Astronomers recently released the most detailed images yet of the distant Orion Nebula—1,300 light-years away. Earlier this summer, they discovered 21 candidate “white dwarf” stars and the most distant galaxy ever observed. The amount to learn is endless – as vast as the universe, or many universes, in which we and our planet revolve. It’s exciting and sometimes disturbing to realize how much we still don’t know. Paradoxically, when the lens is turned to observe the substrates of life rather than the outer limits of the galaxy, there is even less certainty. In When We Stop Understanding the World, Benjamin Labatut describes how the arrival of quantum mechanics reversed the linear path that, up to that point, had exponentially increased our scientific success in reducing the world to smaller and smaller known pieces. At a 1927 conference of the world’s greatest scientists, Labatut explains, Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr presented their astonishing vision of quantum mechanics. He describes how “an electron is in no fixed place until it is measured. it is only at that moment that it appears. Before being measured, it has no properties. before observation, it cannot even be apprehended.’ Through this discovery, scientific thinkers were confronted with the limits of our ability to fully understand the building blocks of life in concrete terms. Heisenberg also introduced the “uncertainty principle”, which states that the position and momentum of a particle cannot both be measured precisely. The more accurately you know one value, the less accurately you know the other. Quantum mechanics changed the trajectory of science. As Wikipedia explains, “quantum mechanics describes nature in a way that is different from the way we usually think of science. It tells us how likely things are to happen, rather than telling us they definitely will.” Although its arrival changed the reductive nature of some scientific paths, its inherent uncertainty did not make it any less valuable. Quantum mechanics is fundamental to chemistry and cosmology. Astrophysicist Adam Frank and his colleagues say that scientific change has changed the status of the historical observer that had been attributed to the scientist. He writes that we can no longer expect to know the world “in itself, outside of the way we see and act upon things. Experience is as fundamental to scientific knowledge as the physical reality it reveals.” Labatut writes, “Physics should not be concerned with reality, but with what we can say about reality.” What we say about reality is, in other words, our stories, which come from our relationships with the world(s) around us. As Heisenberg explains, “When we speak of the science of our time, we speak of our relationship to nature, not as objective, detached observers, but as actors in a play between man and the world.” Although we stand between two poles of uncertainty—the infinitely small and the infinitely large—our understanding (even nominal) of quantum mechanics can help us gain perspective. First, we can humbly embrace the realization that we are far from fully understanding, and probably never will fully understand, the mechanisms that determine nature and reality. Science is not absolute, but we can learn to thrive in that uncertainty. It can help us approach the world with more curiosity and wonder. As author Marilynne Robinson says, we should look “to sciences whose terms and methods can overturn researchers’ assumptions” rather than to those that “simply insist on the truth of their assumptions.” And we can act on what we know, such as our ever-expanding appreciation of the deep interactions that make life possible—from the elaborate mycelial networks underground to the global carbon cycle, from the quantum to the cosmic. We are constantly observing our world and describing it to each other, revising understandings over time. Our experiences will always be part of our ‘reality’. These two are inseparable. And we always face uncertainty. But in the absence of certainty, there is possibility, among countless series of possible outcomes. Collectively, we can change the world by doing our best, through our relationships with nature and each other. More
