The Primacy of Doubt, Tim Palmer
The Primacy of Doubt, Tim Palmer
List: $19.99 | Sale: $13.99
Club: $9.99

The Primacy of Doubt
From Quantum Physics to Climate Change, How the Science of Uncertainty Can Help Us Understand Our Chaotic World

Author: Tim Palmer

Narrator: Tim Palmer

Unabridged: 9 hr 41 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Recorded Books

Published: 12/20/2022


Synopsis

Why does your weather app say “there’s a 10 percent chance of rain” instead of “it will be sunny”? In large part, this is due to the insight of award-winning physicist Tim Palmer, who pioneered the introduction of uncertainty into weather and climate prediction.
Now, he wants to apply it to how we study everything else.

In The Primacy of Doubt, Palmer gives us a revolutionary vision of mathematical uncertainty that provides new insights into a range of practical problems and some of the deepest questions in science and philosophy. He draws connections that are in equal parts unexpected
and fascinating: how ensemble forecasts can predict unpredictability, how the brain uses noise for creative thinking, how the geometry of chaos forces us to rewrite the laws of quantum mechanics, and in so doing reconciles determinism, free will, and moral responsibility.

A tour de force from a brilliant mind, The Primacy of Doubt shows that the fundamental law of the universe might just be to expect the unexpected.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Brian on October 18, 2022

This is quite possibly the best popular science book I've ever read (and I've read many hundreds). To describe what Tim Palmer, a physicist turned meteorologist, does in simple terms does not do it justice. But essentially he explores the nature of (mathematically) chaotic systems and shows how we c......more

Goodreads review by Pablo on October 16, 2022

This is one of the best NetGalley books I've read in a long time. I tend to read new science titles that focus on math, physics, or astronomy, and I prefer they aren't popularized too much in their approach. PRIMACY OF DOUBT meets the bill, stopping short of actual math but definitely giving a quali......more

Goodreads review by Pete on October 30, 2022

The Primacy of Doubt : From Quantum Physics to Climate Change, How the Science of Uncertainty Can Help Us Understand Our Chaotic World (2022) by Tim Palmer explores profound uncertainty in physics in Chaos and Quantum theory. Palmer is a highly acclaimed physicist who now works at Oxford after many......more

Goodreads review by Phullo on February 13, 2023

Positive and negatives. One side of the book is an insightful exploration of how the world around us is permeated by a very specific kind of uncertainty, different from that of quantum mechanics. The author then explains how physicists and climate sci3ntists model complex systems using ensembles of p......more

Goodreads review by John_g on January 06, 2023

He lost me as he jumped between topics barely explained. Why's Roger Penrose doing some Bell experiment? Diagrams were too few, and kindle display makes them less clear. Why does the second law of thermodynamics show "heat can’t be converted into work in such a way"? There are too many typos that an ed......more