There was a time—not so very long ago—when reasonable people believed that if you simply built a better ruler, you could measure the world perfectly.
Measure a mountain carefully enough, they said, and you would know its exact height. Build a better clock, and you would know the precise passage of time. Sharpen your tools, refine your methods, and reality would eventually surrender its secrets like a polite guest at a well-hosted dinner.
Then along came Dr. W. Edwards Deming, who politely cleared his throat and said, “Not so fast.”
Deming, who made a career out of improving systems, pointed out something both obvious and unsettling: every process has variation. Not just some processes—all of them. Your measuring instrument varies. Your environment varies. You vary. Even the act of measuring introduces its own disturbance. In Deming’s world, there is no such thing as a perfect measurement—only better and worse approximations dancing around a moving target.
So far, so good. That’s practical wisdom. That’s engineering. That’s life.
But then physics showed up and said, “Hold my beer.”
Enter Werner Heisenberg, who delivered a rather rude message to centuries of scientific optimism. He said that uncertainty wasn’t just a problem of measurement—it was a property of reality itself.
In what is now called the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, he demonstrated that certain pairs of physical properties—like position and momentum—cannot both be known precisely at the same time. Not because our instruments are flawed. Not because we haven’t tried hard enough. But because the universe simply does not allow it.
That’s a different kind of problem altogether.
It’s one thing to say, “We can’t measure perfectly.”
It’s quite another to say, “There is no perfect value to measure.”
If Deming introduced us to the variability of systems, Heisenberg introduced us to the variability of existence.
Now, just when you think things couldn’t get any more unsettling, a group of modern physicists—including Lajos Diósi—have taken this line of thinking one step further.
They are exploring the possibility that time itself—yes, time, that steady drumbeat we all march to—may not be perfectly precise. Not just hard to measure. Not just influenced by clocks or observers. But fundamentally, intrinsically… a little fuzzy.
The idea emerges from attempts to reconcile quantum mechanics (Heisenberg’s playground) with gravity (the domain of Albert Einstein). Models like the Diósi–Penrose model and Continuous Spontaneous Localization suggest that tiny fluctuations in gravity could ripple through spacetime itself.
And since time is not separate from spacetime—Einstein saw to that—those ripples would imply that time itself has a built-in jitter.
Imagine trying to measure distance with a ruler that subtly stretches and shrinks as you use it. Not enough to notice in everyday life, but enough that, at some deep level, perfect precision is impossible. That, in essence, is what these models suggest about time.
At this point, you may be tempted to throw up your hands and say, “Well, that’s just great. First my tape measure lies to me, and now time itself can’t be trusted.”
But wait. We’re not quite done dismantling certainty.
Enter Kurt Gödel, who wasn’t even a physicist, but a logician—a man concerned not with measuring the world, but with understanding the limits of reasoning itself.
Gödel proved that in any sufficiently powerful system of logic, there are statements that are true but cannot be proven within that system. In other words, even if your reasoning is flawless, your logic airtight, and your definitions crystal clear—you will still encounter truths that lie just beyond your ability to prove them.
Let that sink in for a moment.
Deming says: your measurements vary.
Heisenberg says: reality varies.
Gödel says: even your reasoning about reality has limits.
If this were a poker game, certainty folded three hands ago.
Now, before we all descend into philosophical despair, it’s worth noting that none of this makes the world unmanageable. Airplanes still fly. Bridges still stand. Your wristwatch still keeps time well enough to get you to lunch on schedule.
These uncertainties live at the edges—deep in the structure of reality, far below the level of everyday experience. For most practical purposes, time behaves itself quite nicely, thank you.
But the implications are profound.
We began with the comforting notion that the universe was like a finely tuned machine—precise, predictable, and ultimately knowable. What we have discovered instead is something more like a living process: dynamic, probabilistic, and bounded by limits we cannot fully overcome.
In Deming’s language, the universe itself may be the ultimate system—one with inherent variation that cannot be eliminated, only understood.
And perhaps that’s not a flaw.
Perhaps it’s a feature.
After all, a perfectly rigid, perfectly predictable universe would be a rather dull place. No surprises. No creativity. No emergence. No room for the unexpected turn, the improbable event, the human story.
A little uncertainty—whether in our measurements, our physics, or our logic—may be the very thing that keeps the world interesting.
So, the next time your watch runs a second fast, or your measurements don’t quite line up, you might take comfort in this thought:
It’s not just you.
It’s the universe.
And it’s been that way all along.
What does anxiety and uncertainty have to do with planning? This is an important connection. Uncertainty in my opinion either causes or leads to anxiety. The more uncertain we are, the more anxious we become. Many people will not attempt new endeavors, leave home, eat new food, travel to new places, meet new people, take on adventures or worst of all “listen to new ideas.” The uncertainty of these efforts creates anxiety. The unknown consequences of doing something new brings some anxiety to most of us. Change and newness can impinge on our efforts to maintain equilibrium and homeostasis in our lives. New things can disrupt the natural order that we so carefully craft to protect ourselves, our family, and our identities. “What if” can bring fear and panic to even the most courageous of us.
However, when it comes to anxiety my solution is planning. Karen would say I plan too much. I don’t need to go raging into the night of old age, but I do not want to get in my crypt yet and turn off the lights. Life has a way of closing in on us. The curtains for each of us are indeed coming down and will someday be down for all of us, but we can slow their coming down. As we age, we must push back. Planning can help us to hold the curtains off for a little while longer. But remember, “Plans are nothing, but planning is everything.”
My theory is that I have been driven to reduce anxiety because I grew up with an abusive father. My childhood was a daily diet of fear and uncertainty as to when or how badly my father would fly off the handle and take it out on me. He might have had a bad day at the races, or something went wrong with his car, and it was all my fault. So many things became my fault that I was always looking up expecting the sky to fall on me. I looked under my bed and, in my closet, every night before going to sleep as a kid. Years later I would check under my car and in my back seat before getting in my vehicle. I never let anyone get on the inside track of me when walking down a sidewalk and I always look over my back when going to a public John. I am not paranoid, and I do not think anyone is out to get me. I simply want to be certain that I have an advantage just in case someone might be out to get me. 😊 Karen has learned to cope with my rather bizarre behavior and attributes it to my intrinsic anxiety.
I am having one of those days; when the questions of life that I have never been able to answer just seem overwhelming. I once looked forward to the day that I would know almost everything or at least know a great deal more than I did. Sadly, that day has retreated further and further from my grasp. Each day that I live, I find more questions that I cannot answer. So today, I am listing some of these in the hopes that you (my reader) may have found some of the answers that have eluded me. Please feel free to answer any of these questions in the comments section or send me an email with your answer. Any solutions will be greatly appreciated. For those of you who have never read my blog before, I am a 76 year old White guy who lives in the USA. I love lobster, liquor, reading, music, travel and making it difficult for racists, xenophobes, Trumpers, and other bigots to dominate current narratives.
How do you know if you know anything? You have two paths to answer this question. The first path involves your belief that you do know something. You can choose this path if you are fairly certain that you know something. It may surprise you, but this is not a path of science. This is a Faith-Based path. No matter what anyone tells you, science relies on faith almost as much as religion relies on faith.
The Faith Based Path could lead one to accept that hundreds of systems across America could not all have been wrong and that the tallies were accurate because someone you trust told you they were. If you do not trust the poll counters, you will reject the decisions made by election boards and cling to the idea that Trump was cheated by liars and scoundrels. Either way it is a matter of faith.
Aging Capriciously 