J. Doyne Farmer, physicist: "I like doing things that people think are impossible"

BarcelonaWhen he was 24, J. Doyne Farmer walked into a casino with a hidden computer he had built himself. It was a digital computer he could use while walking, which he intended to use to demonstrate that physics allowed one to predict the roulette wheel's movements. "It was an adventure, and I did it because I like doing things that people think are impossible," he says. However, there was a second reason: he was a very poor graduate student and wanted to make money. He only partially succeeded: he was able to prove that it's possible to predict which number will come up, but he didn't become rich. Born in 1952 in the United States, Farmer trained as a physicist and is one of the founders of the Complex Systems group at Los Alamos National Laboratory, the laboratory that brought together physicists, biologists, and economists to rethink how complex systems work, and the same center where atomic bombs were produced during World War II. An expert in chaos theory, he is a pioneer in computational prediction. He advocates applying to economics the same tools that physics uses to understand hurricanes, ecosystems, or turbulence. He was the founder of Prediction Company.He is currently the director of the complexity economics program at the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the University of Oxford. Farmer argues that, while he was able to predict roulette wheel movements and models can be created to try to understand the financial market and improve economic models, we cannot move through time, nor is it predictable or predetermined.

The scientist came to Barcelona to participate in the discussion. Chaos theory: Is the world predictable?, organized by the Barcelona Science Museum on the occasion of the exhibition The Invention of Timeat the Martorell Exhibition Center. "According to the laws of physics, nothing suggests that time is different from space. Therefore, the first question physicists asked themselves in the 19th century was why time moves in the direction it does. Furthermore, the theory of relativity says that time and space are not completely separate. Even so, in space I can be here. I can be there. I can be there. I can never return to the exact same point where I originally was. The only exception is if I'm near a black hole, but the black hole would tear us apart," he states.

There's no going back. "The second law of thermodynamics says that energy tends to disperse and disorder increases over time. If you tip over a glass of water, you can't undo it. It's an irreversible process. Matter tends toward more random configurations. And even if we could measure the initial position and velocity, you can see.

The more chaos, the harder it is to make predictions

However, our minds strive to foresee what will happen. We constantly make predictions, some more accurate than others. We make them to protect ourselves or to alter the future, but often these aspirations are thwarted. "When the world becomes chaotic, it's harder to predict. Can I predict what will happen with Donald Trump? No, I can't. Can I make a hopeful prediction and say that, in three years, we could be free of this and return to normal, or we could have a civil war? We've already seen signs of it in some states." "Many random things happen that are beyond our control. My son died in a sledding accident. If his trajectory had been slightly different, he wouldn't have died. This led to my divorce. In the long run, you can only recover. Small variations can cause enormous changes in the future," he adds.

What lies ahead is unpredictable to a certain extent. The physicist has long worked on making financial and economic predictions and is creating economic models with the aim of improving conditions for everyone. "Many people still believe in the fiction of the..."trickle-down economics"Popularized by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, and vote accordingly," says Farmer. Trickle-down economics holds that policies that disproportionately favor the wealthiest and large corporations will eventually benefit the economy as a whole. "If we stopped believing in it, we wouldn't vote for these leaders," he points out.

More sophisticated models are needed to predict the real economy. "One of our goals is to simulate the economy on a computer, with millions of people, businesses, wages, and consumption choices, and see how it would change if we modified policies such as taxes, the minimum wage, or renewable energy. This allows us to better predict the real-world effect of economic decisions," he says. Developing these models, he concludes, also serves to demonstrate that the economy can be managed better: "With greater equality and, at the same time, with increased production," he asserts.

Regarding the relationship between science and politics, he is critical of administrations that ignore scientific evidence: "With Trump, there's nothing to be done; he completely ignores science, it's insane." However, he recalls that there have been governments that have listened to scientific advisors. "I'm just doing my part: I'm a scientist, and I try to understand the relationship between cause and effect. Politics is someone else's job." He believes we don't use science enough to improve politics or the economy. "We need to become a conscious civilization. But we have a long way to go. Right now, we're mostly unconscious. We don't have a good model, nor do we understand how we can improve collective behavior. If we understood it better, we could have a shared vision and steer society toward that goal."