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:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The AI Paradox - Virginia Dignum ****

This is a really important book in the way that Virginia Dignum highlights various ways we can misunderstand AI and its abilities using a series of paradoxes. However, I need to say up front that I'm giving it four stars for the ideas: unfortunately the writing is not great. It reads more like a government report than anything vaguely readable - it really should have co-authored with a professional writer to make it accessible. Even so, I'm recommending it: like some government reports it's significant enough to make it necessary to wade through the bureaucrat speak. Why paradoxes? Dignum identifies two ways we can think about paradoxes (oddly I wrote about paradoxes recently , but with three definitions): a logical paradox such as 'this statement is false', or a paradoxical truth such as 'less is more' - the second of which seems a better to fit to the use here.  We are then presented with eight paradoxes, each of which gives some insights into aspects of t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Einstein's Fridge - Paul Sen ****

In Einstein's Fridge (interesting factoid: this is at least the third popular science book to be named after Einstein's not particularly exciting refrigerator), Paul Sen has taken on a scary challenge. As Jim Al-Khalili made clear in his excellent The World According to Physics , our physical understanding of reality rests on three pillars: relativity, quantum theory and thermodynamics. But there is no doubt that the third of these, the topic of Sen's book, is a hard sell. While it's true that these are the three pillars of physics, from the point of view of making interesting popular science, the first two might be considered pillars of gold and platinum, while the third is a pillar of salt. Relativity and quantum theory are very much of the twentieth century. They are exciting and sometimes downright weird and wonderful. Thermodynamics, by contrast, has a very Victorian feel and, well, is uninspiring. Luckily, though, thermodynamics is important enough, lying behind ...
Post a Comment
Read more