Tuesday, November 23, 2004, 5:57pm
Tuesday, November 23, 2004, 5:57pm
Vacation – finally – even if only three days. The sudden design crunch has been beaten back. The micro-satellite power system design remains on schedule – but not without a breathtaking moment. I’ve never actually confronted a design flaw that could most definitely kill a spacecraft. Yet there it was, staring me straight in the face – a single solder joint feature that given enough power running through the circuit could have cut power to the whole damn thing. If this one connection went bad (which would have been quite likely) we’d wind up with space junk hurtling through orbit instead of a micro-satellite. Such design flaws are what we call a potential single-point-failure and we avoid them like a skunk. Finally, after careful study and consultation I fashioned a doubly redundant connection. So hopefully STPSat-1 won’t be making a trail of smoke 250 miles up – at least not because of this.
Such events might begin to explain my obsession with the nature of certainty because once something is launched we can’t chase after it with a screwdriver and soldering iron, at least not unless the beastie is so valuable that it justifies a 600 million dollar Space Shuttle mission. We’ve rescued and re-rescued the Hubble Space Telescope this way several times, but few assets in space are worth the trouble, much less the expense – even if a rescue were possible. When the Shuttle can’t reach a broken spacecraft like an interplanetary mission on its way to Jupiter, we’ll scrub the mission or in rare cases build and launch a replacement spacecraft if the wayward vehicle can’t be reprogrammed over the radio with talk therapy.
Yet my quest to understand the nature of certainty predates any work in aerospace. What was my first question when I first saw somebody operating a personal computer? Nothing about what it does or how it works – I wanted to know about their floppy disc backup procedure. And because nobody in that company had even thought of such an idea, I wrote the procedure that very day and made sure everyone knew it.
Further back during the days of my old film photography hobby somebody might ask why I was taking two pictures of the very same thing from a locked tripod in such a way that both exposures would be virtually identical – to which I’d just as often reply that I didn’t have enough spare film to make three exposures.
Of course all the extra caution has its own pitfalls. As I ride the rails today my attention is focused on the fate of a camera shipped to California for inspection and cleaning. I wanted a shop that appreciates Leica rangefinder repair – not some servicing factory ‘specializing in everything.’ The guy in this case is a one-man show and he sends his repairs to some other guy who is also a one-man show and after nearly two months of no-man-shows I’m beginning to wonder if they’ve lost the camera altogether. In the end, the certainty I’d hoped to achieve in a Leica specialist may have exposed me to unknown risks equal to those I thought I was suppressing.
In light of micro-satellites, film photography, and camera repair – double, triple, or even quadruple redundancy and extra care of any sort may not improve the odds if my core thinking is off-base and I’ve missed something that matters, because a bad idea replicated and carefully implemented is still a bad idea.
Although the ideologues might disagree, again I see how there is no absolute certainty. This feels most true and seems most obvious when the need for certainty matters most. Right this second I don’t care, for example, about glossy pontifications about the safety of railroad travel. I care only that this particular train makes it safely home to Ashland tonight. I’ll find no glossy brochures or power point slides promising exactly what will happen to me this night aboard this train heading west along these tracks.
Perfect certainty is only possible as a matter of symbolic logic manipulated within a specifically defined framework – like ‘2 plus 2 equals 4.’ When I begin to make claims about the real world, I am adding the need for evidence – since otherwise I am merely rearranging symbols within a symbolic universe – much like the ancient Platonic Mystics who managed such poppycock to the demise of early empirical science. I may have exact logic with exactly logical answers, but I must observe if I wish to describe anything useful about the real world.
Logic measures nothing. It merely applies agreed-upon rules for organized thought. Observation plus coherent analysis yields useful information, though never perfect information – since to arrive at a perfect description of the world requires – at the very least – absolutely complete and perfect observations.
Despite what Mrs. Nole taught me in second grade, a year is not actually 365 days long. It’s more like 365 days plus six hours – but even that isn’t an exact answer. Drifting into the realm of nanoseconds and the implications of Einstein’s Relativity and the motions of other planets affecting our orbit around the sun and the tides altering the rotation of the Earth – we have a very good idea for the number and fraction of days in a year, but no exact answer to the very last decimal point.
That sort of imperfection annoyed the Platonic Mystics no end and rather than accept the notion of imprecision and imperfection, they hounded the notion of empirical thinking right off the map with familiar words like ‘heresy’ and ‘blasphemy.’ It would be two thousand years of such drivel before the light of reasoned science returned where we once again understood our place in the cosmos and our brief history on the Earth. Meanwhile tyranny reigned as evidence of it’s failure lay fallow and unobserved, much to the utility and pleasure of those who facilitated the continuing darkness to their own ends.
