Quotes About Uncertainty

We don't know if he ever left England. We don't know who his principal companions were or how he amused himself. His sexuality is an irreconcilable mystery. On only a handful of days in his life can we say with absolute certainty where he was.

one cannot "predict future events exactly if one cannot even measure the present state of the universe precisely!

It was all a long time ago and at this stage we just don't know.

That is the problem with Scotland, I find. You never know whether the next person you meet is going to offer you his bone marrow or nut you with his forehead. Afterward

What would it be like if we had four years and four months to watch an inescapable doom advancing toward us, knowing that when it finally arrived it would blow the skin right off our bones?

So we are stuck with a theory, and we do not know whether it is right or wrong, but we do know that it is a little wrong, or at least incomplete." In

In short, there is just a great deal we don't know.

The uncertainty around which the theory is built is that we can know the path an electron takes as it moves through a space or we can know where it is at a given instant, but we cannot know both.

In short, the remarkable position in which we find ourselves is that we don't actually know what we actually know. In

when astronomers say that the galaxy M87 is 60 million light-years away, what they really mean ("but do not often stress to the general public") is that it is somewhere between 40 million and 90 million light-years away—not quite the same thing.

As Donald Goldsmith notes, when astronomers say that the galaxy M87 is 60 million light years away, what they really mean ('but do not often stress to the general public') is that it is somewhere between 40 million and 90 million light years away - not quite the same thing.

I can remember when you couldn't buy a British Rail sandwich without wondering if this was your last act before a long period on a life-support machine.

It may seem topsy-turvy that cosmologists can speak confidently about galaxies billions of light years away, whereas theories of diet and child rearing – issues that everyone cares about – are still tentative and controversial

It also gives life a richness and unpredictability that endows even the simplest undertakings with an air of challenge and uncertainty.

If there is one thing certain about English pronunciation it is that there is almost nothing certain about it. No other language in the world has more words spelled the same way and yet pronounced differently.

Despite the ambiguities I have just confessed to, most of me wants very badly not to die just yet, and I am sure the majority of writers and scientists working in this area agree.

I felt weightless. I felt nothing would happen to me. I felt that anything might happen to me. I was looking straight ahead, running, trying to keep up, and things were occurring along the dark peripheries of my vision: there would be a bright light and then darkness again and the sound, constantly, of something else breaking, and of movement, of objects being thrown and of people falling.

I looked up—a sheer, flat, white rocky face (the kind you would take a ski lift to reach the top of or wear a parachute to jump from)—and thought: Oh, shit.

You remember when we first took this route?" I ask, recalling our postelection tour before I took the oath of office. "Like it was yesterday," says Carolyn. "I'll never forget it," Danny says. "We were so full of…hope, I guess. We were so sure we'd make the world a better place." Carolyn says, "Maybe you were. I was scared to death.

In spite of the six thousand manuals on child raising in the bookstores, child raising is still a dark continent and no one really knows anything. You just need a lot of love and luck - and, of course, courage.

Sticking one's head in the sand is a deep human impulse. Like when you feel some kind of bump or growth on the back of your neck, and your heart jumps, because, Christ, that could be something bad, I should see a doctor right away. But then you don't, because it's too scary, and what if they do find something, and...and besides: maybe it will just go away !

Doubt is the only appropriate response for human beings.

Religion is dangerous because it allows human beings who don't have all the answers to think that they do

I don't like the word atheist because to me it mirrors the certainty of religion. I preach the gospel of I don't know.