Uncertain principles

Ahmed Shafee
Published : 1 Nov 2010, 06:13 PM
Updated : 1 Nov 2010, 06:13 PM

Dr Quazi Motahar Hossain was one of the most respected teachers of this country. He is well-known for his involvement in such a diversity of fields that lesser mortals can only be awestruck when counting them. He was close to Quazi Nazrul Islam and on several occasions tried to bring his errant friend back to the real world of harsh logic. He was a champion tennis player who kept himself in enviably good shape till late in life. He was the national chess champion until old age. He was a great admirer of Tagore and imbibed in his children a love for his songs which eventually gave birth to one of our foremost cultural institutions — the Chhayanaut. Quazi Saheb was a founder of the secular rationalist 'freedom of thought movement' among Bengali Muslims. He founded the pioneer department of statistics in the country and obtained the first doctorate in the subject. He was an excellent teacher despite serious hearing problems and consequent lack of interaction in the classroom. His childlike innocent smile and intelligent relevant references to familiar events and personalities kept his students spellbound in what could have degenerated into boring classes of a highly mathematical difficult subject in less astute hands.

Dr Hossain was a rationalist and a realist. In class he would often say that everything had a probability, neither exactly zero nor quite 100 percent. During a eulogy meeting after the death of Hossain Shahid Suhrawardy, to the amusement of his students and the discomfort of the organisers he declared that the politician was a 85 percent good man, and hastened to add that we could rarely find that level of goodness in a politician. Nobody asked about his method of quantifying goodness, but the point he was making had many admirers outside his circle of students. He would often warn in class — 'Never trust anybody fully; there is a fallible element in everyone, even saints. The same person is a combination of the good, the bad and the ugly.'

Subjective labels are always fuzzy, and a new branch of mathematics has evolved in recent years called fuzzy set theory that tries to make the best of ill-defined definitions. If a man is branded 'tall', nobody knows what his exact height is. To wash clothes we need 'hot' water, and have to churn it in the machine for a 'length of time', both the quoted words having no precise values. In most everyday situations we do not deal with exact quantities and to acknowledge this nebulosity in human thought and requirements, even electronic chips have been devised by giant home appliance manufacturers in Japan to cater to such fuzziness in parameters in an unambiguous fashion. Mercifully, nobody has yet patented a commercial electronic chip to categorise a person as 'beautiful' or not, though reality show directors and model agencies may ask for one soon.

Once upon a time physics was known to be an exact science. Many students of the subject are still drawn to the neat, curt, symbolic way different entities fit in beautiful formulas, such as Newton's famous 'force is proportional to acceleration'. Then came quantum theory to pull the rug from under all deterministic laws. A 'point particle' is now a hazy cloud, it moves with a mixture of various speeds, and spins clockwise and counter clockwise at the same time. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle has redefined reality in terms of inevitably erratic measurements. 'If you know the position exactly, you know nothing about the speed'; 'If you know the energy, you don't know the time'. Why? Because measuring one quantity disturbs the other. This is great fun and fodder for philosophers. If nothing is absolutely certain, is the world an illusion? Does the moon exist when nobody is looking at it? There is no end to the debate, though physicists furiously affirm that there is no problem with an uncertain world. It turns out to be alright in the average sense. One or two electrons of your body's hazy cloud may occasionally reach out all the way to New York without a valid US visa, but what are a couple of electrons compared to the trillions of trillions of trillions … which remain faithfully attached to you?

The human mind is a recognised potpourri of mysterious unknowns, full of uncertainties and contradictions. A Jibananada Das creates an unreal dusky world where normal human aspirations give way to elemental interactions with nature, and where dreaded death can become a desirable destination. Even the mind of a trained physicist or mathematician does not always follow the rules of logic. Though some famous scientists, such as Roger Penrose have tried to discover 'free will' in the convolution of such indeterminism, which in turn they ascribed to quantum uncertainties, most brain scientists think the complicated behaviour results from the complexity of the organisation, not from any new laws.

Economists deal with human needs and distribution of resources. The latter is fairly well-defined, the former is not. There are too many unknown factors in dealing with human behaviour to develop exact laws, and efforts to put the subject on a firm mathematical footing are progressing only slowly. One of the earliest authors of a book on 'political economy' (artha shastra) was the ancient man of the world Chanakya, and his work is full of interesting aphorisms for the worldly-wise, many of which our politicians diligently follow. "Do not try to be too honest; remember that the straight trees in the forest get cut first"; "Do not reveal what you have thought upon doing, but by wise council keep it secret being determined to carry it into execution"; "Even if a snake is not poisonous, it should pretend to be venomous". This man was anticipating game theory — in limelight in economics 23 centuries later. Circumlocution (vide Charles Dickens' Circumlocution Office in Little Dorrit) and obfuscation are standard weapons in the politicians' arsenal, but few of our leaders in a position to control national economy seem eager to follow another advice from Chanakya: "He who is overly attached to his family members experiences fear and sorrow, for the root of all grief is attachment. Thus one should discard attachment to be happy."

Some scientists perceive in economists an envy of physicists, for uncertain reasons. They had to invent a Bank of Sweden Prize and simply rename it the 'Nobel Prize for Economics'. To prove that they are as comfortable with uncertainty as quantum physicists, they have their own version. Notes an economist scholar: "The uncertainty principle is part of the epistemology of science. There is no reason to suppose that economic theory is exempt from these general constraints on objective knowledge." Actually, the indeterminism and noise errors of complex systems he is implying are quite different from those present even in simplest quantum situations, which even Einstein could not fathom. It might be interesting to mention the sort of things he has in mind: "It is impossible to stabilise money supply and interest rate at the same time" (it has nothing to do with measurement). On the other hand to learn about the Economy, the policymaker conducts experiments; these include regulatory actions as well as fiscal and monetary operations. People adjust to these experiments, and so, after the experiment or the probe, the state of the economy is different from what the policymaker gets as feedback. This is indeed similar to the paradox of quantum measurement.

Many years ago, the following dialogue took place in the seminar room of the Atomic Energy Centre between two friendly physicists (W and S), the former four years senior to the other and later a distinguished Chairman of the Commission.

W: Aha Professor Saheb, your are late for the seminar.

S: Sorry W Bhai, I was taking a viva voce exam.

W: What did you ask the students to stump them?

S: Among other things, the uncertainty principle. If one takes the reference frame as his own frame, his speed is definitely zero in that frame, and he also knows his position with absolute precision. How does that reconcile with the uncertainty principle, which says that he must have some error in both measurements?

W: (after some silence): Indeed, how is this possible?

(after the seminar) S, you have not told me the answer to your question. Where did you find it?

S: W Bhai, you are still thinking of that silly joke? I make them up to amuse myself during the boring exams. The answer is: nobody can ever measure himself. It has to be left to others.

W (frowning): This is unfair. Why should innocent undergrads be expected to answer such philosophical questions?

S: Physics is natural philosophy, and unlike you, W Bhai, some physics students end up as politicians. It was simply meant to be a warning.

I never learned if he carried my message home, but I have been told that his wife kept telling friends that all physicists were crazy.

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Dr Ahmed Shafee is a Professor of Physics at the University of Dhaka