Think Like a Rocket Scientist

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FLYING IN THE FACE OF UNCERTAINTY

The Superpower of Doubt

ROUGHLY SIXTEEN MILLION years ago, a giant asteroid is believed to have collided with the Martian surface. That collision dislodged a piece of rock and launched it on a journey from Mars to Earth. The rock landed in Allan Hills in Antarctica thirteen thousand years ago and was discovered in 1984 during a snowmobile ride. As the first rock to be collected from Allan Hills in 1984, it was given the name ALH 84001. The rock would have been cataloged, studied, and then promptly forgotten—were it not for an astonishing secret that appeared to be embedded within.¹

For millennia, humankind has pondered the same question: Are we alone in the universe? Our ancestors glanced upward in thought, contemplating whether they were cosmic commoners or outliers. As technology progressed, we listened for signals beamed across the universe hoping to capture a message from another civilization. We sent spacecraft across the solar system searching for signs of life. In each case, we came up short.

Until August 7, 1996.

On that date, scientists revealed that they had found organic molecules of biological origin in ALH 84001. Many media outlets were quick to announce these findings as fact of life on another planet. CBS, for example, reported that scientists had “detected single-cell structures on the meteorite—possibly, tiny fossils, and chemical evidence of past biological activity. In other words, life on Mars.”² CNN’s early reports quoted a NASA source who said these structures looked like “little maggots,” suggesting they were the remains of complex organisms.³ The media deluge generated existential hysteria across the globe, prompting then President Clinton to give a major public address on the discovery.⁴

But there was a slight problem. The evidence wasn’t conclusive. The scientific paper that formed the basis for these headlines was candid about its inherent uncertainties. Part of its title was “Possible Relic Biogenic Activity in Martian Meteorite ALH84001” (emphasis mine).⁵ The abstract expressly noted that the features observed on the meteorite “could thus be fossil remains of a past martian biota” but underscored that “inorganic formation is possible.” In other words, the molecules may have been the products not of Martian bacteria but of nonbiological activity (e.g., a geological process like erosion). The paper concluded that the evidence is merely “compatible” with life.

But these nuances were glossed over in many of the secondhand translations provided to the public by the media. The incident became infamous, prompting Dan Brown to pen a novel, Deception Point, about a conspiracy surrounding extraterrestrial life found on a Martian meteorite.

Everything turned out for the best—at least from the perspective of a book chapter on uncertainty. More than two decades later, the uncertainty lingers. Researchers continue to debate whether Martian bacteria or inorganic activity is responsible for the molecules observed on the meteorite.⁶

It would be tempting to say the media got it wrong, but that would be the same kind of overstatement that dominated the original press coverage of the meteorite. More accurately, we can say that people made a classic mistake: trying to make something appear definite when in fact it isn’t.

This chapter is about how to stop fighting uncertainty and harness its power. You’ll learn how our obsession with certainty leads us astray and why all progress takes place in uncertain conditions. I’ll reveal Einstein’s biggest mistake regarding uncertainty and discuss what you can learn from the solution to a centuries-old math mystery. You’ll discover why rocket science resembles a high-stakes game of peekaboo, what you can learn from Pluto’s demotion as a planet, and why NASA engineers religiously munch on peanuts during critical events. I’ll end the chapter with strategies that rocket scientists and astronauts use to manage uncertainty and explain how you can apply them in your own life.

The Certainty Fetish

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, known as JPL, is a small city of scientists and engineers in Pasadena, California. Located just east of Hollywood, JPL has been responsible for operating interplanetary spacecraft for decades. If you’ve ever seen video footage of a Mars landing, you’ve seen the inside of JPL’s mission support area.

During a typical Mars landing, the area is packed with row after row of overcaffeinated scientists and engineers eating bags of peanuts and staring at the data pouring into their consoles, while giving the audience the illusion that they are in control. But they are not in control. They’re simply reporting the events as a sports announcer might—albeit with fancier language like “cruise stage separation” and “heat shield deploy.” They’re spectators to a game that ended twelve minutes ago on Mars, and they have no idea what the score is yet.

On average, it takes roughly twelve minutes for a signal from Mars to reach Earth traveling at the speed of light.⁷ If something is wrong, and a scientist on Earth spots and responds to the problem in a split second, another twelve minutes will pass for that command to reach Mars. That’s twenty-four minutes round trip, but it takes about six minutes for a spacecraft to descend from the top of the Martian atmosphere down to the surface. All we can do is load up the spacecraft with instructions ahead of time and put Sir Isaac Newton in the driver’s seat.

