5/30/2023 0 Comments Chaos james gleick bookOne day in 1961, he wanted to rerun a simulation from the day before. To study how they behaved over time, Lorenz would pick one of those variables and print out a graph that plotted its fluctuations. Conditions like temperature and airstream were represented by numbers. Lorenz’s weather simulation was pretty simple – it didn’t even have clouds. And he stumbled on something deeply unsettling. He wanted to study how weather patterns change over time. In 1960, Edward Lorenz began running a weather simulation on his brand new computer. Here’s the key message: Meteorologist Edward Lorenz became the intellectual father of chaos theory after discovering the unpredictability of weather. It took a mathematically-minded meteorologist to demonstrate this. They’d no idea how fragile, unstable, and chaotic physical systems like the Earth’s weather really are. But they thought that with good enough data and a lot of computer power, it would be possible to calculate the weather for months ahead – at least roughly. Of course, they knew that it was hard to get perfect measurements on something as complicated as the weather. This hope lay in new computer technology. In the 1950s, scientists were highly optimistic about the possibilities of predicting – even manipulating – the weather. How much do you trust the weather forecast?
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