Philosophers call this “epistemological” uncertainty – uncertainty to do with lack of knowledge. In this metaphor, the butterflies themselves aren’t uncertain about the state of their wings, it is us humans that are uncertain about them. This is the metaphor used to describe the unpredictability of chaotic systems:tiny uncertainties in the initial conditions of a system grow and grow until they completely destroy the accuracy of any forecast. Unobserved, they flap their wings, causing unpredicted storms to appear weeks later. This could have far-reaching consequences for our ability to marry quantum mechanics with general relativity.Įveryone knows that long-range weather forecasts are uncertain. But Oxford physicist Tim Palmer now argues that chaos theory shows that quantum uncertainty is in fact down to our own ignorance, not reality itself. Today, the orthodox reading is that uncertainty is indeed an inherent feature of quantum systems, not a reflection of our own lack of knowledge. Two of the key founders of quantum physics, Einstein and Schrödinger, were deeply sceptical of its implications about uncertainty and the nature of reality.
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