Quotes About Uncertainty

I don't think I've ever played the Olympia before, but I'm not totally sure.

We're actually doing something scripted that's totally, you know, we kind of know what's going on, however, we're having to live life and death as the art.

The idea that "there's something we don't know," given a certain wave function, is an outdated relic of our intuitive insistence that what we observe is what really exists. Quantum mechanics teaches us otherwise.

The best we can do is to predict the probability of seeing the electron in any particular location or with any particular velocity.

The real universe is nothing like that. It's more like an annoying child who likes to approach people and say, "I know what's going to happen to you next!" Then, when you ask what will happen, the child says, "I can't tell you." And after it happens, they say, "See? I knew that was going to happen!" That's the universe for you.

Are you sure you're not a Boltzmann Brain? Or at least, do you know your local environment didn't recently fluctuate into existence? How do you know you're

treat measurements as fundamental, wave functions collapse when they are observed, don't ask questions about what's going on behind the scenes

Life is short, and certainty never happens.

On the other hand, in the memorable words of Richard Feynman, "I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.

But honest physicists admit that we don't truly understand quantum mechanics.

What in the world is going on with that?

A police officer pulls over Werner Heisenberg for speeding. "Do you know how fast you were going?" asks the cop. "No," Heisenberg replies. "But I know exactly where I am." I think we can all agree that physics jokes are the funniest jokes there are.

All that human energy, wasted, in response to the simple fact that we know we are going to die, and we don't know what happens after, and we're afraid that this life is all there is.

I'm humble enough to acknowledge that I don't know the secrets of the universe. I'm no longer chasing faith. I'm chasing truth—and that means accepting uncertainty, accepting that the universe is bigger and stranger than we can even know. Is it possible that the universe acts with intention, with intelligence? Science is learning that it's not only possible, it's likely.

The whole world's a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed.

All the world's a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed.

But sometimes, no matter how hard you try, things just don't work out," Jules said. "You're not always in control of everything, no matter how much you want to be.

It takes a special strength to be willing to scrap the life that others have planned for us—safe, beaten trails walked by millions—and embrace one fraught with uncertainty, danger, and the unknown.

Look at Columbus, or Magellan: looking back, historians call you an explorer, but at the time, you're just lost.

You have to have fear to take risks - and I want to at least try.

It would be a very good thing if occasionally I thought I knew what I was doing.

Because I thought it was still possible everything was all right. Why did I think that? Because I had not heard otherwise. I was in the middle of a mystery.

In those strange days when if anything unexpected could happen it probably would.

They stood there two feet apart in all that vale of tears, one man asking another how he was, the other asking how the other was, the one not knowing truly what the world was, the other not knowing either. One nodded to the other now in an expression of understanding without understanding, of saying without breathing a word. And the other nodded back to the other, knowing nothing. Not this new world of terminality and astonishing dismay, of extremity of ruin and exaggeration of misery.