I was camped on a grassy bench at 8,500 feet elevation, far above the valley floor.  I had an expansive view of distant horizons.  Mt Zerkel, the highest peak in the Park Range was 20 miles west.  The Front Range uplift dominated the eastern horizon, but I couldn’t see familiar peaks west of Denver because I was too far north, nearly to the Wyoming border at the northwestern edge of the North Park basin.  The narrow county road leading to my site was stable enough, although it was a steep uphill climb with noticeable ruts of hardened mud, probably resulting from early Spring driving when the hard gravel pavement became saturated from melting snow.  The sky was a blanket of cobalt blue, but I’m always on the lookout for stormy weather.  Heavy rain can make soft clayey roads impassable.

I checked the weather forecast that morning over coffee.  Weather.com said there was a 50 percent chance of storms with gusty winds and small hail after 3 PM, but the current dry conditions just didn’t seem right for serious weather.  At 10 AM, an updated forecast reduced the chance of rain to 20 percent, and puffy fair weather cumulous clouds developed over the Park Range.  I decided to drive the 15 miles to Waldon for groceries and gas.  By lunchtime, I was back at my site staring at the big sky.  Storm cells were starting to form.  By 3 PM the cells coalesced into a storm system that was producing a gust front of strong winds.  It started to rain.  Doppler radar indicated the storm would last about 30 minutes.  By 4 PM it was still raining steadily with cloud to ground lightning and strong winds.  By 5 PM the skies began to clear.  Later that evening it started to rain again and continued to rain lightly just before I fell asleep. 

The Oxford dictionary defines chaos theory as a branch of mathematics that deals with complex systems, phenomena highly sensitive to slight changes to initial conditions.  Small changes can create significant and unpredictable consequences leading to a great deal of uncertainty.  Weather is an ideal example of a chaotic system.  Weather is not random.  Random would mean it’s impossible to predict.  Chaotic simply means that it’s very difficult to predict.   Weather is atmospheric physics with a very large number of conditions or variables: atmospheric pressure, humidity, topography, wind speed and direction, jet stream conditions, temperature, etc.  Slight changes in any of these and other variables may have serious consequences for a forecast.  Meteorologists do an excellent job at prediction considering the multivariate mess they deal with, but weather forecasting involves considerable uncertainty.  It’s an exercise in dealing with a lot of imperfect or unknown information. 

Scientists spend much of their careers dealing with uncertainty.  Half of my time as a geologist was spent working with other geologists to estimate yet-to-be-discovered oil and gas resources in the US and the World.  Petroleum resources are found in sedimentary basins at variable depths under complex geologic conditions.  Predicting future discoveries requires a lot of information about the geologic and production history of a basin.  Numerous questions have to be correctly answered.  Is there enough organic carbon in the sedimentary rocks to produce oil or gas?  Were the rocks buried deep enough for high temperatures to change organic matter into petroleum?  Did petroleum migrate laterally or vertically and get trapped to form a produceable reservoir?  The best source of data for yet-to-be-discovered fields is the presence of nearby existing fields, those that are currently producing petroleum.  We combed the published literature for information about our basins.  We talked to industry geologists who had explored for petroleum in each basin.  The most accurate estimates of future resources are made in very mature basins, but those basins have already produced most of their oil and gas.  There’s little left to produce unless the price of resources increases dramatically and/or new technologies are developed that impact the amount of resource recovered.  Many frontier basins like those in the Russian and Canadian Arctic may be very deep and have never been explored.  The conditions are just too inhospitable for drilling under current economic, climatic, and technologic conditions.  In such cases, estimates of future resources require using analog basins, more mature areas that have similar geologic characteristics.

Since we faced a long list of uncertainties, estimates were presented as probability distributions, ranges of future resource values from least likely to most likely.  The greater the uncertainty, the greater the difference between end member resource numbers.  The uncertainties associated with petroleum assessment can be significant even under the best of conditions.  For example, how experienced was the geologist who estimated the resources?  Did the geologist review all the published literature?  Was the literature accurate?  Were laboratory studies done on important rock units?  Was the subsurface geology correctly understood?  Many questions, much uncertainty. 

