The Uncertainty Principle

For a while — probably longer than I should have, lol — I regularly slipped down the rabbit hole of quantum mechanics, descending again and again in an effort to grasp the elusive concepts. I bought books I struggled to comprehend. I replayed educational videos over and over. I listened to podcasts, my small brain whirling. I even, during a visit to France, hopped on a train to Geneva just to go see CERN where the “God Particle” (Higgs boson) had first made itself known. (That’s how I like to think of it — “Tada! Here I am! Matter! Wheeee!”)

Beasley Ralph was a good student but deserved a better teacher.

The details and the foundations on which these theories are based (not to say the maths, egad) are far out of my reach, but the concepts continue to tug at me.

Non-locality or entanglement, that says if, for example, a pair of electrons are “entangled,” then whatever happens to one electron affects the other electron in exactly the same way at exactly the same instant, and that is even if these entangled electrons are billions of light years apart from each other.

How about the idea that anything that can happen does, maybe just in some other room of the infinite multiverse. (Check out Blake Crouch’s Dark Matter on Apple TV for a little mindbending.)

And that brings me to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which says we cannot at the same time measure both the position and momentum of a particle; measuring one aspect affects the other. (A nerdy joke for you: A quantum physicist is stopped for speeding, and the cop asks, “Do you know how fast you were going?” and she answers, “No, but I know where I am.”)

I’m still turning the uncertainty principle over and over. It’s a bit slippery for my grasp. But…there was a time when I thought about getting the equation tattooed on top of one of my feet as reminder with each step that the future is undetermined and uncertain, and that as humans we just get to live with that.

I have absolutely 100% no idea what this means.

To be clear, this scientific theory applies strictly to subatomic particles, and is not to be applied to everyday situations, we are supposed to stop doing that. Ha, ha, ha, just kidding. Uncertainty is what it means to have a future, i.e., all the stuff that is possible that hasn’t happened yet. (But also, no, don’t irritate the nice quantum physicists, who are doing seriously scientific things, by getting all metaphysical and stuff.)

Since my essay appeared in TIME last Wednesday, I’ve had emails and DMs from lots of people who spoke of their own challenges of living with uncertainty — cancer, worries about climate change, wars and rumors of wars. Kids who are struggling, parents who feel helpless. Fears about aging. The illnesses or deaths of loved ones and other traumatic events that continue to reverberate from the past on into the now, disrupting emotional landscapes.

In light of all this uncertainty, the work to keep putting one foot in front of the other is unending, sometimes exhausting, often frightening. But I want to say how deeply moved I am by all who reached out. It’s always my hope that when we share our stories we feel less alone.

A little bit like when we were kids and came up to a busy street we had to cross, how we’d hold hands the whole way, making sure everybody would make it to the other side. ❤️