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But to answer his fundamental questions, he !rst had to determine to what extent knowledge of any sort can be certain, given the illusions, labels and other deceptive limits of the human mind. Adam Frank, an astrophysicist professor at University of Rochester, shares at least part of that same aim: to remind people of uncertainty and their tendency to ignore or deny it. Humans, for many reasons, are resistant to uncertainty, Frank says, and scientists are no different. We use a false sense of certainty as a shield to protect ourselves, he says. Frank says: “It’s very weird to be a human

being. You’re born, and you have this self to protect from all of the other selves out there.” “One of the great problems for human beings, I think, one of the major steps we need to make in terms of cultural evolution is becoming comfortable with uncertainty, as Pema Chödrön would say,” he says. (Chödrön is an American Tibetan Buddhist and author.) In many ways, false certainty seems necessary, psychologists explain. It facilitates our daily cognitive life so that we can navigate the complicated world around us. We judge and use labels to categorize so we can make life easier for ourselves, psychologists, such

as Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky explain in their research on contradictions in human behavior. In psychology, the study of heuristics often is de!ned as the process of using judgmental shortcuts to save time and mental energy, but often at the expense of truth and objectivity. Frank says scientists are by no means immune to this kind of mental mechanism. “To me, the idea of objectivity is very important, but we should always understand that the idea of the objective world is a very useful !ction. Nobody has ever experienced the objective world,” Frank says. “We’re all

Accepting what we don’t know so we

can be clearer about what we do

By Mary Stone

SOME 400 YEARS AGO, RENE DESCARTES ARGUED THAT IN ORDER TO KNOW ANYTHING ONE HAS TO KNOW AT LEAST A FEW THINGS FIRST. WHETHER OR NOT GOD EXISTS WAS ONE OF THEM. WITHOUT CONTEXT, WITHOUT SOME CERTAINTY, ANY PHILOSOPHICAL, MATHEMATICAL, OR SCIENTIFIC EXPLANATIONS FOR THE UNIVERSE, HE CLAIMED, WOULD BE INHERENTLY FLAWED.

Mark Deff

Issue 7 September / October 2014 | POST 27

stuck looking out from our own perspectives. It’s important to understand where we begin.” To that end, Frank has devoted much of his career educating not just students but laymen as well through two books he wrote: “The Constant Fire: Beyond the Science vs. Religion Debate,” published in 2009 by University of California Press and “About Time: Cosmology and Culture at the Twilight of the Big Bang,” published in 2011 by Free Press, a division of Simon & Schuster. In “About Time,” for example, he shows the miscalculations and wrong turns that can result from one presumption: that time exists. Frank shows how some of the most recent theories in cosmology, such as parallel universes, put the notion of time in a new light, with no beginning and no end. For example, scientists’ quest to !nd out what existed before the Big Bang is not the real issue at all, Frank explains. What has led scientists off course, at least in cosmology, is the unwitting application of our human experience of the world, for example that time is linear instead of uncertain or limitless. The universe, we keep forgetting, does not !t so neatly into our realm of experience. Scientists, perhaps because of their human-ness, ignore uncertainty out of necessity, out of tradition, out of prejudice, or peer pressure. Frank urges all of us to take a fresh look at what we have always believed or ignored. In “About Time” he writes: “Ask a friend what time it is, and he might look at his watch and respond that it is 1:17 p.m. But what is 1:17 p.m.? What is the meaning of such an exact metering of minutes? There is nothing innate, objective, or God-given about this kind of time...But 1:17 exists for you. As a citizen of a technologically advanced culture replete with omnipresent time-metering technologies, you have felt 1:17 in more ways than you probably want to think about.” Frank goes on to explain that time measured in minutes is a fairly modern practice. “For the vast majority of human existence there was only ‘after lunch’ or ‘in the afternoon.’” He then asks us if the time we live by is objectively real at all, or if it is only an invention in our human evolution. In both of his books, Frank describes moments of awe, or what he secularly refers to as “sacred moments.” These are instants when physicists, theorists and scientists realize something, or make a connection, that

