New book suggests embracing uncertainty to navigate chaotic world

8 December 2022

Embracing uncertainty, and recognising the geometry of chaos, could help us to navigate the unpredictability of the world we live in, argues Professor Tim Palmer in his new book The Primacy of Doubt (OUP, 2022).

Tim, a Professorial Fellow at Jesus College and Royal Society Research Professor in Climate Physics, uses examples as broad-ranging as climate, health, the economy and conflict, to highlight the primary limits of how much humans can understand or make predictions, and that, by embracing the mathematics of uncertainty, we might explain phenomena ordinarily considered extraordinarily complex.

Professor Tim Palmer, Senior Research Fellow, and the cover of his new book.

 

Chaos theory is based on the idea that systems can end up in different places with just one miniscule difference in their starting conditions, as best illustrated by meteorologist Edward Lorentz’ well-known butterfly effect. In Tim’s own research on ensemble prediction in weather forecasting, he pioneered the use of multiple models with slightly different initial conditions to give climate forecasts with probabilities more likely to capture rare, extreme weather events.

In the new book, he explains and applies this mathematical approach to climate change, financial crashes and pandemics. The recent COVID-19 pandemic provides is contemporary case in point. Globally, there was unpreparedness for the outbreak of a disease where many in the population were asymptomatic carriers. For governments, there appeared to be a binary choice of either imposing strict lockdowns to curb the spread of the virus, to the detriment of economies, or let economies continue while health consequences escalated, and take a ‘fingers-crossed’ approach to herd immunity.

 

Tim says, “Government reaction to the pandemic was predicated on two different policy choices, and the lockdown policy was based on avoiding a reasonable worse-case scenario, rather than a most-likely scenario. Here estimates of uncertainty allow you to take decisions based on the level of risk rather than on a most likely outcome”.

There’s a parallel with the situation around climate change, as he explains in the book. “Taking a specific position – alarmist, denier or indeed any specific point in between – is simply inconsistent with the science. One’s attitude to climate change, like weather prediction, should be framed in terms of risk: Is the risk of undesirable changes to climate high enough to warrant taking precautionary measures now? How do we decide what decisions to make? It’s based on science but also on value judgements.”  

The third and final section of Primacy of Doubt, titled ‘Understanding the chaotic universe and our place in it’ focuses on fractal state-space geometry, in which Tim puts forward the proposition of an alternative interpretation of quantum theory that enables hidden variables – a concept he calls the ‘cosmological invariant set’. In this premise, the Universe, although appearing chaotic and unpredictable, might also be understood in the context of ensemble prediction (an idea which appealed to Einstein). Tim tries to apply these ideas to provide novel explanations of the notions of free will and consciousness.

So what inspired him to write such an ambitious, and far-reaching book? Tim says, “I think it’s to do with the fact that I’ve had a varied research career. I started life doing very theoretical, mathematical physics on black holes – very esoteric stuff – which was fascinating but which, I felt, was not much use to anyone, and that really nagged at me. A chance meeting with renowned meteorologist Raymond Hide led me to apply to the Met Office, who were looking for scientists, and I was offered a job. But it was not that straight forward. I’d had two job offers to continue my fundamental physics research – including one working with Stephen Hawking in Cambridge. I was struggling with indecision, and at the point where I decided to just not think about the problem for a bit, my mind sort of subconsciously made the decision for me. My brain suddenly became clear: moving to climate physics was the way forward. But what was the mechanism that led me to make this decision? The process of how the brain goes about making decisions began to fascinate me”.

That decision has led many interdisciplinary research breakthroughs for Tim and colleagues in the field of weather and climate science, but his experiences also led an ongoing interest in the brain from a physics perspective; where does creativity come from for example? Some kind of probabalistic determinism is involved, he says, “and in science that’s part of a field known as imprecise computing. So I wondered what would happen if computers became imperfect, and what the consequences of that might be. Chaos theory was becoming relevant in a number of fields – such as economics – and I started to think about whether ensemble prediction methods could be used in those.’

So this notion of uncertainty sort of seemed to be a theme which went through everything I had done. I wondered if I could write a book expanding on the theory of chaos in relation to the world around us, and the Universe, and how uncertainty can actually help us to predict, plan, and philosophically make sense of things”.

The Primacy of Doubt was originally going to just be a side project for Tim, alongside his research, but he then began to think about how it might be of interest to general readers, and if he could produce an interesting and cogent narrative about his research career and the overarching theme of uncertainty. He shared drafts with members of his family and asked for their thoughts and feedback, and the result is a popular science book that aims to engage the public in the nature of chaotic systems and how we might better cope with uncertainty.

“I hope there’s one important take home from the book for everyone who reads it” he says. “Whether that’s seeing how the science of chaos can be applied for the benefit of society and in our daily lives, or providing clarity on conceptual problems such as the perplexing nature of quantum physics, and free will.”              

The Primacy of Doubt – From Climate Change to Quantum Physics, How the Science of Uncertainty Can Help Predict and Understand Our Chaotic World (OUP, 2022) is available to purchase from Blackwell’s Online Bookshop.