Tim Palmer (2)

It is not Heisenberg's uncertainty principle but rather the uncertainty explained by deterministic chaos theory that Oxford physicist Palmer believes can be expanded to apply to a much greater diversity of realms. These realms include weather forecasting, climate change, pandemics, financial crises, and even free will and consciousness. One key concept is the use of "ensembles" of model runs to enable, for example, probabilistic weather forecasts. But quantum physics, I'd say, is the realm show more where the implications are most profound. Here it must be said that Chapter 4's explanation of Bell's inequality, involving multiple remote-placed figures and tables, is much too hard to follow, especially if one is reading an electronic version of the book. That explanation, though, is a necessary preamble for Chapter 11's postulation that the fractal-attractor-like "geometry of chaos" implies that quantum randomness and indeterminacy are really just chaos-theoretic unpredictability. show less