I also studied Cretaceous rocks in the northern Rocky Mountain region by spending time in the field gathering information and later in a laboratory and office analyzing results.  Field work can be frustrating for a variety of reasons.  Often, there are few accessible rock outcroppings or drill holes with cores.  The area may be covered in vegetation.  Often, access to rocks on private property is prohibited.  Once a rancher in western Montana refused to give me permission to look at rocks on his land because of an invasive weed infestation.  He was too embarrassed to have anyone see his property, and it left a hole in my interpretation.   Another rancher once told me that two geologists had visited his ranch years ago and no additional work was needed.  He wouldn’t allow me to access his back 40, but was adamant about showing me his well witching stick. 

I was once on a fieldtrip to the Blue Mountains in northeastern Oregon.  The trip leader  showed us an isolated rock outcropping the size of a house that presumably represented the collision of a volcanic island arc (like Japan) with ancestral North America 145 million or so years ago, suturing the arc to the continent.  I was skeptical, but other geologists have since substantiated that theory as more data became available and have reduced the level of uncertainty in that interpretation.

Science uses the scientific method to solve problems.  Scientists of many disciplines ponder a problem and create a hypothesis.  Maybe the local topography in a region resembles an area that suffered a catastrophic flood, but there’s no surface water left, just giant ripples, a scoured landscape, maybe dry river channels.  Former lake shorelines are later identified upstream and a hypothesis evolves into a coherent theory as more data become available and uncertainty is reduced. 

In the early twentieth century, Alfred Wegener suggested that the earth’s continents appeared to have been connected at one time in the deep geologic past based on their shapes and connectivity.  He was ridiculed during his lifetime.  It wasn’t until the mid-20^th century that a vast amount of data began to appear supporting his theory.  Today, plate tectonics and continental drift are considered fact by the scientific community.  Uncertainty is now just limited to the details, local and regional structural problems as crustal plates move on a mobile mantle.  The basic theory has survived the rigors of time.

Uncertainty of course isn’t limited to geology and weather.  The medical profession is infested with it, in part because the human body is very complicated.  Medical test data may not be available, a doctor may not be knowledgeable, or maybe test results are ambiguous or don’t even exist.  There’s uncertainty associated with the evolution of viruses, the variability in a person’s ability to respond to a drug, variations in immune system response, and much more.

In psychology and psychiatry, the term spectrum is often used to describe a range of related symptoms or conditions that occur on a continuum from mild to severe.  Symptoms for several known disorders often overlap, and individuals may exhibit a wide range of symptoms for the same disorder.  Afflictions like schizophrenia, panic disorder, chronic anxiety, bipolar disorder, OCD, and ADHD are neurologically complex.  I recently read that humans have more than 80 billion neurons (brain cells).  No wonder there’s uncertainty in the neurosciences.

Isaac Newton was a brilliant scientist and a man of the Enlightenment.  Much of our knowledge of optics and light, Calculus, the laws of motion, and gravitation are attributed to Newton.  He formed the basis for a deterministic Universe, one that is orderly and predictable, where the past determines the future.  This is the way the Universe appears to function at the human observational level.  But in the 1920s, a new (and radical) school of thought emerged about the behavior of matter and energy.  Quantum physics mathematically describes the properties of subatomic particles at their most fundamental level.  It says there’s uncertainty to the subatomic world in that there is a limit to the precision by which pairs of physical properties can be known.  The more accurately one is known, the less accurately the other is known. 

We owe this ground breaking work to the German physicist, Werner Heisenberg.  His Uncertainty Principal states that “we cannot know both the location and speed of a subatomic particle such as an electron or proton with accuracy.”  The more we know about its position, the less we know about its speed.  Newton’s Universe was upended by this concept, but at the human level, the behavior of macroscopic objects like cars, humans, and baseballs can be determined accurately.  The effects associated with the Uncertainty Principal are negligible at the human scale, but they still exist.

