Complex Numbers

On Being Wrong

On this last Talk Tuesday of May, let’s talk about bias. How do your own biases influence your life? Is it possible to ever be truly objective?

To answer that last question first: no.

Everyone has bias. It's as inevitable as death, taxes, and construction on the Capital Beltway. The best any of us can do is try to identify those biases and account for them.

Albert Einstein is generally considered the greatest mind of the 20th century (I think it was actually Richard Feynman, but I may be biased.) Whether that's the case or not, there is no denying that he had a towering intellect. Einstein is one of those rare people whose image is practically a dictionary definition; in his case, of the word "genius." Nearly single-handedly, he turned physics on his head and revealed truths about the universe that caused a tectonic shift in our understanding thereof. The theories of relativity are so distant from our everyday perception that, in order to formulate them, one has to throw out a lifetime of experience and personal observation - basically, overcoming one's bias.

Science is like that. It acknowledges that we humans have bias, and provides a working system by which, in time, those biases are minimized, through observation and testing. As unbelievable as relativity seemed at the time, it was independently tested and verified, and refined; and yet, in our everyday lives, it's nearly irrelevant. Sure, you have to take it into account when, say, designing a GPS device, but not when you use one.

Shortly after that particular cosmic brainstorm, however, other scientists were developing what would become known as quantum mechanics - the study of the very small. Einstein made his own contributions to that (notably, it's what he was awarded the Nobel Prize for), and yet, when the full ramifications of this theory began to make themselves apparent - and they're far, far weirder than relativity - Einstein balked.

See, quantum theory deals heavily with probabilities. Instead of "this object exists at this location," it's more like "This thing is both a particle and a wave, and the more we know about its location, the less we know about its motion." and "We can't know what this electron is doing, but there's a 90% probability that it's doing this one thing and a 10% probability that it's doing this other thing" (yes, that's an absurd oversimplification, but that's not the point (pun intended)). When physicist Niels Bohr pointed this out, Einstein objected, based on his own perception of reality. "God," he supposedly said, "does not play dice with the Universe."

To which Bohr, so the story goes, replied: "Al, stop telling God what to do."

Whether that particular conversation ever took place or not, it does sum up the attitudes of the scientists under discussion.

Point is, even Einstein had his biases. And in this case, he was wrong. Since that probably-mythical exchange might have occurred, the probabilistic nature of quantum theory has been shown to be correct through observation, experimentation, mathematics, and all the other things that science does to try to disprove a theory. (That's what it does, you know - tries to disprove, not tries to prove.) Einstein tried to disprove it, and hit a dead end. The Universe, it turns out, is, at its most basic level, non-deterministic.

Whether there's a literal God or not is still under debate and probably always will be. Einstein couldn't prove or disprove that, either. No one can. "God" was his shorthand for something like "the basic forces of the universe." We can all have our own opinions about it, but they amount to biases, one way or the other.

Me? I try to keep an open mind, but not so open that it collects dust. I know that no one knows everything. I know that, for any given topic, whatever I think may be wrong. My biases do show up from time to time, which I'm sure you realize if you've been following this blog. All I can do is be willing to change my mind if the right kind of evidence presents itself, and to try to be a big enough person to admit when I'm wrong.