Quotes About Uncertainty

You can still have children. We'll buy out your contract. You'll get everything you deserve. We owe you.' She wavered. 'You're not going to take it back?

I got a bad feeling about this." —

Eying him, Finn felt he knew the type if not the man. His only fear then was that the man might shoot first and ask questions later. Thankfully, he did not.

I know what I have to do, but I don't know if I have the strength to do it." Ren moved out onto the walkway toward Han. "Will you help me?" "Yes," Han told him. "Anything.

One of three things would occur when she thumbed it, she knew: They would lift off, the ship would blow up, or nothing at all would happen.

And, with much of Europe occupied by Nazi Germany, and Mussolini's armies in Albania, on the Greek frontier, one wasn't sure what came next. So, don't trust the telephone. Or the newspapers. Or the radio. Or tomorrow.

If I had known what the next six years of my life were going to be like, I would have eaten more. I wouldn't have complained about brushing my teeth, or taking a bath, or going to bed at eight o'clock every night. I would have played more. Laughed more. I would have hugged my parents and told them I loved them. But I was ten years old, and I had no idea of the nightmare that was to come. None of us did.

It was all a big joke. I could see that now. There was no rhyme or reason to whether we lived or died. One day it might be the man next to you at roll call who is torn apart by dogs. The next day it might be you who is shot through the head. You could play the game perfectly and still lose, so why bother playing at all?

Consider a world in which cause and effect are erratic. Sometimes the first precedes the second, and sometimes the second the first. Or perhaps cause lies forever in the past effect in the future, but future and past are intertwined.

Most people have learned how to live in the moment. The argument goes that if the past has uncertain effect on the present, there is no need to dwell on the past. And if the present has little effect on the future, present actions need not be weighed in for their consequence. Rather, each act is an island in time to be judged on their own.

Thus, in this world of brief scenes from the future, few risks are taken. Those who have seen the future do not need to take risks, and those who have not yet seen the future wait for their visions without taking risks.

if the past has uncertain effect on the present, there is no need to dwell on the past. And if the present has little effect on the future

In this acausal world, scientists are helpless. Their predictions become postdictions. Their equations become justifications, their logic, illogic. Scientists turn reckless and mutter like gamblers who cannot stop betting. Scientists are buffoons, not because they're rational but because the cosmos is irrational. Or perhaps it is not because the cosmos is irrational because they are rational. Who can say which, in an acausal world?

Have they been together a lifetime, or only a moment? Who can say?

Evidently, the fundamental laws of nature do not pin down a single and unique universe. According to the current thinking of many physicists, we are living in one of a vast number of universes. We are living in an accidental universe. We are living in a universe uncalculable by science.

He had a problem, like any other problem. The problem just hadn't been well posed. The problem was: Should he leave Penny or not?

But what is the past? Could it be, the firmness of the past is just illusion? Could the past be a kaleidoscope, a pattern of images shift with each disturbance of a sudden breeze, a laugh, a thought? And if the shift is everywhere, how would we know?

Decision making is such a delicate and complex mental process. If causality is only approximate, we don't know where the tipping point lies, where the decision is so fragile that it appears without definite cause.

Thus, to explain what we see in the world and in our mental deductions, we must believe in what we cannot prove.

Because of the hazy, nondefinite character of quantum physics (called the Heisenberg uncertainty principle), at the dimensions of the Planck length, space and time churn and seethe, with the distance between any two points wildly fluctuating from moment to moment, and time randomly speeding and slowing, perhaps even going backward and forward. In such a situation, time and space no longer exist in a way that has meaning to us.

The future is beckoning. She makes up her mind. Without finishing her packing, she rushes out of her house, this point of her life, rushes straight to the future.

Why do we argue? Life's so fragile, a successful virus clinging to a speck of mud, suspended in endless nothing.

Truly, whoever we are, wherever we reside, we exist upon the whim of murderers.

For whatever the future holds, one thing is certain... It just won't be the same.