I often wonder about the effectiveness of the trial by jury system, an institution designed to provide a fair examination of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt in a criminal or civil trial.  It’s common to see news articles about an imprisoned convict newly released after 30 years when the guilty party confesses to the murder, or when DNA evidence reveals the true killer.  What was the makeup of the jury?  Was race involved?  Was evidence withheld or improperly presented?  The jury system is flawed because of uncertainty.  That’s why lawyers for the prosecution and defense make an effort to select juries to their liking.   Furthermore, money can buy the best lawyers who can delay sentencing after a guilty verdict or can appeal through the appellate system.

I once served on a jury in a criminal case where an adult gang member was accused of beating another with a 2X4.  I was voted jury foreman.  I favored a guilty verdict along with 10 other jury members based on the evidence presented.  The evidence indicated guilt:  the weapon of choice, doctor’s report, trustworthiness of witnesses, and professional testimony.  A single juror was not convinced of guilt beyond reasonable doubt, even after hours of discussion and argument.  I had to make the phone call to the judge late that evening informing him we could not reach a verdict.  Uncertainty is often very personal and pervasive in the jury system.

              Unpredictability exists in purchasing large ticket items such as a house or car and is embedded in the business world.  One can be prepared to start a business, but many businesses fail for a variety of reasons.  We invest our savings to earn interest or dividends, but the economy fluctuates and future earnings are not guaranteed.  Choosing a career or life path is uncertain.  We just don’t know what will happen to us in a volatile job market.  Our future health is an unknown.  We can eat right, exercise, sleep well, and otherwise take care of our bodies, but a fatal disease can shorten our lives.  I have known several people who’s lives have been cut short by health or accident.

But what would a deterministic, predictable Universe be like, where everything is certain, where all is known or determined ahead of time, where decisions about successes and failures are already decided?  What if we believe in predestination, the Calvinistic teaching that God chooses those who will be saved, not by personal merit but by the will of the Creator?  I recall a discussion I had with a long-gone acquaintance, on a cruise ship in the Caribbean.  We were sitting in a bar.  I was drinking scotch.  He was drinking Coke.  The subject of his religious beliefs came up after a while.  He belonged to the Dutch Reformed Church, a scripture-based faith grounded in the infallibility of God where only the chosen reach heaven because humans are sinful and unable to save themselves.  Salvation is not reached by merit, but by God’s mercy, a uncertain world where free will does not exist. 

Then, if there is no free will, we live in an inescapable state, a place where our decisions are not our own but the result of our genetic soup or maybe the will of God.  But our legal system and social and cultural codes of ethics assume that we can choose between right and wrong.  We can pursue the common good and have an opportunity to make judgements about good and evil.  In other words, we are free to make decisions and attempt to create our own beneficial certainty.  Is it all genetics or is our environment in control?  Or is it a mix, both the genes we inherited and the environment we live in.  We evolved from hunters and gatherers, and with our large brains it seems that we can think of options and weigh them based on known information and extrapolation.    

My feeling about uncertainty reminds me of Richard Feynman, the late, great theoretical physicist, who once said: “I can live with doubt and uncertainty.  I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong”.  I recently read that quote in Feynman’s obituary written by James Gleick for the New York Times in February 1988 two days after Feynman died.  Gleick used the quote to describe Feynman’s willingness to accept uncertainty for what it is rather than create imaginary or make-believe answers to complex problems. 

Feynman’s quote originally came from a BBC interview called The Pleasure of Finding Things Out (and from a book written by Feynman with the same title) where he also said that there are many answers about the Universe that have varying degrees of certainty rather than absolute certainty, and living in a Universe without knowing its purpose (if any) is not frightening.  I agree with Feynman.