The fundamental and inescapable

“Uncertainity”

Pradeep Kumar Jain, CME 1, 169888

1/28/2009
 The fundamental and inescapable “Uncertainity”

Every era in history is addressed by the use of epithets such as “Bronze”, “Iron”,
“history”, etc which give an identity to the people and the society of that age. We are
currently living in the information age, where the complexity and speed of change have
overtaken our ability to understand the factors that support our living in the world. As a
result, we have left it to the historians of the future to record our ways of living.

Stephen Hawkin’s book, “A Brief History of Time”, was in the London Sunday Times
best sellers list for 237 weeks. This clearly proves the penchant for knowing about the
past events. Why is this phenomena very prominent?

The repercussions will be severe as we take too much for given and leave it to the future
historians to rack their brains. This may be right in one perspective that this can only give
true perspective of any age. But, the bottom line here is, the thought process and the
technology available now are completely different from those of the past. Developments
in Science and Technology have taken us to new heights. The thinking is struck and
hence, the level of imagination, creativity and nuances are left unaccounted. It has now
become a question of concern whether we are dawdling to the magnitude that it has
minimized the ways for the future generations to build a sustainable civilization. Hence it
is desirable to make some elbow grease to examine this devolution of thinking.

In this so-called Information age, Electronic gadgets such as the I-pods and mobile
phones have become indispensable in all our lives. Blackberries are like fruit cherries
now. Very common with all cadres of people. One click and you can know about
anything. GPS can take you to any remote unknown place. The list goes on… How many
of us have spent a second to think the driving force behind these inventions, which is the
basis of our civilization? Have we ever pondered as to what mode of thought lead to their
development?

Mr.#oel.C.Spare, Renowned German-based management consultant, is of the opinion

that none of these inventions would have come up if all of them thought the way
Pythagoras, Euclid, Galileo, Descartes or even Newton had done. Surprised? Yes! He is
very categorical in stating that these people, who were considered great in their times,
could not even produce a simple device like a radio from their laws; leave alone the
aforementioned devices.

A complete transformation in scientific thinking, according to Spare, happened in 1900

when Max Planck postulated his theory according to which matter and energy were not
contiguous, but came in lumps or small discrete indivisible packets that he called quanta.
While Planck’s theory had no explanation or proof in support, it gave a deep insight into
questions like how the universe was formed from fundamental particles. In due course, a
separate branch of mechanics called Quantum Mechanics emerged. The development in
the field of Quantum Mechanics gained momentum when Heisenberg put forth his
Uncertainty Principle in 1926. The laws of Kepler, Galileo and Newton couldn’t describe
the motion of sub-atomic particles like electrons, neutrons and protons; but Heisenberg’s
principle provided threw some light on it.

Every development in science is accompanied by an increase in the threat to humanity

that arises as a result of the misuse of the development. Quantum mechanics was no
exception to this. The bombs that rocked the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
were developed based on Quantum mechanics. This had thrown Planck into an ocean of
despair. Ironically, a few weeks after his death in 1947, the first practical transistor was
put to functional use at the Bell Labs, New Jersey. The transistors replaced the
cumbersome vacuum tubes and hence paved the way for modern electronics. This
revolutionary application of the Quantum theory is what led to the development of the
fast, small-sized and robust PCs and laptops that we are now using. It is now quite clear
that the technological advancements that created ripples in the field of science and
technology were in fact built on uncertainty and the quality and humility of Quantum
mechanics that describes it.

Many of us forget that the life that we are leading today is a result of uncertainty and try
to eliminate uncertainty as much as possible in our work. The human mind tends to seek
an explanation for every happening. Spare mocks at such people and reminds them of the
fact that we do not live in a linear, machine-like world into which we are all drawn and
from which we can never quite break free. But for physicists like Planck who refused to
join the then conventional school of thought that the others like Pythagoras followed, the
Information age that we are now living in, would have featured only in Scientific fiction
stories.

Even as Heisenberg came up with his uncertainty principle, another mathematician,

W.A.Shewhart brought forth a tool called Control charts, which he used to quantify the
uncertainty of Manufacturing processes and systems. Later the use of control charts was
extended to other fields like administration, society, etc. by Deming. The works of
Heisenberg and Shewhart are both based on a common context namely uncertainty.
While the former used Planck’s concept of Quanta, the latter used statistical measures
like mean, standard deviation, etc. to quantify the level of uncertainty. Shewhart’s control
charts propose the limits of uncertainty which are also called as “control” limits. They are
still widely in use particularly in the manufacturing sector, because they help in
identifying extraneous “noises” even in cases where linear cause and effect relationships
are suspended and where differences in results do not represent any detectable change to
the system. Shewhart, indeed, was absolutely true when he said that looking for causes
would be uneconomic because we futilely waste a lot of resources in identifying the
cause when it is really not needed. Says Spare that, “The legacy of Shewhart is to
provide an analytical technique that quantifies and filters out the uncertainty implicit in
the data and therefore a means of avoiding the costly pitfalls that occur when
inappropriate action (e.g. tampering) is taken based on raw data comparisons.”

The western world has always remained ignorant of the teachings of Shewhart that were
propagated by Deming and as a result of which; managing ‘waste’ has now become the
biggest problem there. As we step into the post-quantum period, we need to understand
that there are limits to what humans can know and comprehend. Now that, the post-
quantum thinking has become popular amongst the scientists, the management world
should embrace post-control thinking, not only in the sense as said by Shewhart, but also
by understanding that it is “control” which hinders one’s creativity and supports
management as an interest and not as that which provides a seat for reasoning.