Other Voices #1:
IS MATH ALL THERE IS?
An Interview with Tim Palmer: Timothy Noel Palmer (born 31 December 1952) is a mathematical physicist by training. He has spent most of his career working on the dynamics and predictability of weather and climate. Among various research achievements, he pioneered the development of probabilistic ensemble forecasting techniques for weather and climate prediction (at the Met Office and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts).[3] These techniques are now standard in operational weather and climate prediction around the world, and are central for reliable decision making for many commercial and humanitarian applications.
In autumn 2018, I got a surprise invitation from the Royal Society in London. They asked me to attend a dinner conversation about artificial intelligence. When I looked up the sender, the then-acting president of the society, he turned out to be a Nobel Prize winner. Because my knowledge about artificial intelligence barely extends beyond its being commonly abbreviated AI, I assumed the invitation was a mistake. I didn't respond.
A few weeks passed. Then came a polite reminder to please RSVP.I wrote back to say they had gotten the wrong person. I was assured indeed wanted me to come. No, really. And I thought, "Well, free trip to London, dinner included." Would you have said no?
This is how I found myself one February evening in the building of the Royal Society, at a big oval of a table, feeling misplaced among people loaded with titles and awards. As I awkwardly sat down, the British gentleman next to me introduced himself as a climate scientist, attending because his group at University of Oxford uses artificial intelligence In study clouds. His name: Tim Palmer, one of the recipients of the2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his work in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
I did not recall it at the time, but the same Tim Palmer had sent mean email a year earlier, about which I joked to my husband that now even climate scientists have ideas for how to revolutionize quantum mechanics. Indeed, after the dinner, Tim tried to initiate a conversation with me about free will in quantum mechanics, of all things. Excused myself and left him standing in a cold, dark London street.
But Tim Palmer, it turned out, is not one to give up easily. He kept sending me cheerful updates about his newest attempts to fix quantum mechanics. I did my best to ignore him, and probably would have succeeded if I had not, a few months later, looked for a climate scientist to interview for an article I was writing.
A year later, we'd written a paper, published a popular-science article along with it, and recorded a song together. Tim and I, it turned out, had independently arrived at similar conclusions about the lack of progress in the foundations of physics. We both pointed the finger at physicists' overreliance on reductionism, the idea that we gain deeper insights into nature by looking at shorter and shorter distances. Be-cause the questions about how much we really know and how much we can possibly know are a running theme of this book, I went to interview him again, this time in his office at the University of Oxford.
Enter Tim's office and a cardboard Einstein greets you at the door, leaning on a whiteboard with scribbles of the Navier-Stokes equation, the math that describes turbulence in the atmosphere. That's Tim’s passion in a nutshell-space-time geometry and chaos theory combined. Behind his desk, a European flag mourns the UK's departure from the European Union.
I hesitate for a moment with my first question. Scientists often give me funny looks for it. Still, I think it provides relevant context, so I begin by asking if he is religious.
"No. No, I'm not," Tim says. He shakes his head and his Einstein hair wiggles. Then he adds, "Well, I'm not religious, but I get slightly resistant to people who are adamant they can prove that God doesn’t exist." He complains for a bit about scientists like Richard Dawkins who portray all religious people as stupid, ignorant, or both. I realize that there are quite a few of these scientists.
"The reason this bothers me a bit," Tim continues, "is that I know there are a lot of creationists in the US who've been very vocal and all that, but you have to remember that a lot of traditional Muslim families also have this creationist belief. And I was brought up a Catholic, so I am aware there is an element in that that is attacking your culture. It bothers me a bit that this sort of attitude toward creationism could be alienating young people from those cultures that might otherwise might have been open to a career in science.
"So I tried to think, 'Could one envision a situation in which such a belief, that God created the universe six thousand years ago, wasn’t stupid and wasn't completely against all the things that we under-stand about science?'"
I agree with Tim that scientists sometimes overstep the boundaries of their discipline. Of course some religious beliefs have turned out to be just incompatible with evidence. Humans, for example, did not inhabit Earth together with dinosaurs, and having sex in public doesn’t increase the banana harvest. But science has limits, and rather than proclaiming that teaching religion is "child abuse"-as Lawrence Krauss has-I think scientists should acknowledge that science is compatible with many traditional sacred beliefs.
Tim goes on to make his case: "The standard argument is that the idea that the universe was created six thousand years ago is stupid because we know that the age of the Earth is billions of years, and the age of the stars is longer than that, and all kinds of lines of evidence make it completely obvious that the universe is much older than six thousand years.
"But then I started thinking, 'What do we mean by this word creation anyway?' Let us look, for example, at the creation of atoms. What are atoms? Well, all that science can say at the moment is that we can describe atoms with equations. We have laws that are mathematical, and whatever you want to know about an atom, the equations will tell you what it does. But the mathematics will not tell you what an atom is. Is an atom just mathematics? Is mathematics all that is? Or is there something, a substance or something, that makes stuff real and is not part of the modern-day scientific canon?