That’s where the peanuts come in. In the early 1960s, JPL was in charge of the unmanned Ranger missions, which were designed to study the Moon to pave the way for the Apollo astronauts. The Ranger spacecraft would be launched toward the Moon, take close-up photos of the lunar surface, and beam those images back to Earth before plummeting into the Moon.⁸ The first six missions ended in failure, leading critics to accuse JPL officials of adopting a cavalier “shoot-and-hope” approach.⁹ But a later mission succeeded when a JPL engineer happened to bring peanuts to the mission control room. From then on, peanuts became a staple at JPL for each landing.

In critical moments, these otherwise rational, no-nonsense rocket scientists—who have dedicated their lives to exploring the unknown—look for certainty at the bottom of a Planters peanut bag. As if that’s not enough, many of them wear their worn-out good-luck jeans or bring a talisman from a previous successful landing—doing everything that a dedicated sports fan might do to create the illusion of certainty and control.¹⁰

If the landing goes successfully, Mission Control promptly morphs into a circus. There’s no trace of cool and calm. Instead, having conquered the beast of uncertainty, engineers will begin jumping up and down, high-fiving, fist pumping, bear hugging, and disappearing into puddles of joyful tears.

We’re all programmed with the same fear of the uncertain. Our predecessors who weren’t afraid of the unknown became food for saber-toothed tigers. But the ancestors who viewed uncertainty as life-threatening lived long enough to pass their genes on to us.

In the modern world, we look for certainty in uncertain places. We search for order in chaos, the right answer in ambiguity, and conviction in complexity. “We spend far more time and effort on trying to control the world,” Yuval Noah Harari writes, “than on trying to understand it.”¹¹ We look for the step-by-step formula, the shortcut, the hack—the right bag of peanuts. Over time, we lose our ability to interact with the unknown.

Our approach reminds me of the classic story of the drunk man searching for his keys under a street lamp at night. He knows he lost his keys somewhere on the dark side of the street but looks for them underneath the lamp, because that’s where the light is.

Our yearning for certainty leads us to pursue seemingly safe solutions—by looking for our keys under street lamps. Instead of taking the risky walk into the dark, we stay within our current state, however inferior it may be. Marketers use the same bag of tricks over and over again but expect different results. Aspiring entrepreneurs remain in dead-end jobs because of the certainty they get in the form of a seemingly stable paycheck. Pharma companies develop me-too drugs that offer only marginal improvement over the competition as opposed to developing the one that’s going to cure Alzheimer’s disease.

But it’s only when we sacrifice the certainty of answers, when we take our training wheels off, and when we dare to wander away from the street lamps that breakthroughs happen. If you stick to the familiar, you won’t find the unexpected. Those who get ahead in this century will dance with the great unknown and find danger, rather than comfort, in the status quo.

The Great Unknown

In the seventeenth century, Pierre de Fermat scribbled a note on a textbook margin that would baffle mathematicians for more than three centuries.¹²

Fermat had a theory. He proposed that there’s no solution to the formula aⁿ + bⁿ = cⁿ for any n greater than 2. “I have a truly marvelous demonstration of this proposition,” he wrote, “which this margin is too narrow to contain.” And that’s all he wrote.

Fermat died before supplying the missing proof for what came to be known as Fermat’s last theorem. The teaser he left behind continued to tantalize mathematicians for centuries (and made them wish Fermat had a bigger book to write on). Generations of mathematicians tried—and failed—to prove Fermat’s last theorem.

Until Andrew Wiles came along.

For most ten-year-olds, the definition of a good time doesn’t include reading math books for fun. But Wiles was no ordinary ten-year-old. He would hang out at his local library in Cambridge, England, and surf the shelves for math books.

One day, he spotted a book devoted entirely to Fermat’s last theorem. He was mesmerized by the mystery of a theorem that was so easy to state, yet so difficult to prove. Lacking the mathematical chops to tackle the proof, he set it aside for over two decades.

