three eye-opening results that demonstrated how there are limits to what we can know and do in the physical universe, limits to what truths we can discover using mathematical knowledge, and limits to what we can achieve in implementing democracy. ......Werner Heisenberg's uncertainty principle ....... Kurt Gödel's incompleteness theorem ......Kenneth Arrow showed that there is no method of tabulating votes that can satisfactorily translate the preferences of individual voters into the prefernces of the society to which those voters belong.

a surprising common element uniting these three results is that they are - well, surprising........ Each of these three results was an intellectual bombshell, exploding preconceptions held by many of the leading experts in their respective fields. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle would have astounded Laplace and the many other physicists who shared Laplace's deterministic vision of the universe... Social scientists had searched for the ideal method of voting even before the success of the American and French Revolutions, yet before he even finished graduate school, Arrow was able to show that this was an impossible goal.