Certainty: As Unreliable as Pundits’ Predictions

Small particles are not allowed
to travel with agility,
but wander fuzzy as a cloud
defined by probability,
determined by the principle
of Heisenberg and Schrödinger,
since quanta are invincible
and always are asserting a
prerogative to be elusive,
for which we are obliged to thank
a theory, seemingly conclusive,
that flowed from quanta found by Planck,
though Albert Einstein disapproved
of revolutionary sensations,
believing particles all moved
according to his own equations.

Now Abhay Ashtekar has claimed,
rebutting anti-quanta queries,
that Planck and Einstein may be tamed
by unifying both their theories,
and making peace between Niels Bohr,
and Heisenberg and Paul Dirac,
and Schrödinger, to end the war
declared by Einstein’s stark attack.
I wish him luck because to wander
lonely as a fuzzy cloud
from quanta to a black-holed yonder
should truly never be allowed.

All particles, like daffodils,
should be entitled to exist
without improbability whose thrills
I’m sure the good Lord must resist,
although improbabilities do not
exist for Him, aware of facts;

so Certainty alone is what
compels the way He always acts,
as inevitable as the best solution
of equations, given by
Dirac — their loveliest attribution:
Beauty — though it’s unreli-
able on futures, or that Bohr
was Jewish, an offbeat ident-

ity, that neither links us nor
defines this genius as Jewish gent…

no more than reliability
of any Greek or Roman augur,
economist, or predictability
of pundits past in the New Yorker.

On 4/27/25 Bret Stephens with Charlie Rose reminded his audience that Niels Bohr famously stated, “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future,” but wrongly identified him as Jewish. Although  Bohr’s work and his family’s background had some connections to Jewish culture, he was raised in a Christian environment and his family’s lineage was not Jewish.

James Glantz describes the attempt of Dr. Abhay Ashtekar, a physicist from Maharashta who now heads the center for Gravitational Physics and Geometry at Pennsylvania State University, to unify the theory of general relativity proposed by Albert Einstein with the laws of quantum mechanics developed by Erwin Schrödinger, Werner  Heisenberg, Paul Dirac and Niels Bohr and the theories of Max Planck (“Taste-Testing a Recipe for the Cosmos: Physicist Blends One Part Relativity, One Part Quantum Mechanics,” The New York Times, April 20, 1999).  Glantz says that Dr. Ashtekar has been able to transmute Einstein’s theory’s geometric spirit into the fuzzy quantum world where particles sometimes exist “not at definite positions but as fuzzy clouds of probability.”

In “Is That an Augur, or a Mere Economist? Examining pundits’ entrails might tell us more than the data,” WSJ, 4/23/25, Joseph Epstein writes:

In ancient Rome augurs were revered for their powers of prophecy. They found meaning in thunder, the flight patterns of birds, the behavior of domestic animals. Some augurs read the entrails of sacrificial animals in hope of discovering the will of the gods before entering into such actions as warfare, treaties and appointing new leaders. How quaint, if not nutty, it all seems.

Yet I wonder if we don’t have our own augurs. Today we call them economists. Like augurs, modern economists gain priestly respect for their reading of omens on cable television, where they interpret interest rates, inflation trends, the bullishness or bearishness of the stock market, the unemployment rate, statements from the Federal Reserve, the rise or fall in new jobs, price stability and just about everything else that passes under the rubric of economic data. For them such data are equivalent to the entrails of pigs, the flight of eagles, and the success or failure of cows to reproduce.

Did the augurs of old exhibit as much confidence as modern economists when interpreting their omens? Whether such confidence is taught in economics departments as bedside manner was once taught in medical schools, I don’t know. But I first noted it many years ago when I saw John Kenneth Galbraith debate Milton Friedman, each man with all but diametrically opposite views from the other yet each equal in the certainty of his own correctness. As for the merit behind the confidence of economists, one recalls the old joke that holds economists have successfully predicted 11 of the last five economic recessions.