He returned to the theorem later in life as a math professor and devoted seven years to working on it in secrecy. In an ambiguously titled 1993 lecture in Cambridge, Wiles publicly revealed that he had solved the centuries-old mystery of Fermat’s last theorem. The announcement sent mathematicians into a tizzy: “It’s the most exciting thing that’s happened in—geez—maybe ever, in mathematics,” said Leonard Adleman, professor of computer science at the University of Southern California and Turing Award winner. Even the New York Times ran a front-page story on the discovery, exclaiming, “At Last, Shout of ‘Eureka!’ in Age-Old Math Mystery.”¹³

But the celebrations proved premature. Wiles had made a mistake in a critical part of his proof. The mistake emerged during the peer-review process after Wiles submitted his proof for publication. It would take another year, and collaboration with another mathematician, to repair the proof.

Reflecting on how he eventually managed to prove the theorem, Wiles compared the process of discovery to navigating a dark mansion. You start in the first room, he said, and spend months groping, poking, and bumping into things. After tremendous disorientation and confusion, you might eventually find the light switch. You then move on to the next dark room and begin all over again. These breakthroughs, Wiles explained, are “the culmination of—and couldn’t exist without—the many months of stumbling around in the dark that [precede] them.”

Einstein described his own discovery process in similar terms: “Our final results appear almost self-evident,” he said, “but the years of searching in the dark for a truth that one feels, but cannot express; the intense desire and the alternations of confidence and misgiving, until one breaks through to clarity and understanding, are only known to him who has himself experienced them.”¹⁴

In some cases, scientists keep stumbling around in the dark room, and the search continues well past their lifetime. Even when they find the light switch, it may illuminate only part of the room, revealing that the remainder is far bigger—and far darker—than they imagined. But to them, stumbling around in the dark is far more interesting than sitting outside in well-lit corridors.

In school, we’re given the false impression that scientists took a straight path to the light switch. There’s one curriculum, one right way to study science, and one right formula that spits out the correct answer on a standardized test. Textbooks with lofty titles like The Principles of Physics magically reveal “the principles” in three hundred pages. An authority figure then steps up to the lectern to feed us “the truth.” Textbooks, explained theoretical physicist David Gross in his Nobel lecture, “often ignore the many alternate paths that people wandered down, the many false clues they followed, the many misconceptions they had.”¹⁵ We learn about Newton’s “laws”—as if they arrived by a grand divine visitation or a stroke of genius—but not the years he spent exploring, revising, and tweaking them. The laws that Newton failed to establish—most notably his experiments in alchemy, which attempted, and spectacularly failed, to turn lead into gold—don’t make the cut as part of the one-dimensional story told in physics classrooms. Instead, our education system turns the life stories of these scientists from lead to gold.

As adults, we fail to outgrow this conditioning. We believe (or pretend to believe) there is one right answer to each question. We believe that this right answer has already been discovered by someone far smarter than us. We believe the answer can therefore be found in a Google search, acquired from the latest “3 Hacks to More Happiness” article, or handed to us from a self-proclaimed life coach.

Here’s the problem: Answers are no longer a scarce commodity, and knowledge has never been cheaper. By the time we’ve figured out the facts—by the time Google, Alexa, or Siri can spit out the answer—the world has moved on.

Obviously, answers aren’t irrelevant. You must know some answers before you can begin asking the right questions. But the answers simply serve as a launch pad to discovery. They’re the beginning, not the end.

Be careful if you spend your days finding right answers by following a straight path to the light switch. If the drugs you’re developing were certain to work, if your client were certain to be acquitted in court, or if your Mars rover were certain to land, your jobs wouldn’t exist.

Our ability to make the most out of uncertainty is what creates the most potential value. We should be fueled not by a desire for a quick catharsis but by intrigue. Where certainty ends, progress begins.

Our obsession with certainty has another side effect. It distorts our vision through a set of funhouse mirrors called unknown knowns.

Unknown Knowns

On February 12, 2002, amid escalating tensions between the United States and Iraq, US secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld took the stage at a press briefing. He received a question from a reporter about whether there was any evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction—the basis for the subsequent American invasion. A typical answer would be packaged in preapproved political stock phrases like ongoing investigation and national security. But Rumsfeld instead pulled out a rocket-science metaphor from his linguistic grab bag: “There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”¹⁶

These remarks were widely ridiculed—in part because of their controversial source—but as far as political statements go, they’re surprisingly accurate. In his autobiography, Known and Unknown, Rumsfeld acknowledges that he first heard the terms from NASA administrator William Graham.¹⁷ But Rumsfeld conspicuously omitted one category from his speech—unknown knowns.

