
The Primacy of Doubt
From Quantum Physics to Climate Change, How the Science of Uncertainty Can Help Us Understand Our Chaotic World
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Narrated by:
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Tim Palmer
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By:
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Tim Palmer
About this listen
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.
©2022 Tim Palmer (P)2022 Recorded BooksListeners also enjoyed...
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By: Adam Kucharski
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Waves in an Impossible Sea
- How Everyday Life Emerges from the Cosmic Ocean
- By: Matt Strassler
- Narrated by: Christopher Grove
- Length: 11 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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In Waves in an Impossible Sea, physicist Matt Strassler tells a startling tale of elementary particles, human experience, and empty space. He begins with a simple mystery of motion. When we drive at highway speeds with the windows down, the wind beats against our faces. Yet our planet hurtles through the cosmos at 150 miles per second, and we feel nothing of it. How can our voyage be so tranquil when, as Einstein discovered, matter warps space, and space deflects matter? The answer, Strassler reveals, is that empty space is a sea, albeit a paradoxically strange one.
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No pdf
- By Mark on 01-14-25
By: Matt Strassler
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Empire of AI
- Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI
- By: Karen Hao
- Narrated by: Karen Hao
- Length: 17 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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When AI expert and investigative journalist Karen Hao first began covering OpenAI in 2019, she thought they were the good guys. Founded as a nonprofit with safety enshrined as its core mission, the organization was meant, its leader Sam Altman told us, to act as a check against more purely mercantile, and potentially dangerous, forces. What could go wrong?
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Well-researched. Timely. Informative. Karen is brilliant and kind!
- By Kahlil Andrews on 05-25-25
By: Karen Hao
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Thinking in Systems
- A Primer
- By: Donella H. Meadows
- Narrated by: Tia Rider Sorensen
- Length: 6 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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In the years following her role as the lead author of the international best seller, Limits to Growth - the first book to show the consequences of unchecked growth on a finite planet - Donella Meadows remained a pioneer of environmental and social analysis until her untimely death in 2001. Thinking in Systems is a concise and crucial book offering insight for problem-solving on scales ranging from the personal to the global. Edited by the Sustainability Institute's Diana Wright, this essential primer brings systems thinking out of the realm of computers and equations and into the tangible world....
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Skip to the Middle
- By John Chambers on 06-20-20
2/3 great science, 1/3 fun speculation
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Great
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Regarding God
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He discusses many applications of nonlinear dynamics (aka chaos), e.g. in climate modelling, the spread of covid, etc. This part of the book is great.
He eventually meanders off into what many physicists would consider "the weeds" with discussions on consciousness and untestable connections between chaos and quantum mechanics. I don't think he made a very persuasive argument regarding the later, but it seems he ran out of space in the book to delve much deeper.
A good pop-sci book, with plenty of learning and edutainment to be had by all.
The book is well written, and equally well narrated by the author.
Applied chaos theory; beware of quantum quackery
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Excellent critical thinking fuel
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Awesome
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Learned a ton
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I was a bit disappointed.
Good intentions but not great
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