Uncertainty
39 articles-
When Pigs Fly, Crayfish Whistle, and It Snows Red Snowflakes
What do you say when faced with something so unlikely, so improbable, that you simply cannot imagine it ever happening? Perhaps you’ll admit your neighbor was right about who owns the shovel you’ve both used—when pigs fly. Or maybe your boss will give you that raise when hell freezes over. But would you ever say […]
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When a Planet Is Not Really a Planet at All
As astronomers point their telescopes up at the sky to learn about the cosmos, they tend to push those devices’ abilities to their limits. The edge of what we can measure is, of course, where all the interesting things are happening. The downside of this ambition is that the conclusions drawn from the newest data […]
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The Best Evidence for Dark Matter & the Uncertainty Therein
Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . If I told you that I was 99.81 percent certain I had made a big discovery, you might suggest it was time to break out the champagne. If I said the discovery resolved one of the biggest outstanding problems in science and […]
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The Remarkable Philosophy of the TV Show “House”
In his essay for “Uncertainty,” the second issue of Nautilus, David Deutsch explains why you can never be entirely sure that a thought is undoubtedly correct. Despite that, he says we can still learn true things about the world, and that information be used in important pursuits like medicine. Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. […]
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The Comforting Certainty of Unanswered Questions
Light was thought to travel through aether like waves on a lakeShutterstock Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . You might know the anecdote. In April 1900, Lord Kelvin, one of the most prominent physicists of the 19th century, stands in the speaker’s well of the Royal Society in London. […]
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How to Tell The Future(s)
In 1972 the Club of Rome, an international think tank, commissioned four scientists to use computers to model the human future. The result was the infamous Limits to Growth that crashed into world culture like an asteroid from space. Collapse, calamity and chaos were the media take-aways from the book, even though the authors tried […]