Al's Opinions

Most of you have heard about the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which relates to very small physical systems, such as the cloud of electrons that surround an atom. According to the Principal, one can not simultaneously measure the position and the velocity (or momentum) of an electron, or of any other particle, such as a proton, neutron, or meson. There is some uncertainty in how accurately we can measure either parameter, and the product of the uncertainties is always at least as great as Planck's Constant (h).

There is an uncertainty in many human endeavors. I have thought of a few examples:

(A) Not long ago my telephone went dead. There was no dial tone. I could not call anyone, and noone could call me. I had to go to a neighbor to phone the telephone company and try to have the problem corrected. I was phone-less for about three days. Eventually I received a phone call from a telephone technician. He had found the problem in a junction box a few blocks from my house. Contacts had corroded and opened up. One other person and myself were affected. He had replaced the contacts and was phoning me to let me know that I again was connected to the world by telephone.

The telephone company operates according to principles taught in courses on business management in our universities. One principle is that cost must be minimized as much as possible, consistent with reliability sufficient to keep the whole system in operation. Telephone service must be as cheap as possible, just as long as the outages are not too frequent or too long to cause too many customers to leave the service and find other means of communication.

Let’s express my idea in simple algebra. Let C denote the cost of operating the system and F the failure rate. In quantitative terms, C denotes the cost of providing a unit of service and F the probability that the service will not be delivered because of a failure, such as an eroded contact in a junction box. The management has two groups of humans to satisfy: the customers (like me) and the investors or stockholders. In order to satisfy me, the failure rate F must be as low as possible (preferably zero). To satisfy the investors and pay them big dividends, the cost C must be as low as possible. However, a part of the cost of running the system is the money paid to the technicians who find the corroded contacts and broken wires and keep the system running. The management must find a balance between C and F. If F is too large, customers will turn to other means of communication, such as telephoning through internet cable connections. If C is too large, investors will sell their stock and depress its price. This balance can be expressed in algebra as follows:

C x F >= H

where H is a constant analogous to Planck's Constant in Physics.

(B) Another example occurred during one of the debates between candidate George H. W. Bush and candidate Michael Dukakis in 1988. Both men were campaigning for the Presidency. Dukakis was known to be opposed to capital punishment. Mr. Bush posed to him this question: If your wife or daughter were brutally murdered, would you want the murderer put to death?

I’ve thought about how I now wish Mr. Dukakis had answered that question, or how I might answer it myself. Like Mr. Dukakis, I also am opposed to capital punishment.

The question and its answer have no logical relation to that public policy should be regarding capital punishment for murderers. Mr. Bush asked the question simply to try to embarrass Mr. Dukakis and to illustrate to the voters his unfitness to be President. If Mr. Dukakis answered, “I’d like to strangle the bastard with my bare hands,” he would have made points with some voters, while others would have been turned off by his insincerity regarding capital punishment. If he answered, “I would let the police and the justice system take care of him,” the public would have been convinced that Mr. Dukakis was an uncaring wimp, who wouldn’t even express an honest feeling of outrage and grief at the loss of his wife or daughter.

Either answer would lose Mr. Dukakis support.

In this case we would say that C is the cost to Mr. Dukakis for a wimpish-sounding answer to Mr. Bush's question of votes among enthusiastic supporters of the death penalty. F would represent the cost among opponents of the death penalty if Mr. Dukakis seemed insincere in his opposition to the death penalty.

There are many other examples of human behavior in which there is an uncertainty principle. Many decisions involve balancing one set of drawbacks with another.