Columbia Crash - A Reminder That We Live in the Age of Uncertainty
Pacific News Service, Commentary, Walter Truett Anderson, Posted: Feb 03, 2003
Science brings increasingly complex and remarkable feats, but wars, holocausts, global environmental threats and even scientific theories themselves reveal the tenuous nature of knowledge and cast a pall of uncertainty on our times. The Columbia tragedy, writes PNS contributor Walter Truett Anderson, reminds us that we can never fully predict and control reality -- but explorers will keep forging ahead anyway.
Whenever something large and tragic happens -- which it does rather frequently these days -- people immediately begin a fervent search for deeper meanings. In the wake of the Columbia disaster comes an avalanche of high-level speculation: Is this a signal of American decline? Will it mean the end of the space program? Is it divine punishment for human hubris?
An alternative to such musings can be found in a book written by a research physicist, F. David Peat, and published almost a year ago. The title: "From Certainty to Uncertainty." The message: We have entered an age of dealing with unimaginably complex systems, with less than perfect knowledge of all the interacting forces that are involved -- and all the ways that something could go wrong. And, although we sometimes do succeed in remarkable achievements -- the manned moon expedition, for example -- we are a long way from perfect understanding.
Peat contends that the history of the 20th century has been a long slide from the hearty mood of stability and confidence that prevailed around 1900, when the world was basking in the glow of economic progress and major breakthroughs in several fields of science and technology. Since then many things have happened to shake the world out of that mood -- not only two world wars and the Holocaust, but also new developments in science challenging the assumption that more knowledge always means greater certainty and surer ability to predict and control.
Quantum physics revealed a level of physical reality where particles moved and behaved in ways that utterly defied the known laws of physics -- and even of common sense: they jumped in and out of nothingness, interacted simultaneously over great distances, could in some ways be understood as doing different things at the same time. This introduced into science a fundamental uncertainty about the universe itself.
Kurt Goedel, with his Incompleteness Theorem, revealed mathematics to be not the flawless logical system that so many scientists had believed it to be, but rather a language whose own logic was in some ways incomplete and inconsistent.
Chaos and complexity theories brought us a new and daunting approach to understanding -- but, again, never fully controlling or predicting -- huge multidimensional systems.
These and other developments have taken us into a world in which, however desperately people may strive for complete understanding or flawless management of any system, they never have all the relevant data. No matter how thorough they may be in efforts to keep their high-tech gadgetry in top running order -- like the $90 million overhaul the Columbia shuttle underwent a couple of years ago -- they can never be sure it is totally free of defects.
We really do live in an information society -- or as some prefer, a knowledge society -- but one of the things we know now is that all information is incomplete.
So, on what looks like the brink of a war with Iraq, we get predictions of the likely outcome from all sides: assurances of quick victory and a new birth of democracy in the Middle East, warnings of a massive backlash of terrorism -- and we don't know what will happen.
Global climate change looms as potentially one of the most momentous developments in the history of human civilization and, although we have more knowledge about how the biosphere works than ever before, dazzling software to model and consider all the data, and authoritative forecasts (frightening or calming, depending on which expert you listen to) we don't know what will happen.
The painful realization that all knowledge is partial, all information incomplete, could easily be taken as a reason for stopping everything, and trying to get back to an age when things were simpler and people knew what they were doing. But we can't do that, because there never was such a time.
In a way, we are doing what people have always done -- making decisions on the basis of incomplete information. Explorers never knew what they would find when they climbed into their boats or wandered over the next range of hills. Doctors have never been completely certain their treatments would do more good than harm. Parents have never known what would be the outcome when they conceived their children.
Nothing has changed, and yet everything has changed. Learning always goes on, and with new knowledge people are creating and managing systems of enormous complexity -- such as the space program -- and doing it in full view of the whole world and future generations. Some of them produce awesome success, and some of them fail. When there are failures people learn from them and do better the next time, and there are always those who -- ignorant of the lessons of the 20th century -- believe that progress will lead to certainty, mastery, complete control. It won't. Sooner or later, people will just build better space ships, and fly off into new surprises.
Anderson (waltt@well.com) is a political scientist and author of "All Connected Now: Life in the First Global Civilization" (Westview Press, 2001).
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