Quotes About Uncertainty

Can the future be a white expanse? Can you run in, heart pounding? I find I've never given much thought to the future. Beyond that sense of getting away. Derelictions, you see, left and right. Yet here I am.

Wherever life can grow, it will. It will sprout out, and do the best it can. I give you what I have. You don't get all your questions answered in this world. How many answers shall be found in the developing world of my Poem? I don't know. Nevertheless I put my Poem, which is my life, into your hands, where it will do the best it can.

To say yes is to die A lot or a little. The dead wear capably their wry Enameled emblems. They smell. But that and that they do not altogether yell is all that we know well. It is brave to be involved, To be not fearful to be unresolved. Her new wish was to smile When answers took no airships, walked a while.

I lose the thread

But I may also be afraid. I am afraid. I have already read it. And, not to lie to you, I liked it. But I am afraid. I am not afraid of you, Fidelia, Sania, Ania. I am afraid of you . (I put all this in my separate notebook. My doubtbook.)

These days I am in a super-acute, a hyped-up life. It never goes to sleep. And yet all the events of this hyped-up life seem to be cut from the hyperdream. All of them turn up accompanied by a voice that murmurs to my heart "it's not going to last.

Night, the mother of fear and mystery, was coming upon me.

No matter how many determinants of health we throw in the mix, we will never be able to perfectly predict who will experience good health.

Seek opportunity, not security. A boat in the harbor is safe, but in time its bottom will rot out.

Let some things remain mysterious.

The public… demands certainties…. But there are no certainties.

If you knew where you were, there was no way of knowing where you were going and conversely, if you knew where you were going, there was no way of knowing where you were....

chaos eliminates the Laplacian fantasy of deterministic predictability.

A bit, fundamentally, is always a coin toss.

Incompleteness was real. It meant that mathematics could never be proved free of self-contradiction.

In physics there is slippage. Chance has a part to play. Accidents can happen. Uncertainty is a principle. The world is more complex than any model... The physical laws are a construct, a convenience. They are not coextensive with the universe.

The computer will still be unable to predict whether Princeton, New Jersey, will have sun or rain on a day one month away. At noon the spaces between the sensors will hide fluctuations that the computer will not know about, tiny deviations from the average. By 12:01, those fluctuations will already have created small errors one foot away. Soon the errors will have multiplied to the ten-foot scale, and so on up to the size of the globe.

Information is uncertainty, surprise, difficulty, and entropy:

The potential application of a piece of pure thought can never be predicted

The Butterfly Effect was the reason. For small pieces of weather—and to a global forecaster, small can mean thunderstorms and blizzards—any prediction deteriorates rapidly. Errors and uncertainties multiply, cascading upward through a chain of turbulent features, from dust devils and squalls up to continent-size eddies that only satellites can see.

He died. And waited.

Parents are never sure that they have done the right thing. They can only do what they think is right.

But I was beginning to realise that life was not a tidy little parcel at any time.

Why do I prefer insurance to the invisible guarantees of existence?