Chaos theory and geometry: can they predict our world? – with Tim Palmer

The geometry of chaos can explain our uncertain world, from weather and pandemics to quantum physics and free will.

This talk was recorded at the Ri on 21 April 2023.

Join Tim Palmer as he explores how it provides the means to predict the world around us, and provides new insights into some of the most astonishing aspects of our universe and ourselves.

00:00 Introduction
00:55 Illustrating Chaos Theory with pendulums (demo)
02:44 Fractal geometry: A bridge from Newton to 20th Century mathematics
08:43 The three great theorems of 20th Century mathematics
11:24 The concept of State Space
14:43 Lorenz State Space
19:24 Cantor's Set and the prototype fractal
22:52 Hilbert's Decision Problem
24:04 The link between 20th Century mathematics and fractal geometry
27:21 The predictability of chaotic systems
32:26 Predicting hurricanes with Chaos Theory
43:44 The Bell experiment: proving the universe is not real?
51:45 Counterfactuals in Bell's theorem
56:29 Applying fractals to Bell's theorem
01:03:57 The end of spatial reductionism

Tim Palmer is a Royal Society Research Professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Oxford. Following a PhD in general relativity theory, he spent much of his career working on the predictability and dynamics of weather and climate, developing probabilistic ensemble prediction systems across a range of weather and climate timescales. He also researches the foundations of quantum physics, in addition to applications of quantum and imprecise computing. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and an International Member of the US National Academy of Sciences. Amongst other awards, he has won the Institute of Physics Dirac Gold Medal, and the top medals of the American and European Meteorological Societies.

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[ange]

This was absolutely wonderful. It was a fantastic walk through some lovely ideas. Thank you for posting this.

[jamesmckenzie]

This was difficult at first but once I got accustomed to Mr. Palmer's speaking mannerisms it was really quite fascinating. By the end I wanted to hear more.

[asmodeusnord]

Fascinated from start to finish. Thank you Dr. Palmer xx

[hrdcpy]

The audio gets better about 2:30 for those first listening

[csikjarudi]

Anyone noticed that one of his coauthors is Sabine Hossenfelder (1:03:15)?

[bogdand]

A presentation as chaotic and unstructured as its subject :) I'm sorry but... thumbs down!

[TomiTapio]

Pants with hue, saturation, value(brightness), reflectivity, porousness, cotton-ness, vinyl-ness, width, length, elastic band tightness, total volume of pockets 0 to 100...and how much sound they make.

[guitarboogieboogie]

I think it may have been Johannes Kepler responsibr describing elipses of planetary motion.

[Tom-spgy]

1.5 X Speed sounds best for this lecture

[qwfvrwx]

This is fascinating because I was thinking about time travel or teleportation would function as a concept and how quantum entanglement is the cosmos way of helping with the math

[auntiecarol]

Two words: "computational irreducibility".

[BlergleslinkVettermoo]

Great lecture, but Palmer may have been in error about a point of history: it wasn't Newton but Kepler who discovered that planetary orbits are elliptical.

[isaacaraya]

Great talk! So much to think about here. The connection with P-adic numbers was fascinating. Have you considered where something like the reiman-zeta function or the central limit theorem, which are both intimately related to primes and large scales of reference, might be connected to something like chaos theory?

[sgramstrup]

Not a math dude, but it should be possible to influence a system in state space to control the direction of the system, so we could perhaps learn to control even extremely complicated chaotic systems by detecting, observing and nudging the system in state space.

[Anakin]

I believe that this idea (particularly), of Chaos Theory being able to link General Relativity, and Quantum Physics is truly fascinating!

[AlexanderKoryagin]

Thank you very much for an inspiring lecture, Dr. Palmer!

[thewiseturtle]

Yes, big picture thinking! My idea is that reality is all possible combinations, with each pattern being a single awareness (timeline), so each of us is an individual universe unto ourselves, while also branching and interconnecting with one another in an expanded Pascal's triangle (Galton board) type fabric. It's deterministic randomness (pure entropy), and definitely fractal. I shared this idea with Stephen Wolfram and he ran with it as his recent new physics model.

One thing to note is that because there is BOTH branching and reconnecting (see: a family tree where babies are produced and then grow up to mate with one another from nearby lineages) there is BOTH expansion of the number of individuals/universes in the whole multiverse, and there is contraction of those things into the larger volume. This is the fractal ability to fully contain a fixed amount of matter~energy that never gets destroyed nor added to while also adding more and more stuff infinitely into the future. This explains why we keep finding smaller and smaller "smallest parts" of the universe. It's not because we're just "better" at looking closely, but because reality is fractal, so the closer we look, the smaller the "smallest part" we can observe literally is. But ultimately there is no smallest part. Reality is expanding into the details or fractions of space~time, just like how we can zoom into the mandlebrot set and continue seeing infinitely new patterns.

So, rather than increasing entropy leading to some sort of boring (low entropy) "heat death", at least on a multiversal level, it leads to infinite life, expanding in complexity, creativity, and effectiveness at finding better and better collaborators to procreate with, genetically and memetically and whatever -etically there might be. The "heat death" is just local death of individuals physically dividing up. But those parts go on to continue to make ever more interesting sets of new individuals Entropy and a fractal reality of deterministic randomness means that there's no real death for any of the matter and energy of reality, only infinite natural selection and random mutation of patterns of all types.

[ddtt]

A measurement involves a phase transition where the macroscopic pointer variable of the apparatus goes from the initial metastable state to one of the stable states. Not doing an experiment means that nothing happens. Counterfactuals do not make sense. Getting the whole universe in the argumenting, means that they don't have any clue.

[PetraKann]

6:15
It was Kepler, not Newton, who discovered the elliptical orbit of a planet (Mars).
In 1609 he published Astronomia Nova, delineating his discoveries, which are now called Kepler's first two laws of planetary motion.

[frun]

What is the reason for the difference in statistics between classical and quantum cases? (2 vs > 2) 48:33 I mean, why are experimenters somehow limited in their measurement choices in the quantum case, but not in the classical? A measurement outcome clearly depends on the past light cone in both cases.