuse to accede to our desires “know” best. What humans want most may be (and, as we are finding to our peril, often is) precisely that which would not only nullify us, but all other life, all other forms of existence as well. We should be grateful that our fondest, our most persistent desires (especially for certainty) do not, and cannot ever be realized. 

 

Lawrence DiStasi