Anosognosic is an unpronounceable word used to describe someone with a medical condition that makes them unaware they’re suffering from it. For example, if you put a pencil in front of a paralyzed anosognosic individual and ask them to pick it up, they won’t do it. If you ask them why, they’ll respond, “‘Well, I’m tired,’ or ‘I don’t need a pencil.’” As psychologist David Dunning explains, “They literally aren’t alerted to their own paralysis.”¹⁸

The unknown knowns are like anosognosia. This is the land of self-delusion. In this category, we think we know what we know, but we don’t. We assume we have a lock on the truth—that the ground underneath our feet is stable—but we’re actually standing on a fragile platform that can tumble over with a rogue gust of wind.

We find ourselves on that fragile platform far more often than we realize. In our certainty-obsessed public discourse, we avoid reckoning with nuances. The resulting public discussion operates without a rigorous system for discerning proven facts from best guesses. A lot of what we know simply isn’t accurate, and it’s not always easy to recognize which part lacks real evidence. We’ve mastered the art of pretending to have an opinion—smiling, nodding, and bluffing our way through a makeshift answer. We’ve been told to “fake it until we make it,” and we’ve become experts at the faking part. We value chest beating and delivering clear answers with conviction, even when we have little more than two minutes of Wikipedia knowledge on an issue. We march on, pretending to know what we think we know, oblivious to glaring facts that contradict our ironclad beliefs.

“The great obstacle to discovering,” historian Daniel J. Boorstin writes, “was not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge.”¹⁹ The pretense of knowledge closes our ears and shuts off incoming educational signals from outside sources. Certainty blinds us to our own paralysis. The more we speak our version of the truth, preferably with passion and exaggerated hand gestures, the more our egos inflate to the size of skyscrapers, concealing what’s underneath.

Ego and hubris are part of the problem. The other part is the human distaste for uncertainty. Nature, as Aristotle said, abhors a vacuum. He argued that a vacuum, once formed, would be filled by the dense material surrounding it. Aristotle’s principle applies well beyond the realm of physics. When there’s a vacuum of understanding—when we’re operating in the land of unknowns and uncertainty—myths and stories whoosh in to fill the gap. “We can’t live in a state of perpetual doubt,” Nobel Prize–winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman explains, “so we make up the best story possible and we live as if this story were true.”²⁰

Stories provide the perfect remedy for our fear of uncertainty. They fill the gaps in our understanding. They create order out of chaos, clarity out of complexity, and a cause-and-effect relationship out of coincidence. Your child exhibits signs of autism? Blame it on that vaccine the kid got two weeks ago. You spotted a human face on Mars? Must be the elaborate work of an ancient civilization that, coincidentally, also helped the Egyptians build the pyramids of Giza. People got sick and died in clusters, with some of the corpses twitching or making noises? Vampires, our predecessors concluded, before we knew about viruses and rigor mortis.²¹

When we prefer the seeming stability of stories to the messy reality of uncertainty, facts become dispensable and misinformation thrives. Fake news is not a modern phenomenon. Between a good story and a bunch of data, the story has always prevailed. These mentally vivid images strike a deep, lasting chord known as the narrative fallacy. We remember what so-and-so told us about how his male-pattern baldness was caused by too much time in the sun. We fall for the story, throwing logic and skepticism to the wind.

Authorities then turn these stories into sacred truths. All the facts in the world can’t keep democratically elected hate machines from taking office as long as they can inject a false sense of certainty into an inherently uncertain world. Confident conclusions by loud-mouthed demagogues who pride themselves on rejecting critical thinking begin to dominate the public discourse.

What they lack in knowledge, the demagogues make up for by cranking up their assertiveness. As viewers sag in confusion trying to interpret the unfolding facts, the firebrands provide us comfort. They don’t bother us with ambiguity or let nuances get in the way of bumper-sticker sound bites. We put our mouths on the spigot of their seemingly clear opinions, happily removing the burden of critical thinking from our shoulders.

The problem with the modern world, as Bertrand Russell put it, is that “the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.” Even after physicist Richard Feynman earned a Nobel prize, he thought of himself as a “confused ape” and approached everything around him with the same level of curiosity, which enabled him to see nuances that others dismissed. “I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing,” he remarked, “than to have answers which might be wrong.”

