Uncertainties of knowledge

In a great book “A History of Knowledge”, the author, Charles Van Doren, writes on Heisenbergs Uncertainty
Principle, Gödels incompleteness theorem and the limits of knowledge.

“The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle revealed a disturbing fact about human knowledge, or, rather, the human
effort to know. The principle only became apparent to quantum physicists when they began, in the 1920s, to
investigate the interior of the atom and its nucleus. That microcosmic world is exceedingly small, and the things
within it-electrons and other particles-are smaller still. As the investigations proceeded, it began to be evident
that no attempt to know accurately and completely how that world worked could succeed.

In a sense, it was like trying to investigate the works of a fine Swiss watch with the end of your thumb. No one’s
thumb is small enough, or sufficiently delicate, to avoid making a jumble of the parts of the watch. Besides, your
thumb gets in the way. It comes between the watch and your eyes. It is impossible to see what you are doing,
even if your thumb is capable of doing anything at all that is not destructive of the watch.

The situation was even worse than that, as Heisenberg and his colleagues discovered. The mathematics showed
that the uncertainty was not merely accidental, arising from the great disparity in size between the interior
parts of an atom and any instrument, no matter how small, for investigating them. The uncertainty was
imbedded in nature itself. And it was always there, inescapable. It could be described in a formula, which
declared that the product of the uncertainties of position and velocity, for example, or of a position and
momentum, was always greater than a very small physical quantity.

In the larger world in which we live, the macrocosm, the smallness of this tiny physical quantity meant that the
uncertainty was insignificant. Not only can it not be detected by any instrument, but it makes no difference at
all, of a practical sort. Although the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle guarantees that none of our calculations
will ever be exactly right, we can still guide a satellite through a hundred-million mile orbit with confidence that
it will not miss its final destination. It may not hit the destination exactly in the center, in the bull’s-eye, as it
were, but it will come close enough.

Nevertheless, it is disturbing to think that there is any inherent inaccuracy at all. We would like to believe that
when we have done the best we can do, and made our calculations as accurate as humanly possible, the result
will be entirely predictable. According to the Heisenberg principle, this can never be so. The very attempt to
know with absolute precision any physical fact is essentially and fundamentally intrusive. Always, in every
situation in which we attempt to know, our thumb gets in the way.

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 Uncertainties of knowledge

As the truth of the uncertainty principle began to be accepted, first by quantum physicists, then by other
physicists and scientists generally, and finally by the public, more deeply disturbing thoughts came into play.
Knowledge, it began to be realized, is often more or less intrusive. Numerous examples come to mind.

We can learn much about animal anatomy by conducting dissections. Vivisections are even more informative,
for when we open the animal’s chest, the heart, for instance, may be observed still beating, even if the animal
soon dies and the heart stops. But this procedure is obviously intrusive. Knowledge is gained, but the animal is
destroyed.

Performing vivisections upon human beings is forbidden by custom and law, although Hitler’s doctors performed
such experiments at < ?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags"
/>Dachau and Auschwitz. We have to be content with dissecting the bodies of deceased subjects. Less
knowledge is obtained, even though the procedure is still intrusive, for it destroys the body, even if to begin
with it was already dead.

Similar destructive intrusiveness is apparent in experiments with plants, at all levels down to the cellular and
beyond. The lower the level, the greater the intrusion. The fine point of a laboratory instrument finally becomes
as much of an interference as our thumb. There comes a time when we can no longer see, and therefore no
longer understand, what we are trying to discover.

Let us concede that the principle applies throughout the natural world, from elephants to cellular nuclei, from
galaxies to particles. What about that other world which we attempt to investigate, the human world, man’s soul
(psychology) and his society (sociology and economics and political science)?

Upon reflection, it becomes clear that similar uncertainties obtain in these areas as well. Any attempt to
investigate the interior makeup and workings of a person’s mind is disturbed and perhaps rendered vain by the
mind itself, which cannot view such intrusions as benign. The consequent suspicion distorts the findings. And
there appears to be no way to examine human groups with absolute objectivity. Distortions and disturbances
are always inserted by the investigator, who, however hard he tries, cannot remove himself entirely from the
picture.

Such distortions and uncertainties in sciences like sociology and economics can be controlled by an interesting

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 Uncertainties of knowledge

and typical twentieth-century device. Given a group of human beings and a question you want to ask them or
ask about them, be certain at the outset that there are enough of them so that the inevitable uncertainties will
cancel out. The science of statistics guides us in this effort. It tells us, as surely as such a science can, how
many persons to include in the sample in order to obtain results of such and such a degree of accuracy. The
knowledge thus obtained is dependable within the stated limits. It is only important to remember that it is not
exact. It does not hit the bull’s-eye, but neither does it miss its destination.

That is comforting enough, from many practical points of view. But it is exceedingly discomforting in another
sense. As analogies to quantum mechanical uncertainty were discovered in many other fields, inevitable but
disquieting questions began to be asked about knowledge itself. Is there any area in which it can be counted on
to be absolutely certain and correct? Or is all knowledge, without exception, tainted with uncertainties, reduced
to dependence on statistical methods and guarantees, and forced to accept the possibility that the bull’s-eye
always may be missed?

Here is one of the most troubling questions with which our uncertain century has had to deal. Even in
mathematics itself, for centuries the very citadel of certainty, a proof developed in the early 1930s by the
Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel (1906-1978) showed that within any logical system, no matter how rigidly
structured, there are always questions that cannot be answered with certainty, contradictions that may be
discovered, and errors that may lurk. Thus as the century comes to a close, the verdict is clear: knowledge
never can be certain. It is always intrusive. No matter how hard we try, our very effort to know fully and
completely, like our thumb, gets in the way.

What does this mean for the progress of knowledge? Has it ended in our time? Is humankind’s great adventure
over?

It seems not. In the first place, statistical methods ensure that our knowledge, except perhaps in the microcosm
where the effort to know is radically intrusive, can generally be as accurate as desired, which means as
accurate as needed for any particular task, like sending a satellite to Jupiter. Knowledge thus takes on the
character of the integral and differential calculus that Newton invented, and with which he replaced the plane
geometry of Euclid, which was inadequate to describe “the system of the world.” No differential equation can
ever be solved with perfect exactitude, but it is accepted that this does not matter, for it can always, or nearly
always, be solved well enough.

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 Uncertainties of knowledge

Second, the discovery that man’s knowledge is not, and never has been, perfectly accurate has had a humbling
and perhaps a calming effect upon the soul of modern man. The nineteenth century, as we have observed, was
the last to believe that the world, as a whole as well as in its parts, could ever be perfectly known. We realize
now that this is, and always was, impossible. We know within limits, not absolutely, even if the limits can usually
be adjusted to satisfy our needs.

Curiously, from this new level of uncertainty even greater goals emerge and appear to be attainable. Even if we
cannot know the world with utmost precision, we can still control it. Even our inherently defective knowledge
seems to work as powerfully as ever. In short, we may never know precisely how high is the highest mountain,
but we continue to be certain that we can get to the top nevertheless.”

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