The uncertainty principle and limits of knowledge

[Heisenberg and Bohr] left the park and plunged into the city streets while they discussed the consequences of Heisenberg’s discovery, which Bohr saw as the cornerstone upon which a truly new physics could be founded. In philosophical terms, he told him as he took his arm, this was the end of determinism. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle shredded the hopes of all those who had put faith in the clockwork universe Newtonian physics had promised. According to the determinists, if one could reveal the laws that governed matter, one could reach back to the most archaic past and predict the most distant future. If everything that occurred was the direct consequence of a prior state, then merely by looking at the present and running the equations it would be possible to achieve a godlike knowledge of the universe. These hopes were shattered in light of Heisenberg’s discovery: what was beyond our grasp was neither the future nor the past, but the present itself. Not even the state of one miserable particle could be perfectly apprehended. However much we scrutinized the fundamentals, there would always be something vague, undetermined, uncertain, as if reality allowed us to perceive the world with crystalline clarity with one eye at a time, but never with both.

Labatut, Benjamín. When We Cease to Understand the World. New York Review of Books, 2020. p. 161–2

Cherry blossom season-starter

Last night, the Neon Riders began their 2025 season with a tour of Toronto’s varied blooming cherry blossoms:

These rides are one of the definite high points of my week. Riding in a large group is a totally different experience from riding in the city alone — as long as you are not at the edges you barely need to worry about cars, which is an inversion of the normal city cycling experience, and the rides are fundamentally social since you are always surrounded by people who you can speak to easily and naturally.

Plus, there are bike dogs:

No anger! No sadness!

You minimize your feelings and shut yourself down. Emotionally immature parents often react as though your emotions are too extreme: as though there were something wrong with you for having a heartfelt reaction. They thus teach you to downplay your feelings because they are uncomfortable with these strong emotions. They convince you that many of your emotions are unwarranted or excessive.

…

Their overall message to her was: don’t feel. Whatever Maya experienced, she always got the message that it was too much. Mild emotional arousal was all her parents considered acceptable. To avoid embarrassment, Maya learned to disconnect from her strongest emotions, whether positive or negative. This resulted in chronic depression as an adult. “I think they wanted me to be happy,” Maya told me, “but in a very shallow ‘let’s not get too deep’ kind of way.” Maya recalled that her parents accepted her happiness only about tangible outer-world things they approved of, such as Christmas gifts, new clothes, or a good report card. Maya hid her true reactions because her parents often judged her feelings as excessive, weak, or oversensitive. Because of their rejection, Maya began to minimize and hide her feelings from herself too. She gradually lost her emotional freedom: her right to feel whatever she felt.

Gibson, Lindsay C. Recovering from Emotionally Immature Parents: Practical Tools to Establish Boundaries & Reclaim Your Emotional Autonomy. New Harbinger Publications, 2019. Chapter 2. Chapter 6: “EI Parents are Hostile Toward Your Inner World”

Boundary-rejecting parents

They don’t respect your boundaries or individuality. Emotionally immature parents don’t really understand the point of boundaries. They think boundaries imply rejection, meaning you don’t care enough about them to give them free access to your life. This is why they act incredulous, offended, or hurt if you ask them to respect your privacy. They feel loved only when you let them interrupt you any time. EI parents seek dominant and privileged roles in which they don’t have to respect others’ boundaries. EI parents also don’t respect your individuality because they don’t see the need for it. Family and roles are sacrosanct to them and they don’t understand why you should want space or an individual identity apart from them. They don’t understand why you can’t just be like them, think like them, and have the same beliefs and values. You are their child and therefore belong to them. Even when you’re grown they expect you to remain their compliant child or, if you insist on your own life, at least always follow their advice.

Gibson, Lindsay C. Recovering from Emotionally Immature Parents: Practical Tools to Establish Boundaries & Reclaim Your Emotional Autonomy. New Harbinger Publications, 2019. Chapter 2.

Catastrophes and mental collapse

Psychologically and emotionally, I have really been doing badly lately.

I have spent all of my adult life studying environmental politics and trying to fight climate change, and now we are at a juncture where the world’s leaders have effectively given up. They won’t acknowledge fossil fuels as the root of the crisis, and they are far too controlled by the fossil fuel industry to accept phasing them out as a solution. They see every new potential oil, gas, and coal project as a vehicle for wealth and self-advancement. Meanwhile, environmentalists are distracted by social issues as the long-term crisis keeps deepening, and people generally are too frightened to even perceive the truth of their situation. Perhaps scariest of all, young people don’t have a coherent and politically-activated sense of what is happening. They can’t see that their leaders are destroying their futures, and they are being drawn into the same sorts of non-solutions which are driving the rise of charlatans and authoritarians to power.

The path forward is totally unclear, and I don’t know how — psychologically or morally — to cope with a world where we have identified that the processes of collapse are accelerating but where we don’t have the honesty or the courage to work through what that means or work toward any remedy.

These are dark, dark days.

Carney on the carbon bubble and stranded assets

By some measures, based on science, the scale of the energy revolution required is staggering.

If we had started in 2000, we could have hit the 1.5°C objective by halving emissions every thirty years. Now, we must halve emissions every ten years. If we wait another four years, the challenge will be to halve emissions every year. If we wait another eight years, our 1.5°C carbon budget will be exhausted.

The entrepreneur and engineer Saul Griffith argues that the carbon-emitting properties of our committed physical capital mean that we are locked in to use up the residual carbon budget, even if no one buys another car with an internal combustion engine, installs a new gas-fired hot-water heater or, at a larger scale, constructs a new coal power plant. That’s because, just as we expect a new car to run for a decade or more, we expect our machines to be used until they are fully depreciated. If the committed emissions of all the machines over their useful lives will largely exhaust the 1.5°C carbon budget, going forward we will need almost all new machines, like cars, to be zero carbon. Currently, electric car sales, despite being one of the hottest segments of the market, are as a percentage in single digits. This implies that, if we are to meet society’s objective, there will be scrappage and stranded assets.

…

To meet the 1.5°C target, more than 80 per cent of current fossil fuel reserves (including three-quarters of coal, half of gas, one-third of oil) would need to stay in the ground, stranding these assets. The equivalent for less than 2°C is about 60 per cent of fossil fuel assets staying in the ground (where they would no longer be assets).

When I mentioned the prospect of stranded assets in a speech in 2015, it was met with howls of outrage from the industry. That was in part because many had refused to perform the basic reconcilliation between the objectives society had agreed in Paris (keeping temperature increases below 2°C), the carbon budgets science estimated were necessary to achieve them and the consequences this had for fossil fuel extraction. They couldn’t, or wouldn’t, undertake the basic calculations that a teenager, Greta Thunberg, would easily master and powerfully project. Now recognition is growing, even in the oil and gas industry, that some fossil fuel assets will be stranded — although, as we shall see later in the chapter, pricing in financial markets remains wholly inconsistent with the transition.

Carney, Mark. Value(s): Building a Better World for All. Penguin Random House Canada, 2021. p. 273–4, 278

Victoria

Though crazily tired from the daylight savings shift, plus a workweek, plus two straight days awake due to travel, it was heartening to get to Victoria, see my brother Sasha, and explore a few parks and scenic sights with him, my brother Mica, his wife Leigh, and their daughter Mila:

I’m too tired to process any photos from today before sleeping.

Tomorrow is Sasha’s benefit concert.