Feynman’s mindset requires an admission of ignorance and a good dose of humility. When we utter those three dreaded words—I don’t know—our ego deflates, our mind opens, and our ears perk up. Admitting ignorance doesn’t mean remaining willfully oblivious to facts. Rather, it requires a conscious type of uncertainty where you become fully aware of what you don’t know in order to learn and grow.

Yes, this approach may illuminate things you don’t want to see. But it’s far better to be uncomfortably uncertain than comfortably wrong. In the end, it’s the confused apes—the connoisseurs of uncertainty—that transform the world.

Connoisseurs of Uncertainty

“Something unknown is doing we don’t know what—that is what our theory amounts to.”²²

This is how the astrophysicist Arthur Eddington described the state of quantum theory in 1929. He may as well have been speaking about our understanding of the entire universe.

Astronomers live and work in a dark mansion that’s only 5 percent lit. Roughly 95 percent of the universe is made up of ominous-sounding stuff called dark matter and dark energy.²³ They don’t interact with light, so we can’t see or otherwise detect them. We know nothing about their nature. But we know that they’re there because they exert gravitational force on other objects.²⁴

“Thoroughly conscious ignorance,” physicist James Maxwell said, “is the prelude to any real advance in knowledge.”²⁵ Astronomers reach beyond the borders of knowledge and take a quantum leap into a vast ocean of unknowns. They know that the universe is like a giant onion, where the unwrapping of one layer of mystery simply reveals another. Science, as George Bernard Shaw said, “can never solve one problem without raising 10 more problems.”²⁶ As some gaps in our knowledge are filled, others emerge.

Einstein described this dance with mystery as “the most beautiful experience.”²⁷ Scientists stand “at the edge between known and unknown,” physicist Alan Lightman writes, “and gaze into that cavern and be exhilarated rather than frightened.”²⁸ Instead of freaking out over their collective ignorance, they thrive on it. The uncertain becomes a call to action.

Steve Squyres is a connoisseur of uncertainty. He was the principal investigator of the Mars Exploration Rovers project when I served on the operations team. The intensity of his passion for the unknown is contagious. The fourth floor of the Space Sciences Building at Cornell University, where Squyres’s office is located, would buzz with energy whenever the doctor was in. When talk turned to Mars (which was often), his eyes glinted with a fiery passion. Squyres is a natural leader. When he moves, others follow. And like any good leader, he’s quick to take the blame but also share the credit. He once crossed out his name on an award he had received for his work on a mission, wrote in the names of the staff members who did the heavy lifting, and gave it to them.

Squyres was born in southern New Jersey and inherited his enthusiasm for exploration from his scientist parents.²⁹ Nothing flared his imagination like the unknown. “When I was a kid,” Squyres recalls, “we had an atlas in our home that was fifteen or twenty years old, and there were places where there wasn’t a whole lot drawn. I always thought that the idea of a map that had blank spots on it that needed to be filled in was incredibly cool.” He dedicated the rest of his life to finding and filling those blank spots.

As an undergraduate at Cornell, he took a graduate-level astronomy course taught by a professor serving on the science team for the Viking mission that sent two probes to Mars. The course required Squyres to write an original term paper. For inspiration, he walked into a room on campus where images of Mars taken by the Viking orbiters were collecting dust. He planned to spend fifteen or twenty minutes looking through photos. “I walked out of that room four hours later,” Squyres explains, “knowing exactly what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.”

He had found the blank canvas he was looking for. Long after he left the building, his mind continued to hum with the images of the Martian surface. “I didn’t understand what I was looking at in these pictures,” Squyres says, “but the beauty of it was, nobody did. That was what appealed to me.”

The appeal of the unknown led Squyres to become an astronomy professor at Cornell. Even after more than three decades navigating the unknown, “I still haven’t gotten over that rush,” he says, “that feeling of excitement that comes from seeing something that nobody’s ever seen before.”

But it’s not just astronomers who relish the unknown. Take it from another Steve. At the beginning of each movie scene, Steven Spielberg finds himself surrounded by enormous uncertainty. “Every time I start a new scene, I’m nervous,” he explains. “I don’t know what I’m gonna think of hearing the lines, I don’t know what I’m gonna tell the actors, I don’t know where I’m gonna put the camera.”³⁰