Bet on Physical

How many uncertainties must combine
For some certainty to be made secure?

Do the Bayesians have any idea?
You’d think that totting up uncertainties

In an ever-accumulating heap
Could only lead to more uncertainty,

And yet, at scale, they tend to cancel out.
So many uncertainties in a day

And yet, that a day will come’s near certain.
It’s not just that, at the subatomic

Level of the wave-particle circus
Populated by superpositions,

Super strings, spookiness, and infinite
Three-ringed multiverses on trapezes

Bouncing with equivalent equations,
It’s hard to see for the paradoxes

Of quantum-classical interfaces
And boxes of hypothetical cats.

It’s more the beautiful, summative curve
Of it, this universal contraption,

In which the seeds of mischief seem buried
More densely in tinier dimensions,

While as the arcs grow larger and larger—
Planetary orbits, stellar parades

Sweeping the arms of spiral galaxies,
Compounding galactic superstructures—

They grow increasingly stately, surer,
Until they blur into one composite

Bound by constants of silky certainty,
One arrow of light shot through entropy.

There aren’t enough concatenated thoughts
To count up certainty’s uncertainties.