That uncertain uncle

My uncle, who was actually younger than me, was a source of much hilarity for the young and old. If asked ‘will it rain today?’, he would reply, "it may or may not." Well, we can excuse him for this, as he worked for the weather bureau! But he left us exasperated when he replied "Yes and no" to a simple query: "Did you have coffee, uncle?" We couldn't quite put this as "his sense of humour"; he perhaps thought the coffee was so-so but couldn't say it aloud as his wife was around the corner. Or was his uncertain responses a symptom of Alzheimer's? Absolutely not. He still writes articles in top science journals in the world.

His answers reminded us of a comedian's dialogue in an old movie: "bus baruthe, adhare barolla" (the bus will come, but won’t come), bringing peals of laughter. Was uncle's replies a take on this seemingly simple humour? Or was it a more serious line of thought in his analytical mind on the uncertainty of a single event, while there can be no doubt about the gross probabilities? You can’t predict the possibility, when a coin is tossed, of head or tail, but can be certain that it is a 50-50 in, say, 100 tosses, well almost.

I hit upon the answer to my uncle's strange behaviour when Ganesh, my 8-year-old grandson asked, "Who is Werner Heisenberg, thatha." Every week he learns of a Nobel laureate in his class. Immediately, I saw the link between Heisenberg’s law of uncertainty and my uncle. Even the long cherished scientific beliefs are questioned in modern days, like whether light is a wave or particle, or is it space and time or a single space-time, or if gravity is a force or warping of space-time etc. My uncle probably took a cue from deep scientific uncertainties and linked them to routine events to spread laughter all around him.

Now, back to Ganesh. He is too young to understand Heisenberg’s Law, and that explains why his teachers did not offer an explanation. I took it upon myself to challenge the young mind, without the complexities of physics. "Ganesh, you can’t exactly say the location, and speed, of a moving thing." He thought for a while and said with an all-knowing smile, “Go, thatha. You mean in Olympics, you wouldn’t know the speed of the athlete and when he reaches the winning post?" I said, "Not when you are at very very high speeds, say about the speed of light. For determining speed, you need to know the time taken between 2 points however close they are, and hence nothing like a precise speed at a point. Well, we are talking about trillionths of a metre and second."

I do not know if the law made sense to Ganesh, but he never joins in when the rest of us share anecdotes from uncle's life in a lighter vein.