I believe in uncertainty.

I am in this class called Quantum Physics for the Artist here at Columbia, and daily it blows my mind. The concepts and equations we deal with have changed many of my ideas about the world. Mainly the idea that at any time, one cannot simultaneously measure the poistion and momentum of a particle, which means we can never predict where a particle will end up. We will always be missing half the information. Today we watched a film from the '70s that dealt with the imperfection of information, saying that humanity will never reach the point of ingenuity where errors will not exist in information that we receive from measurements or experiments. The speaker in the film said that the best that mankind can ever do is decrease our sphere of uncertainty.

And knowing that we can't know anything truly, I believe that humanity should act with humility. There are some things that mankind will never know or understand.  And this uncertainty is crucial because I believe mankind needs to know how to tolerate not knowing. Noone should ever believe that they have absolute knowledge. We need to know that we cannot ask the universe to be exact. We need to understand that no events, not even atomic events, can be predicted accurately. 

I take comfort in this uncertainty. In the fact that we can't really know anything. I don't understand my affinity for this idea of uncertainty, but I think that its beautiful that knowledge has now become faith for me, and it is something I believe in. It is something I will keep on practicing. 

-JordonSalveson