How to Discover the Limits of the Impossible

Arthur C. Clark's third law states, the only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. Tim Palmer: 90 something percent of new ideas in a particular field come because somebody has made the connection with some technique that's used in a different field. "Don't get sort of seduced into spending 20 hours a day focusing on some arcane problem," he says.

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In his acclaimed latest book, The Primacy of Doubt: From Quantum Physics to Climate Change, How the Science of Uncertainty Can Help Us Understand Our Chaotic World, Professor Timothy Palmer argues that embracing the mathematics of uncertainty is vital to understanding ourselves and the universe around us. Whether we want to predict climate change or market crashes, understand how the brain is able to outpace supercomputers or find a theory that links quantum and cosmological physics, Palmer shows how his vision of mathematical uncertainty provides new insights into some of the deepest problems in science. The result is a revolution—one that shows that power begins by embracing what we don’t know.

The Primacy of Doubt on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Primacy-Doubt-Quantum-Uncertainty-Understand/dp/1541619714

Timothy Palmer is the Royal Society Research Professor in Climate Physics, and a Senior Fellow at the Oxford Martin Institute at the University of Oxford. He is a mathematical physicist who has spent most of his career working on the dynamics and predictability of weather and climate. He pioneered the development of probabilistic ensemble forecasting techniques for weather and climate prediction, techniques that are now standard in weather and climate forecasting around the world. In 2021 Professor Palmer was awarded an honorary fellowship of the Institute of Physics.

Professor Palmer was involved in the first five IPCC assessment reports, and was co-chair of the international scientific steering group of the World Climate Research Programme project (CLIVAR) on climate variability and predictability.