Quotes About Uncertainty

In the whole range of human activities, war most closely resembles a game of cards.

Dans les deux cas, l'empereur Napoléon attaqua avec son aile droite en cherchant à résister avec l'aile gauche. L'archiduc Charlesdfit exactement la même chose. Mais le premier le fit avec toute sa résolution et toute son énergie, tandis que le second était indécis et s'arrêtait chaque fois à mi-course.

der Handelnde im Kriege die Dinge unaufhörlich anders findet, als er sie erwartet hatte

Most of us adapt; eventually learning to navigate on ground we no longer trust to be steady. We gradually come to accept that our questions will not be answered. We try not to torture ourselves for having failed to predict the coming catastrophe and preventing our loved ones from taking their lives.

Entropy derives from the Greek "conversion", "mutation", "evolution", but also "confusion" and "shame" (this latter meaning one finds in the writings of Hippocrates in the form ).

One place is as good as another, in the valley without exit...

Genius hesitates.

The very foundation of science is to keep the door open to doubt.

The incompleteness and the uncertainty of our knowledge, our precariousness, suspended over the abyss of the immensity of what we don't know, does not render life meaningless: it makes it interesting and precious.

In quantum mechanics no object has a definite position, except when colliding headlong with something else.

Probability does not refer to the system as such (the dice, the newspaper editor, the decaying atom, tomorrow's weather), but to the knowledge that I have about this system.

In the awareness that we can always be wrong, and therefore ready at any moment to change direction if a new track appears; but knowing also that if we are good enough we will get it right and will find what we are seeking. This is the nature of science. The

Scientific answers are not definitive: they are, almost by definition, the best ones that we have at any given time. Consider

Newton's mechanics, Maxwell's equations, quantum mechanics, and so on, tell us how events happen, not how things are.

Time is information we don't have. Time is our ignorance.

Science is not reliable because it provides certainty. It is reliable because it provides us with the best answers we have at present. Science is the most we know so far about the problems confronting us. It is precisely its openness, the fact that it constantly calls current knowledge into question, which guarantees that the answers it offers are the best so far available: if you find better answers, these new answers become science.

A határozatlanság és tudásunk bizonytalansága, amint azzal tudatlanságunk végtelen szakadékaiba letekintve szembesülünk, nem teszi értelmetlenné az életet, épp ellenkez?leg: értékessé teszi.

The entropy of a system depends explicitly on blurring. It depends on what I do not register, because it depends on the number of indistinguishable configurations. The same microscopic configuration may be of high entropy with regard to one blurring and of low in relation to another.

Probability does not refer to the evolution of matter in itself. It relates to the evolution of those specific quantities we interact with.

Heisenberg had understood that you can't locate a particle at a point in space for long: it soon escapes. The smaller the region where we try to locate a particle, the greater the velocity at which it escapes.

The search for knowledge is not nourished by certainty: it is nourished by a radical absence of certainty.

La precariedad de la verdad no implica que no podamos ponernos de acuerdo.

Nuestro saber es demasiado débil para no aceptar vivir en el misterio. Y precisamente porque el misterio existe, y porque es tan profundo, no podemos confiar en quien declara poseer la llave de este misterio. Aceptar la incertidumbre y la novedad de un pensamiento que busca nuevos caminos conlleva nuevos riesgos.

Richard Feynman, who more than anyone has known how to juggle with the theory, has written: "I think I can state that nobody really understands quantum mechanics.