Uncertainly

As physicists we are taught to embrace logic and numbers.We base our assumptions on measurements and calculations. We weigh and we approximate, we calculate and we plot graphs. Our weapons of choice are scales and detectors and computers. We think in vectors and we see the world as a conglomerate of constants that keep it bounded and, paradoxically, ever changing..

Funny thing is the only certain thing is uncertainty. Hell, we even proved that God exists but does not interfere with the world. He threw the dice and we keep kicking it around. Question is, can God make a bigger rock than He can roll? Think about that.Fact is, we are all scientists in one way or another; we all perform experiments of some sort.

Usual Scientists are generally regarded as outcasts. People see us as lab rats and bookworms trapped inside books and computers, constrained by numbers and never-ending experiments and with the highest hope for a social life consisting of updating our social network profile and our relationship with our laptops and multi-meters.

I, for one, am a lone wolf and cannot quite choose a side yet, but that's a good thing, I can still be a little objective. Most of them Phys are highly opinionated and never hesitate to speak up. And we do love to push buttons more than anyone else. In more ways than one.

Every day, we face the insufficiency of human behavior. Team work can be a bitch sometimes. But it is also the deal breaker. A team should be like an atom in ground state. It's just that burst of energy that sets the electrons excited and bouncing from one level to another...

And at the end of all the experiments we have to asses the errors. Which are often greater than we measured in the first place. But that's exactly how life goes in general. We sometimes screw things up much worse than the good we intended to do.

A couple of hundred years ago, Benjamin Franklin shared with the world the secret of success : never leave till tomorrow, he said, that which you can do today.This is the man who discovered electricity, you'd think more people would listen to what he had to say. I don't know why we put things off but, but I'll take a wild guess and say it has a bit much to do with fear. Fear of failure, fear of rejection, sometimes is just the fear of making that damn decision, because what if you're wrong?

I know that if I make one choice I am letting out all the other possibilities; not all observables are compatible, but there are some things in life you can't compute (yet); and what if you make a mistake you can't undo? there is no reset button for life.

And we've been warned. We've all heard the philosophers,heard our grandparents about wasted time, heard the poets urging us to seize the day. Still sometimes we have to make our own mistakes and see for ourselves; learn the lesson and move on so that we may apply it. The wise ones do. Those are from the Applied Science. They handle the apparatus with steady hands; they measure, connect the wires and bring to life what's in numbers and schemes and graphs and blueprints.That's where the Theoreticians kick in.

But they are in Never-never Land. Where there are all the answers for the non-existing questions, where ":-?" is the emoticon of the day. "Mary in Wondering-Land" ({{{{8 can we get Johnny Depp to be the Mad Scientist if I ever make this a movie? )

Mistakes are good. A Japanese proverb says that one that makes no mistake learns nothing. But that doesn't mean that you have to do wrong every time just so you smart up. You would end up with great library of lessons and no good accomplished life at all, because you know too much to ever apply it...Theoreticians are cursed to this sometimes.

A wrong data input can blow up a nuclear reactor. What's worse? New experiments gone bad or old experiments that should have gone well but never did? Disasters are good. They remember us where we've been and what we've overcome. They teach us lessons of what to avoid in the future. That's what we like to think.

But that is not how it works, is it? Some things we have to learn over and over again.

And I get what Benjamin Franklin meant.That knowing is better than wondering, that waking up is better than sleeping, and even the biggest failure beats the crap out of never trying. It's just a matter of time.

But the Uncertainty relation loudly shows that if we know when, we won't know how much energy is involved; if we know where, we won't know how fast. et caetera, et caetera...