The Science of Uncertainty

On the day you are born, a parcel arrives at your parents’ doorstep. No special note, no return address—just a brown, somber-looking box lined with red tape. Inside is a record, a map if you will, of all the steps you’ll take and all the destinations you’ll arrive at in this lifetime. Signed, sealed, delivered.

Your fate is now literally in the palm of your hands.

Hi. Hello. It’s your favorite internet neighbor popping up to say we have a new episode. After such a long time, this is The Science of Uncertainty. Today, we’ll be dipping our toes into small particle science. Now, bear with me. I do not have a degree in physics and I’m probably going to do a terrible job of explaining. And yes, I am equal parts daunted and fascinated by the subject. But thank you for being here with me and thank you for letting me be here with you. I hope my nosey, internet badger qualities will make up for the fact that I may indeed be burrowing into things I don’t understand in an attempt to make sense of the complicated business of being human.

In her poetry collection What Hurts Going Down, Nancy Lee opens the poem titled Of Factual Interest with a line that goes like this: “Parisians prescribe ice baths for uncertainty. / Barometric pressure is the leading cause of tears. Each time a doctor rubs her nose, / a bundle of bad news is born.”

The first time I read that poem, something stuck.

Barometric pressure. Doctors that set off a domino-effect of bad news. Parisians and ice baths. The strange dichotomy between the inward, personal revelations juxtaposed with the external and the uncontrollable. More often than I would like to admit, I think of that imaginary magical map. I think of how much easier it would be to know, to not doubt for one second, where you’re headed. I wonder if the questions about who we are in this great, big world, whether it’s all going to work out in the end, ever get answered.

In the subtext, the poem suggests that if you could trace every effect back to its cause, then maybe you could predict your way to perfection.

Yet despite its best efforts, something leaks out of the syllables—a sense of the terra incognita. After a while, you start to see that although there is uncertainty in these lines, there is also something soft and vulnerable trying to open itself up to you.

One day, as I was surfing the World Wide Web, I came across an interesting article that was published in 2015, a time during which we were on the cusp of a new era of the internet.

Social media then was widespread but hadn’t yet become ubiquitous. I can still recall the nebulous teenage years and the feelings that dominated that period—feelings which have since expanded into this weird cocktail of emotions that is less “sugar, spice, and everything nice” and more “unrelenting stubbornness mixed with a bit of anxiety and a whole lot of hope.” That same year, in the Utracold Lab of Dr. Mukund Vengalattore, a team of physicists were conducting an experiment on Rubidium atoms that had been cooled to near absolute zero temperatures, and they discovered that atoms won’t move as long as you are watching.

That had to be one of the most intriguing sentences I’ve ever read. What do you mean atoms won’t “move” as long as someone’s watching? I don’t cook very often but when I do, I make sure it involves eggs. Sunny side up, scrambled, soft boiled. One of the things I used to get told was that a watched pot never boils. In a way, that’s what’s happening to the atoms. They are suspended in space and time by the very process of observation. Cooling the atoms, giving them an ice bath at near absolute zero temperatures, is crucial.

Try to picture a room full of bouncing, energetic atomic fuzzballs. If the particles are always jumping and moving and vibrating around, it would be quite difficult to observe them. But when atoms are cooled to extremely low temperatures, they lose much of their kinetic energy. In other words, atoms start to “behave in an orderly fashion.” They start arranging themselves in lines or more accurately, in a lattice.

But at such low temperatures, these atomic particles can “tunnel” from place to place, which basically means that a particle can pass through a barrier it wouldn’t normally have enough energy to overcome. And because the nature of the quantum world is probabilistic, while we can presume an atom may be at one place, there’s also a chance that it could appear on the other side of whatever barrier exists. This introduces us to the famous Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. As the atoms start to slow down, the physicists can measure their momentum or velocity more accurately. The trade-off is that their exact location becomes a little hazy. Because according to Werner Heisenberg, you cannot precisely measure both the position and speed of an object at the same time. Not even in theory.

Say there was a turtle trying to cross the street. At this moment, we can tell exactly where it is and how fast (or slow) it’s going. But if we shrunk the turtle to the size of an atom, things would get trickier. At such a tiny scale, the turtle would start to exhibit quantum behavior. So we take our special tools and try to locate him. We try to find out where this atom-sized turtle is lurking. But here’s the catch. Because he’s so tiny, any attempt to measure his speed would disturb his position. And trying to measure his position more accurately would introduce uncertainty about his speed. Because in order to know and observe him, we’d have to be able to see him and to see him requires us, the observers, to shine a light on him. But light is made up of photons, and those photon particles, if beamed at Mr. Turtle would bump into the very atoms that make up his being.

And that’s just the way the quantum world works. The relationship between particles and waves is so intimate, so entangled, the particles themselves are altered by the technology used to find and observe them.

There’s an excerpt floating around in the online space that graciously describes this exchange between the observer and the observed, “However it is that you approach the thing you seek, that thing responds to your approach and your way of seeking […] You find your looking, in other words, and you will see your eyes. What you find is a faithful rendering of your own consequences.”

In the universe of the atom, uncertainty is not a bad thing. It’s not something that needs to be fixed, remedied, or fine-tuned, but rather a thing to be experienced, observed. Uncertainty is inherent in the subatomic realm. It’s there, existing alongside, and that’s what boggles my mind to no end. That something so fundamental as the atom, the building block of all reality, all that we see and are, can be so open to flux. What does that say about our reality then?

Are atoms ultimately better at dealing with uncertainty than human beings? I don’t know.

Sometimes, in the middle of prayer, my mind wanders to a distance I know I’m not supposed to cross. I prod and probe for answers, for clues. I can’t help it. I know there is a time for everything but please, could you show me where I’m headed? Is it good? Is it beautiful? Is it everything anyone could ever want? But you can’t bargain for your life like that, I’ve learned—not in bits and pieces when you were meant to have it in full. And to have your life in full means you’re going to have the ups and downs. The moments of pure clarity and moments where you doubt the very ground you tread on. And there’s no having one without the other.

Because maybe the point isn’t to find answers but to get good at asking questions.

If you’re at a point in your life where you’re not sure which step to take or whether you’re making the right choices, I have good news and bad news. The bad news is that we don’t know what the future has in store for us. The good news is that we don’t know what the future has in store for us. As it turns out, there is more room in reality for uncertainty than we initially thought. Because the science that brought us the uncertainty principle is the same science bold enough to say that we live in a world built upon potentialities and possibilities rather than one of things or immovable facts.

[OUTRO]

That was The Science of Uncertainty. The beautiful music you heard in this episode is from Blue Dot Sessions. To read the transcript and/or discover more of my work, please visit www.shekwrites.com. That’s S-H-E-K writes [dot] com. I end this episode with more questions than I have answers for, but such is the nature of life. Thank you for listening.