For the sake of pseudo-certainty (and people like Mrs. Nole) we can cheat by asking how many whole days there are in a year. Yet, by asking in terms of rounded numbers, we are simply gaming the question in order to codify the ‘truth’ of an imprecise answer. In fact, that is exactly how the Mystics won their arguments. They simply refused to accept any observational data – especially those undermining their notion of absolute precision. Once external evidence is allowed, they knew how this would quickly devolve down a slippery slope into uncertainty. Why else would Galileo remain unaccepted by the Roman church for nearly 400 years? No chink can be allowed, and only once the absurdity reached laughable proportions did the church finally relent.
The Mystics would have none of that. Better to bury any notion of an imperfect cosmos and burn the heretics at the stake than accept even the slightest bit of evidence to the contrary.
Yet what if there were an unavoidable need precision – one that couldn’t be ignored? That seems to be the answer to such intellectual stonewalling. For example, consider the distance between the rails of this railroad. For obvious reasons it does matter and can’t be ignored, and if I look that up in a book of official facts and figures I’ll read an exact number representing the ideal distance for the American standard railroad gauge at 56 ½ inches between the inner rail edges.
Now let me visit some quiet section of the real railroad to carefully measure the gauge for myself. From what I can already see in the wiggles of the rails streaming past my window there are slight variations of up to perhaps a half-inch. And if I measure the rails themselves I would likely see numbers ranging between 56 ¼ and 56 ¾ inches more or less.
Apparently, then, what keeps a train on the tracks is not an ideal gauge, but rather a distance that varies within some tolerance for error, and as long as this variation stays close enough to the ideal, the train will not fall off the tracks – at least not for this reason.
Of course there must be some section of track that is exactly 56 ½ inches where the distance between the rails swaps from being a bit too far to a bit too close, and using optical interferometry I could search the rails until my gauge measurement came within 1/20th of a wavelength of visible light. Yet even with such extraordinary methods I could measure no more accurately than this, and in the end only say that I’ve found a location where the imperfection is less than my ability to measure it.
Perhaps with a billion dollars I could measure right down to individual molecules using an electron beam or gamma ray laser, but unless the temperature of each rail is cooled to absolute zero, the molecules won’t stay put long enough to measure anything approaching a molecular accuracy – and even if the molecules did stay put they have an indefinite size and shape within parameters set forth in quantum theory. So in the end I could state with extreme precision what the distance is between the rails at a few places, but down into subatomic distances, uncertainty will still arise because the very effort to detect those molecules will disturb them according to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle – where the very effort to measure an atom changes the condition of that atom.
The Mystics solved this sort of dilemma via brute force by sticking to ideas and symbols and not bothering to measure anything. Then they could say whatever they wanted about the world. Of course there were those carpenters and stone masons who needed precision, and these were pushed so far down the chain of social status as to become irrelevant to the philosophical debate such that the god of technology was shown to be a feeble and loathsome cripple and a first-century carpenter akin to a trash-collector in our modern age.
The central point here––the self-consistent system of Platonic thought exists solely in a world of ideals – in self-contained philosophy – in self-absorbed religious doctrine – in self-aggrandizing political ideology, and it does not exist in the actual physical Universe.
Perhaps this sounds like a subject overworked – yet this is the exact cleavage point between two fundamentally basic forms of thought and the precise battle line between those wishing to drag the world back into an ideological way of thinking versus those who wish to see progress based upon evidence and rational analysis. This matters a ton because the battle continues right down to this very hour, and there’s no fundamental answer to those who ignore observation and reason.
On an individual level – at the root of our humanity – we tend to envision ‘perfection’ as some real or at least possible. In practice, the image is derived from that portion of the world we can observe plus that portion we conjure from other sources to render our vision whole and without flaw.
Human nature needs the equilibrium of this sort of wholeness, yet the endeavor to create it should be attempted wisely and with care, since the gaps are always susceptible to the Mystics of our modern age offering prepackaged solutions defined according to their own visions of reality. In fact, the modern Mystics know this game better than anyone – and continue to build their power and gather their wealth by trapping people in a world of ideals to one extent or another.
Once again, I’m getting way ahead of myself, and before I drop this like a note into a bottle, I need to dig and lay the foundations for what I’ve just written …ah, yet more promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep!
