The only absolute certainty is uncertainty itself.

I am almost completely certain of this.

Okay… Seriously.
This assertion began a long time ago.  Back with Socrates, actually.  It was the Delphic Oracle who recognized Socrates as the wisest man in Greece.

Yet, our boy Socrates replied that he possessed no wisdom whatsoever.  Sockry said… “I know nothing.”

But.  Paradoxically, the Oracle interpreted his complete acceptance of ignorance as evidence of great wisdom. (Leave it to an Oracle!)   As a result.. Socrates ended up being sentenced to death by poisoning.  You see… those prominent Greek-folks-of-old didn’t like being ranked among the self-proclaimed ignorant.  Poison.

Jump 2,000 years forward……  after Socrates’.  This was a point in history where the West became incredibly concerned with certainty.

Calculus was developed; Newton’s discoveries of gravity and the laws of motion came about.  Lots of things like this.  It was hard not to be convinced that reality could be laid out and explained through scientific exploration.

Newton was followed by a whole of other scientists, making scientifically science-like discoveries.

And with every new discovery….  people started to think the certainty that the universe could be completely understood through equations and deductions. These discoveries of electric, and magnetism and such… could be explained in physical realms.

But then hey… a little later… some new kids hit the block.  A  new batch of scientists that included Curie, Rutherford, Planck, Einstein and Bohr proved that the universe was not that simple to figure out.  These discoveries were a little more

Then 1926, when a young German physicist proved that it was impossible to know the position and momentum of a particle at the same time.  Werner Heisenberg.

He formulated the Uncertainty Principle…. and of course…. quantum mechanics. The implication of this discovery…. was that unpredictability ruled at the fundamental level of subatomic particles.  Einstein didn’t like it so much… and died trying to disprove it.

But years of experimental consistency confirmed his worst fears.  For lack of a better way of putting it…. God does play dice.  In 1932 Heisenberg was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics.

And now…. we have recent discoveries by Leonard Susskind and Ed Witten which support the idea that we live in a holographic universe.   In other words….objective reality does not exist.

This one is a DOOZY… but it comes down to this.  All aspects of reality are merely interpretations.  Yes, these “personal understandings” are relative to the observer.   And as such… it makes it impossible to reach any kind of universal certainty.

If you are still reading after all of this… YOU deserve a Nobel Prize.

So there you have it.  2,500 years later…. we know that Socrates was right all along.  The only absolute certainty is uncertainty itself.

I am almost completely certain about all of this.  Certainly.

“All we know is still infinitely less than all that remains unknown.”  — William Harvey

Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.  — Albert Einstein