previously had been veiled to them, usually because of their subconscious assumptions of the world. For its secular meaning, he says ‘sacred’ is a word he chose very deliberately to describe the mysterious quality of experience. In fact, it was this sacred sense of awe that attracted Frank to science, even though it seemed to run counter to the prevailing attitude in his industry. “One time I worked for a while between undergraduate and graduate (school) in New York City at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, this was like the mid ’80s. GISS, as it is known, is a climate place, which got me started in my passion about climate,” Frank recalls. “I was learning about vortices, you know, swirling patterns of "uid motion. I walked outside into Riverside Park, and there was a dust devil (a small whirlwind of dust or sand). And I was like, ‘Oh my God, there it is!’ “In that experience of awe. Even atheists will attest to a feeling of awe. Science gives me awe. But what they don’t really understand, these super strident atheists, is that the word awe is tagged as fundamental to spiritual experience,” Frank says. “You don’t have to have a deity,” he says. “There is no place in my life for a deity: a super guide deciding which baseball team (is going to win).” Still that overwhelming sense of awe exists, he says, and it is something that is innate to what human beings have always identi!ed as sacred. Science is not separate from that, and in fact can generate that sense of the sacred. But even with this understanding, spirituality is still hard for Frank to grasp. Spirit implies that there is no matter, but as a scientist, his inclination is to use a model to help him understand. But without matter there can be no model. What scientists can do, however, is accept that this exists whether or not we have the means to comprehend it. “Even though I consider myself an atheist, the people who are religious who I have the most respect for, they’re deeply religious and their religious quest or their religious experience is not one of certainty, of rigid, clenched-!st certainty, it’s one of open-ended experimentation,” Frank says. “They have a sense of spirituality, whether it’s through a deity or not, but there are no !xed identities. You can’t have !xed conceptions.

It’s all a play that you have to engage in if you want to open your heart.” Frank is not the only scientist willing to accept the uncertain, but he is one of very few. Physicist and Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman who during his lifetime was one of the best-known scientists in the world once said that despite the approximate answers and possible beliefs he had, he could not be sure of anything—much like Descartes once asserted. Feynman, in the 1950s, said: “When a scientist doesn’t know the answer to a problem, he is ignorant. When he has a hunch as to what the result is, he is uncertain. And when he is pretty damn sure of what the result is going to be, he is still in some doubt. Scienti!c knowledge is a body of statements of a varying degrees of certainty—some unsure, some nearly sure, but none absolutely certain.” Frank, who writes for NPR’s cosmos and culture blog, Discover Magazine, Astronomy Magazine, Scienti!c American, Sky & Telescope and other national publications, considers himself an evangelist of science. He combined his love for science with his parents’ gift for writing to steer much of his career. Growing up in New Jersey, his father wrote for numerous trade publications and his mother was an author and magazine writer. He credits them, in part, for giving him his unusual perspective on science and the arts. “My dad was really into science, but he wasn’t a scientist. I was raised in a household where literature and the arts were all around. Both my mom and dad helped me with my writing. I have very clear memories of my mom helping me redo an essay in ninth grade. She was my !rst editor, and she gave great advice,” Frank remembers. As a kid, Frank’s hero was Carl Sagan. “I always had an interest in science popularization, or writing about science,” Frank says. “I was really interested in philosophy as a kid. “I’ve always had an interest in the big questions as well as science. So, to me, some scientists are hostile to philosophy, which I think is crazy,” Frank says. “I’ve always been thinking about this stuff, and then of course reading Carl Sagan was very interesting to me, I wanted to write about it as well.” Frank started doing popular writing as a graduate student at the University of Washington. “I had a period there of 15 years, where I was doing a lot of science journalism,

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and then at some point, I wanted to explain my own ideas. That’s where the !rst book on science and religion came from,” Frank says. In his writing, Frank says that embracing uncertainty means more than identifying what we don’t know. “It means embracing the fuzzy boundaries of the very process of asking questions. It means embracing the frontiers of what explanations, for all their power, can do,” Frank wrote for NPR. “It means understanding that a life of deepest inquiry requires all kinds of vehicles: from poetry to particle accelerators; from quiet reveries to abstract analysis.” Though he considers himself an atheist, he relishes the mystery of life, in art, in science, in literature. Most scientists, however, seem to prefer to block the mystery out in the name of science.

Albert Einstein, who preferred to be identi!ed as agnostic, also enjoyed the mystery of science and of life in general. With regard to uncertainty, he described himself as having “an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our own intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being.” In pursuit of truth, many scientists, Frank says, adhere to a hyper-strident atheism that

may lead them away from the truths they so doggedly try to uncover. By calling what is uncertain nonexistent, we make assertions that risk obfuscating the truth more than clarifying it. Frank, for his part, says he does not make it his goal to debate the existence of the soul, or God or the afterlife. It is the quality of experience—the sacredness and mystery of life—that compel him to write. “These lives we live, surrounded by beauty and horror, profound knowledge and pitiful ignorance, are a mystery to us all,” Frank writes. “To push that truth away with false certainty, falsely derived from either religion or reason, is to miss our most perfect truth.”

Humans may crave absolute certainty; they

may aspire to it; they may pretend ... to have attained it. But the

history of science—by far the most successful claim to knowledge accessible

to humans—teaches that the most we can hope for is successive improvement in our

understanding, learning from our mistakes, an asymptotic approach to the Universe, but

with the proviso that absolute certainty will

always elude us.

—Astronomer and writer Carl Sagan

Mark Deff