The Primacy of Doubt

September 19, 2022
Physicist Palmer delivers a challenging but rewarding look at how uncertainty helps scientists make sense of the world. Much of the work draws on “the science of chaos,” which Palmer writes has “impacted... almost all branches of science: not only astronomy, meteorology, and ecology, but chemistry, engineering, biology, and social science.” Regarding the math and science of weather forecasting models, which have “several billion variables,” Palmer considers whether the “same ensemble techniques that have transformed weather and climate prediction” could also make waves in economics, such as by potentially allowing economists to forecast market shifts and crashes. Elsewhere, he tackles the uncertainty in pandemics (and explains how Covid prediction models work), investigates how uncertainty might help answer questions about dark matter and energy, and closes with a provocative account of how consciousness arises, in which he suggests that “to be conscious of an object is to be aware that the object has an existence independent of the rest of the world.” Despite the complexity of his arguments, the author succeeds at bringing complicated theories within reach of those who have a basic familiarity with physics. Science-minded readers, take note.

September 15, 2022
An exploration of the amorphous concept of uncertainty, "an essential part of the human condition." Uncertainty is another name for chaos, a fascinating concept largely unknown until the 1950s. Palmer, a professor of physics at Oxford, works hard to explain it to lay readers. He begins with Newton's law of gravity, which can predict the Earth-sun orbit precisely into the distant future but only works with two gravitating bodies. After three centuries of searching for a formula to predict the positions of three or more, French physicist Henri Poincare proved that "no formula exists." Planetary orbits are "chaotic." Like weather or stock prices, "the system appears reasonably predictable until, out of the blue, it behaves unpredictably"--which means that it's not impossible that the Earth will one day wander out of its orbit. One of Palmer's main characters is meteorologist and mathematician Edward Lorenz (1917-2008). Before Lorenz, scientists believed that if you had enough accurate information about current conditions (temperature, wind speed, humidity), you could feed the details into a powerful computer and predict weather far into the future. Lorenz proved that this was impossible; tiny changes in initial conditions can blow up into huge errors. Chaos theory doesn't make prediction impossible, only erratic over the short term. Weather forecasts have grown more accurate, but they're now expressed in percentages. Palmer believes that embracing uncertainty might explain phenomena considered hopelessly complex, and he illustrates his points with densely argued chapters on financial crashes, war, climate change, pandemics, and brain function. The author is a fluid writer, but the sections on complicated areas such as fractal geometry and quantum uncertainty may overwhelm readers unfamiliar with college physics and calculus. They should prepare by reading James Gleick's Chaos, still in print after 35 years--and which Palmer calls "masterful." Read Gleick first and then turn to this informative, ingenious book.

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