"And the answer is, no one knows. Hawking in his book [A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes] famously asked the question, 'What breathes fire into the equations to make the universe?' Perhaps there is something to the universe around us that isn’t just mathematics.
"I am not trying to advocate this," Tim cautions, "but you could say God created the universe as a piece of mathematics. And that mathematics will describe how clumps of dust aggregate and get hot enough that nuclear fusion starts to make energy and elements and soon. All of this is just mathematics. And then, six thousand years ago, God got fed up and said, 'This is a bit boring. I'm gonna make some real stuff now,' and waved his wand and at that point real stuff appeared.
"I was wondering, 'How would science deal with this? What is there in science that would distinguish the pre-creation and post-creation era?' Nothing. Chemistry is underpinned by physics, and that is underpinned by mathematics. So there is nothing in science that would say anything about this moment of creation.
"So I thought if someone was brought up with this belief that creation happened some thousand years ago, here is an easy way out. Six thousand years ago, God created the universe, and before it was all just mathematical equations. And this is not unscientific. It does not go against anything in our current scientific lexicon. I like to use the word a scientific. Science has nothing to say about it-at least, science in its current state. There are things we are really profoundly ignorant about. And this is one of them. Is mathematics just a tool for describing the world, or is it the world? We can argue about it, but there is nothing scientific we can say about it."
I ask Tim for other examples where we fill in gaps in our scientific knowledge with belief, and he names the Big Bang. "It's a situation where we have no means of distinguishing between a God-type solution and a scientific one. Unless we find a better theory, maybe one in which there was an earlier eon."
He is, of course, thinking about his own theory, which does away with the division into initial law and differential equation that physicists currently use. Instead, Tim argues, we should describe the universe and everything in it by using the arrangement of matter in the universe, at all times, in its entirety. The geometry of this arrangement could bring new insights into which configurations of particles are even possible, and how likely they are to ever repeat.
This idea led Tim to a theory in which the universe has no beginning and no end. The mathematics for his timeless structure of natural law is a fractal, a pattern of infinite variety in which the large scales resemble the smallest but never exactly repeat. On this fractal, our universe goes through eons that resemble one another but never quite repeat. It has done this for an eternity and will continue doing so forever.
"I didn't do this to get rid of God," Tim says. "It's just how its workout. That's the way physics works. You do the math and find what you find."
"So you don't have a Big Bang, but you have a cycle?"
"Well," he says, "the word cycle has this connotation that it repeats, and I wouldn't buy into this. In some sense it cycles: it goes from a Big Bang to a Big Crunch to a Big Bang to a Big Crunch, and so on. But the way I think about it is as a path in a state space, which means a space where each point is a configuration of the universe, so it's a very high-dimensional space. And you plot the path of this multi-eon universe in this state space, and the theory tells you that the path is contained within a finite region of state space and it is a fractal. This is what you would expect if the universe as a whole is a chaotic dynamical system. This means there could be a universe in the past or the future which very closely resembles the current one at the current time. I often think about this: if you are agonizing over a decision, you made and you are kicking yourself, 'Why did I do that?' then don’t worry, because there will come an eon when you'll be faced with the same situation and you will make the right decision."
"And there will come an eon when you make an even worse decision," I quip.
He nods without the hint of a smile. "You may make an even worse decision. And the other thing that occurs to me is, if you lose a partner, you may not lose that partner forever. They may come back in a future eon."
I know it sounds crazy. But it's compatible with all we currently know.
>> THE BRIEF ANSWER
We use mathematics to describe our observations, but we don't know why some math describes reality whereas other math doesn't. One can therefore attribute a moment of creation specifically to the math that describes what we observe, a moment at which the math be-comes real. Such a creation event is by construction not observable --otherwise it would have been described by the math already-and is therefore compatible with science.
Questions:
Who was Albert Einstein?
Does the universe run like clockwork?
What is light?
How does light travel through space ?
What is the quantum?
What is the photoelectric effect ?
How did Einstein prove that atoms exist?
What is the theory of special relativity?
What are Einstein's ideas about time?
What is the Lorentz-FitzGerald contraction ?
What is spacetime?
Why does E = mc2?
How did Einstein fit gravity into relativity ?
How does Einstein define gravity?
How did an eclipse prove Einstein was right?
If Einstein was right, was Newton wrong ?
Why didn't Einstein's theory win the Nobel Prize ?.
What was Einstein's greatest blunder ?.
Where does Einstein's relativity theory break down ?.
How did relativity lead to a Big Bang?
Does God play dice ?.
Who won the argument ?.
Was Einstein the 'father of the atomic bomb' ?
Can we find a theory of everything?
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Timothy Noel Palmer (born 31 December 1952) is a mathematical physicist by training. He has spent most of his career working on the dynamics and predictability of weather and climate. Among various research achievements, he pioneered the development of probabilistic ensemble forecasting techniques for weather and climate prediction (at the Met Office and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts).[3] These techniques are now standard in operational weather and climate prediction around the world, and are central for reliable decision making for many commercial and humanitarian applications.
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