This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Earlier this summer, the four of us spent three days in a room with a dozen others whose jobs sound nothing like ours, or like each other's: a cosmologist, an emergency management scholar, a genetic counselor, a hydrologist, a neuropsychologist, a health risk communication scholar, a cognitive neuroscientist, a theater director, an investigative journalist and a meteorologist. We're also from four different disciplines: a sociologist, a human rights scholar, an Indigenous community health scholar and a microbial geneticist.
We had convened through CIFAR, a research organization that gathers interdisciplinary groups to work on hard questions, for a workshop on a challenge that none of our fields can solve alone: how to grapple with and communicate about uncertainty in research. To start, we each brought an object that captured our own struggle with representing uncertainty clearly. One of us brought a handheld weather monitor.
Another brought a blank flip chart. A third brought a gachapon, a prize from a Japanese capsule-toy vending machine, purchased without knowing which toy they would get. After the show-and-tell exercise, it was obvious we were all circling the same problem.
The instinct for many researchers is to treat uncertainty as a failing, something to paper over before anyone notices. Our conversation suggested the opposite: Uncertainty is everywhere in every field, and it is worth naming out loud rather than hiding. It is not the absence of knowledge or a lack of results—it is a generative space where curiosity, learning and new understanding are possible.
Most of us also agreed that our struggle to articulate uncertainty makes it harder to share our work clearly with the public, and that glossing over it can damage public trust when people later discover the doubt we left out. Uncertainty is not a problem to be solved. Navigating uncertainty is the job, and it never fully goes away.
What do researchers mean by uncertainty? Broadly, it is everything we don't yet know about the thing we are trying to describe, and how much that missing knowledge could change the answer. It could mean that there is a range of possible outcomes—for example, that it might rain or it might not.
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