From Certainty to Uncertainty by F. David Peat, Joseph Henry Press, £17.95/$24.95, ISBN 0309076412
WE are living in a golden age of science; at least, that’s what we’re told. Yet compared to what scientists were doing a century ago, the human genome project seems like mere stamp collecting, while the search for a theory of everything smacks of looking for angels on the head of a pin.
A century ago, Max Planck had just discovered quantum theory, Henri PoincarÄ was laying the foundations of what would become chaos theory and Bertrand Russell had begun work that would ultimately reveal the flaky roots of mathematics.
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These revolutionary developments transformed science, not just in practice, but also in principle. Today no physicist seriously aspires to the god-like certainty that seemed attainable until the uncertainty principle of quantum theory shot it down. No astronomer would claim to know the position of the planets billions of years hence, chaos theory having shown the impossibility of such prescience.
As physicist F. David Peat shows in this impressively wide-ranging study, the central idea of uncertainty has inveigled its way into the thinking of society as a whole. In doing so, he highlights the crucial difference between merely knowing something to be true, and actually living in the light of that knowledge.
For example, many people recognise that life is shot through with chaos, where just a tiny change can trigger huge upheaval. Few of us still entertain the hope of predicting the future, when we get fired or how our pension fund performs. Yet while we may know this, how many of us happily accept it, and alter our approach to life accordingly?
In a particularly telling example, Peat describes the everyday traumas facing anyone trying to make eco-friendly decisions. Again, science has taught us that issues of environmental impact are replete with uncertainties, from life-cycle costs to ecological feedback loops. Yet while we know this to be true, we still cling to the old view that there must be one “right” answer, while all the others are “wrong”. Yet the sheer complexity of the situation prevents us from knowing for certain whether we have found the one “right” answer.
According to Peat, this dichotomy between merely knowing uncertainty exists and accepting it and acting accordingly lies behind the collapse of confidence in “experts”. Such experts know (or at least ought to know) that neither they nor anyone else can always make definitive statements, yet they still act as if they can.
In From Certainty to Uncertainty Peat argues that Western society is in the midst of a “mid-life crisis”, in which we sense something is wrong in our approach to the world and its issues, but we’re not sure what to do about it. He puts forward a few pointers: giving up the one-dimensional notion of progress would be a start. Truly accepting our inability to know everything may sound defeatist. Yet Peat’s immensely thought-provoking book demonstrates that, while our old ways of thinking have served us well for centuries, we need to find new ways of thinking about the world that can cope creatively with its uncertainties. Peat suggests that we might adopt one of Nature’s preferred strategies, and encourage diversity in both thought and action wherever possible.
A strategy that has served Nature well enough for a few billion years would seem as good as any. And at a time when so much research smacks of bandwagon hopping, it might just kick science out of the doldrums.