6:44am*
My iPhone tells me the sun will set tonight at 7:32pm and rise again tomorrow at 6:44am. Right now it’s 82 degrees, tomorrow it will reach just 78.
These are the facts. And you don’t mess with facts. You don’t question them. Facts are like the face of El Capitan in Yosemite: slabs of granite so massive you can’t even think of moving them. They exist independently of any of us; they’ve been there since the dawn of time and they’ll be there until the end.
Some facts are more satisfying than others, which mostly corresponds to whether you can assign a number to them. “The sky is blue” is just a so-so fact mostly because blue is subjective, and anyway later today it won’t be. So that one is true but you don’t invite that fact to dinner, mostly due to its flakiness. But “water molecules have three atoms” is much more satisfying since, well, “three” isn’t subjective like “blue.” “Three” you can hang your hat on.
And then there’s the matter of the sunrise. That’s the best fact yet. 6:44am. Tomorrow. You can’t argue with that one. Not only does it have a number, it has a couple of them, and that colon in-between? That’s like putting a black tie and tuxedo on a number; you know it means business.
But my dirty little secret is: I never bought into any of these facts — including the last one. The earth has been spinning, and circling, and whizzing along at whatever ungodly speed we’re moving right now and while it seems like we’ll see the sun tomorrow at 6:44am, what proof is there that we really will? “Because it’s happened lots in the past” sounds pretty suspect. Even if we pretend to have records going back, say, a thousand years — that’s only 365,025 data points. Not bad. But I’m not sure that’s El Capitan-worthy.
To which one might say: well, how many data points do you need? And this is the catch: there isn’t a set number. And this isn’t the random muttering of a crazy man who lives amidst boxes of newspapers from 1978 and two-dozen cats (I have neither, thankfully.) This is simply nonlinear dynamics. There is a lovely description of one of the simplest equations that quickly goes off the rails here: https://ghannami.com/chaos-in-one-innocent-equation.
But so what, right? I mean, okay, yes, fine — chaos theory shows us that at any moment the earth might lose its center and go spinning off into oblivion. So what?
And that’s true. But it seems, at a minimum, we should update our iPhones and place a little asterisk next to those so-called facts, and then update the Terms of Service with a tiny footnote. It can read: “we’re super proud of ourselves for making this little machine, and golly it’s cool, right? But for the record: we’re kinda just blowing smoke around the whole ‘the sun will come up at such-and-such time’ feature. Honestly we have no idea. Limits of human knowlegde in general, especially around mathematics, and especially around nonlinear dynamics. But whaddya gonna do? We put a cool graphic on it anyway.”
Just saying. If we’re gonna have a giant Terms of Service that nobody reads, well, let’s be honest around it at least.