We’re studying a concept in Statistics right now, called the Confidence Interval.

Let’s say you measured a group of people for a certain characteristic. The Confidence Interval would give you a range of values between which you might expect to find the mean of your population, with a certain amount of likelihood. Let’s say you measure bodyfatness for women age 20-30. You get a confidence interval that would say about 95% of scores will fall between 16 and 25% bodyfat, with 95% certainty.

The trick with the Confidence Interval is this – the larger you make the the interval, the more confident you can be that scores will fall within the interval. However, you’ll be less precise about what you’re measuring (larger interval = less precise or exact). The smaller your interval, the less confidence you can have, but the more precise you can get.

Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle states something similar, I think, with regard to electrons. We can know their position, or their energy level, but not both; and the more precise we get with one measure, the less precise we can be about the other.

I thought of this similarity while studying the other day, and wondered what it meant. Does it reflect the nature of things, that the more precise you become, the less certain you can be, or vice versa? Or does it reflect the nature of the measuring instrument (the human mind)?

I would guess that it hints at the nature of our minds, of our capacity for measurement, for understanding, or for calculating several variables at a time.

In fact, I would take it a step further, and say that all of human knowledge, to date, has simply been an expression of our ability to understand. The limits of human knowledge define our ability to perceive things. We can’t see infrared colors, or hear ultra-sonic frequencies…so, for the most part, these things don’t make up part of the picture of our world.

What about uncertainty? We’re largely incapable of focusing on more than one thing a time, or of holding two opposing ideas within our minds (which was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s definition of first-rate intelligence).

Which brings me to exercise. We rely so much on definitions in this culture, and on “science,” that we often lose site of the limitations of those tools. Recommendations for exercise, or exercise variables, are just recommendations. They aren’t Laws of the Universe. And in fact, anyone who’s ever sat down and tried to come up with “the perfect workout” knows that, the closer you get to “perfect” with your program, the further you get from actually being able to accomplish it without superhuman recovery abilities.

But perhaps these uncertainties do reflect a central “law of nature.” Uncertainty is actually the thing that helps us to grow. It is the “why” and the “how.” It is the question mark. It is the necessity of learning new skills, solving those problems. Without it, there’d be no motion. It is the Yin to certainty’s Yang. It is the hub at the center of the spokes – the necessary and fulfilling emptiness that allows the wheel to spin. It is the blind spot in our vision – that allows the nerve to leave the back of the eyeball and reach the brain – that gives us sight.

For every certain thing, there is uncertainty. For every movement, there is a complementary stillness. Meditate on this. Then go workout.