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 Language of Mathematics - Raúl Rojas ***

One of the biggest developments in the history of maths was moving from describing relationships and functions with words to using symbols. This interesting little book traces the origins of a whole range of symbols from those familiar to all, to the more obscure squiggles used in logic and elsewhere. On the whole Raúl Rojas does a good job of filling in some historical detail, if in what is generally a fairly dry fashion. We get to trace what was often a bumpy path as different symbols were employed (particularly, for example, for division and multiplication, where several still remain in use), but usually, gradually, standards were adopted. This feels better as a reference, to dip into if you want to find out about a specific symbol, rather than an interesting end to end read. Rojas tells us the sections are designed to be read in any order, which means that there is some overlap of text - it feels more like a collection of short essays or blog posts that he couldn't be bothered ...
Post a Comment
Read more

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 ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more