{"id":3296,"date":"2015-03-23T23:11:11","date_gmt":"2015-03-24T03:11:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gollypolly.com\/30473\/?p=3296"},"modified":"2015-03-23T23:11:11","modified_gmt":"2015-03-24T03:11:11","slug":"i-am-so-uncertain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gollypolly.com\/30473\/?p=3296","title":{"rendered":"I am so uncertain."},"content":{"rendered":"

\"fieldgood\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The only absolute\u00a0certainty\u00a0is uncertainty itself.<\/p>\n

I am almost completely certain of this.<\/p>\n

Okay\u2026 Seriously.
\nThis assertion began a long time ago.\u00a0 Back with Socrates, actually.\u00a0 It was the Delphic Oracle who recognized Socrates\u00a0as the wisest man in Greece.<\/p>\n

Yet, our boy Socrates replied that he possessed no wisdom whatsoever.\u00a0 Sockry said\u2026 \u201cI know nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n

But.\u00a0 Paradoxically, the Oracle interpreted his complete acceptance of ignorance as evidence of great wisdom. (Leave it to an Oracle!) \u00a0 As a result.. Socrates ended up being sentenced to death by poisoning.\u00a0 You see\u2026 those prominent Greek-folks-of-old<\/em> didn\u2019t like being ranked among the self-proclaimed ignorant.\u00a0 Poison.<\/p>\n

Jump 2,000 years forward……\u00a0 after Socrates\u2019.\u00a0 This was a point in history where the West became incredibly concerned with certainty.<\/p>\n

Calculus was developed; Newton\u2019s discoveries of gravity and the laws of motion came about.\u00a0 Lots of things like this.\u00a0 It was hard not to be convinced that reality could be laid out and explained through scientific exploration.<\/p>\n

Newton was followed by a whole of other scientists, making scientifically science-like discoveries.<\/p>\n

And with every new discovery\u2026.\u00a0 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\u2026 could be explained in physical realms.<\/p>\n

But then hey\u2026 a little later\u2026 some new kids hit the block.\u00a0 A\u00a0 new batch of scientists that included\u00a0Curie,\u00a0Rutherford,\u00a0Planck, Einstein\u00a0and\u00a0Bohr\u00a0proved that the universe was not that simple to figure out.\u00a0 These discoveries were a little more<\/p>\n

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. \u00a0Werner Heisenberg.<\/p>\n

He\u00a0formulated the\u00a0Uncertainty Principle\u2026. and of course\u2026. quantum mechanics. The implication of this discovery…. was that unpredictability ruled at the fundamental level of subatomic particles.\u00a0 Einstein didn\u2019t like it so much\u2026 and died trying to disprove it.<\/p>\n

But years of experimental consistency confirmed his worst fears.\u00a0 For lack of a better way of putting it\u2026. God does play dice.\u00a0 In 1932 Heisenberg was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics.<\/p>\n

And now\u2026. we have recent discoveries by\u00a0Leonard Susskind\u00a0and\u00a0Ed Witten which support the idea that we live in a holographic universe.\u00a0\u00a0 In other words\u2026.objective reality does not exist.<\/p>\n

This one is a DOOZY\u2026 but it comes down to this.\u00a0 All aspects of reality are merely interpretations.\u00a0 Yes, these \u201cpersonal understandings\u201d are relative to the observer.\u00a0\u00a0 And as such\u2026 it makes it impossible to reach any kind of universal certainty.<\/p>\n

If you are still reading after all of this… YOU deserve a Nobel Prize.<\/p>\n

So there you have it.\u00a0 2,500 years later\u2026. we know that Socrates was right all along.\u00a0 The only absolute\u00a0certainty\u00a0is uncertainty itself.<\/p>\n

I am almost completely certain about all of this.\u00a0 Certainly.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll we know is still infinitely less than all that remains unknown.\u201d\u00a0 \u2014 William Harvey<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.\u00a0 \u2014 Albert Einstein<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The only absolute\u00a0certainty\u00a0is uncertainty itself. I am almost completely certain of this. Okay\u2026 Seriously. This assertion began a long time ago.\u00a0 Back with Socrates, actually.\u00a0 It was the Delphic Oracle who recognized Socrates\u00a0as the wisest man in Greece. Yet, our boy Socrates replied that he possessed no wisdom whatsoever.\u00a0 Sockry said\u2026 \u201cI know nothing.\u201d But.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3296","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nowyouseeit"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gollypolly.com\/30473\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3296","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gollypolly.com\/30473\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gollypolly.com\/30473\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gollypolly.com\/30473\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gollypolly.com\/30473\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3296"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/gollypolly.com\/30473\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3296\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3299,"href":"https:\/\/gollypolly.com\/30473\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3296\/revisions\/3299"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gollypolly.com\/30473\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3296"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gollypolly.com\/30473\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3296"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gollypolly.com\/30473\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}