Skip to main content

The Primacy of Doubt - Tim Palmer *****

This is quite possibly the best popular science book I've ever read (and I've read many hundreds). To describe what Tim Palmer, a physicist turned meteorologist, does in simple terms does not do it justice. But essentially he explores the nature of (mathematically) chaotic systems and shows how we can deal better with uncertainty, even using his expertise to propose a different way to look at the lack of local reality in quantum physics.

This is interesting stuff anyway, but what is astounding is the way that Palmer rattles through a series of topics that are quite difficult to get your head around and, in several diverse cases, gives the most approachable explanation of the topic I've ever seen.

I'm not saying this book is an easy read, by the way. You do have to think about what you are reading, and I had to go back over a couple of sections to make sure it sunk in. But it is so rewarding of the effort.

In terms of this broad enlightening nature, the first of the three sections in the book stands out head and shoulders above the rest. Palmer starts by exploring chaos and gives the best explanation of the behaviour of chaotic systems, state space and attractors I've come across. Then he throws in Cantor sets, then shows the relationship of weather forecasts to all this, and introduces p-adic numbers (arguably the only bit that could have been better explained). He then shows graphically (literally, not metaphorically) how the introduction of noise can make models of chaotic systems work better. Finally in this section, he takes on quantum uncertainty, with one of the only explanations of the use of Bell's inequality I've ever seen that is at least vaguely comprehensible.

I don't usually go into that much detail in a review, but just wanted to show how much is crammed into the first 80 or so pages.

In the second section, Palmer addresses the use of Monte Carlo methods and ensembles in making at least partly successful predictions of chaotic systems, such as the weather, the climate and pandemics. Usually, the applications of the theory are the most interesting bits of a book, but somehow this isn't quite as engaging as the theory in the first section, though things really liven up when we get onto economics, and how economists are stuck in the fairly useless state meteorologists were before the great storm of 1987, when they used single-run forecasts, rather than ensembles. He also shows fairly bluntly that economists have failed in the development of the kind of models that can handle a chaotic system like the economy.

Finally, in the third section, Palmer addresses the big picture. He starts with an alternative interpretation of quantum theory that effectively enables hidden variables, using an approach that he describes as involving 'counterfactual indefiniteness', a concept he calls the 'cosmological invariant set' and invariant set theory. How much this will appeal probably depends how you feel about quantum interpretations, or get worried about the idea that until a quantum system interacts with the outside world it doesn't have real values for things like the location of particles. This part felt a bit hand-wavy, partly, I think because it needed too much of the mathematics behind it (which we sensibly don't see) to get a handle on it.

To end this more speculative section, Palmer takes on things like consciousness, free will and God - not bad going for a relatively short book. Finishing The Primacy of Doubt is like getting off one of those exciting roller coaster rides, when your immediate inclination is to think 'I want to do that again, but I'll have a bit of a break first.' I will be reading this book again, without doubt. Remarkable.

Hardback:   
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg - See all of Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly digest for free here

Comments

  1. The pandemic chapter has a few errors. I can't remember ever seeing a SIR model in which the R included the dead. If exponential growth was rapid I would be very happy with the balance of my savings account. Exponential growth of epidemics is debunked by Farr's Law of 1840. In 1927 Kermack and McKendrick showed logistic growth.

    Now to read the rest of the book.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I've finally finished the book and think it is a very worthwhile read that has some significant omissions.

    He discusses CovidSim which had its source code released after John Carmack (of Doom fame) had made its output for multi-threaded runs deterministic thus allowing regression tests. A regression tests fails for one of two reasons - either you introduce a bug or fix a bug. What it didn't have, and what the book doesn't mention about this or any other code, is validation tests. Such tests are used by commercial engineering codes to assure their customers that the implementation of the physical models do not have bugs. The author expresses doubt in some of the results of the models but never the model implementation.

    Continuing with epidemiology the standard SIR model has been extended to be stochastic in a number of ways. Several of which are by making the reproduction rate normally distributed. This is the usual lazy assumption by modellers and is debunked by a derivation from first principles that shows it is logit-normally distributed. The author references various models in which he has added noise but never mentions which distribution was used and how that was determined which raises questions over the subsequent conclusions that he draws.

    He seems to rate the Stern Review which I believe to have been a waste of tax payers money on the assumption that its software was seemingly never made available to be updated. The discussion of cost-loss models for tying economics to climate reminded me of Pascal's wager.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Battle of the Big Bang - Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Harper *****

It's popular science Jim, but not as we know it. There have been plenty of popular science books about the big bang and the origins of the universe (including my own Before the Big Bang ) but this is unique. In part this is because it's bang up to date (so to speak), but more so because rather than present the theories in an approachable fashion, the book dives into the (sometimes extremely heated) disputed debates between theoreticians. It's still popular science as there's no maths, but it gives a real insight into the alternative viewpoints and depth of feeling. We begin with a rapid dash through the history of cosmological ideas, passing rapidly through the steady state/big bang debate (though not covering Hoyle's modified steady state that dealt with the 'early universe' issues), then slow down as we get into the various possibilities that would emerge once inflation arrived on the scene (including, of course, the theories that do away with inflation). ...

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that â€˜Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...

Ctrl+Alt+Chaos - Joe Tidy ****

Anyone like me with a background in programming is likely to be fascinated (if horrified) by books that present stories of hacking and other destructive work mostly by young males, some of whom have remarkable abilities with code, but use it for unpleasant purposes. I remember reading Clifford Stoll's 1990 book The Cuckoo's Egg about the first ever network worm (the 1988 ARPANet worm, which accidentally did more damage than was intended) - the book is so engraved in my mind I could still remember who the author was decades later. This is very much in the same vein,  but brings the story into the true internet age. Joe Tidy gives us real insights into the often-teen hacking gangs, many with members from the US and UK, who have caused online chaos and real harm. These attacks seem to have mostly started as pranks, but have moved into financial extortion and attempts to destroy others' lives through doxing, swatting (sending false messages to the police resulting in a SWAT te...