In Search of Certainty

Appendix A. Summary and storyline from the chapters

Part 1: Stability

Or how we base technology on science

1. King Canute and the Butterfly

How we create the illusion of being in control

• We believe we are in control of a process when we choose to ignore all the factors that seem inconvenient or unlikely to make a difference to its outcome.

• We always live with incomplete information about our environments.

• Limiting information actually helps with the illusion of control, but what is really controlling outcomes if not us?

• All phenomena are associated with particular scales in space and time (e.g. short or long). At each separable scale there are different phenomena. When things interact strongly, phenomena at all scales get coupled together. This inseparability of scales is often referred to as chaos. When interactions are weak, scales separate cleanly and what happens at a high level does not depend strongly on the details at a low level.

• Instead of control, we should talk about the limited certainty of outcome.

• To understand certainty, we need to understand scales sufficiently.

• Control-thinking or determinism has been ingrained in our culture since the time of the Enlightenment. Newton believed that there were laws that determined the outcome of a clockwork universe. The ability to formulate these laws depended on being able to separate concerns, which in turn assumed weak coupling.

• Only in the 20th century did we fully realize that weak coupling and determinism were the exception rather than ...