Skip to main content

Tim Palmer - Five Way Interview

Tim Palmer is a Royal Society Research Professor in the department of physics at the University of Oxford. He spent much of his career working on the predictability and dynamics of weather and climate, developing probabilistic ensemble prediction systems across a range of weather and climate timescales. 
He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and an International Member of the US National Academy of Sciences. Amongst other awards, he has won the Institute of Physics Dirac Gold Medal, and the top medals of the American and European Meteorological Societies. His book The Primacy of Doubt is published by Oxford University Press in the UK and Basic Books in the US.

Why science? 

I love the idea of studying things that at one level could tell us about the meaning of life, the universe and everything, and at the other end of the spectrum is of practical importance to ordinary people around the world. This is science at its best, and I hope my book shows why. As American physicist Robert Oppenheimer said: 'The history of science is rich in example of the fruitfulness of bringing two sets of techniques, two sets of ideas, developed in separate contexts for the pursuit of new truth, into touch with one another.'

Why this book?

It was a challenge to myself to try to write something coherent that encompassed my various scientific interests over my research career, that could be read by the layperson. The two themes that underpin everything I’ve worked on over the years, from black holes to climate change, are uncertainty and nonlinearity (a nonlinear system is one whose outputs are not in direct proportion to its inputs). I worked hard to connect the different notions of uncertainty and nonlinearity discussed in the book into a coherent whole: from noise in transistors, to the predictability of weather, to the idea that the universe as a whole may be a chaotic system, completely overturning the notion of quantum uncertainty as it is conventionally understood and giving us fresh perspectives on age-old conundrums like free will and consciousness. I hope the reader will be exhilarated by the idea that all these different topics, some of fundamental importance, others of practical importance, come together in a unified way. This is really what makes science so enjoyable and what made writing the book so enjoyable. 

What are the implications of your model for quantum physics?

I think the most important thing is that it suggests that a deeper understanding of the laws of nature may not be found by probing smaller and smaller scales - something we call 'methodological reductionism.' Indeed, the real breakthrough in formulating a unified theory of gravitational and quantum physics may come from understanding the structure of the universe on the largest scales. (A less fundamental consequence, though one of practical significance, is that it may not be possible, even in principle, to construct noise-free quantum computers with more than a couple of hundred qubits.) 

What’s next?

As far as book writing is concerned, I would like to write a second book focussing on this idea that the laws of physics may be much more holistic than we physicists normally acknowledge. The wonderful thing about this topic is that it will allow me to cover a vast range of ideas in mathematics and fundamental physics, which I’d love to try to explain to the general reader.  

What’s exciting you at the moment? 

On the climate front, I want to continue pushing for an international 'CERN for Climate Change' as I think this is super important if we are to really be confident about the regional impacts of climate change. I only need a couple of hundred million a year to make it happen - small beer compared with the amount the Bank of England had to spend to prevent UK pension funds from imploding after the Chancellor’s budget. I’m also working with colleagues to use AI to increase the effective resolution of weather and climate models. This will be important in providing early warnings of extreme weather events in developing countries in particular. 

On the fundamental physics front, I have a paper in review which I am pretty excited about, showing how all the weird things we associate with quantum physics really can be explained using ideas from number theory. This does seem to confirm that quantum mechanics is only an approximation to something deeper, and that this “something deeper” may be much more in line with Einstein’s ideas. I do think Einstein was right to stick to his guns in his criticisms of quantum mechanics and I believe time will prove him right. Good to see basic quantum physics being recognised in the latest Nobel Prizes. 

Interview by Brian Clegg - See all of Brian's online articles or subscribe to a digest free here

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Pagans (SF) - James Alistair Henry *****

There's a fascinating sub-genre of science fiction known as alternate history. The idea is that at some point in the past, history diverged from reality, resulting in a different present. Perhaps the most acclaimed of these books is Kingsley Amis's The Alteration , set in a modern England where there had not been a reformation - but James Alistair Henry arguably does even better by giving us a present where Britain is a third world country, still divided between Celts in the west and Saxons in the East. Neither the Normans nor Christianity have any significant impact. In itself this is a clever idea, but what makes it absolutely excellent is mixing in a police procedural murder mystery, where the investigation is being undertaken by a Celtic DI, Drustan, who has to work in London alongside Aedith, a Saxon reeve of equivalent rank, who also happens to be daughter of the Earl of Mercia. While you could argue about a few historical aspects, it's effectively done and has a plot...
Post a Comment
Read more

The New Lunar Society - David Mindell *****

David Mindell's take on learning lessons for the present from the eighteenth century Lunar Society could easily have been a dull academic tome, but instead it was a delight to read. Mindell splits the book into a series of short essay-like chapters which includes details of the characters involved in and impact of the Lunar Society, which effectively kick-started the Industrial Revolution, interwoven with an analysis of the decline of industry in modern twentieth and twenty-first century America, plus the potential for taking a Lunar Society approach to revitalise industry for the future. We see how a group of men (they were all men back then) based in the English Midlands (though with a strong Scottish contingent) brought together science, engineering and artisan skills in a way that made the Industrial Revolution and its (eventual) impact on improving the lot of the masses possible. Interlaced with this, Mindell shows us how 'industrial' has become something of a dirty wo...
Post a Comment
Read more