Bridges can collapse, planes crash, and software fail. There are limits to what can be calculated and foretold. And there are often unintended consequences. I have always been fascinated by the limits of human knowledge. From physical theory and experiment, we can derive laws and constants to describe the world in which we live.
Mathematical logic furnishes clear answers to precisely defined questions.
Yet in all these efforts to grasp the meaning of what we see around us, we constantly face the random and the unknowable. As in the Heisenberg uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics, we can sometimes define with remarkable precision the extent and shape of our ignorance. But nothing rids us of the element of chance. Out of these hard-won, though limited certainties, we build our remarkable technologies, and in our everyday lives we find ways to hack through and negotiate the jungles of uncertainty that constantly press in upon us. So we persist in our efforts to learn, calculate, organize, classify, and predict.