David Nezelek
Cibbuano
TyronneThe Butterfly Effect
May 3rd 2008 23:15
one butterfly
“Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?”
A Tornado
Edward Lorenz was an MIT professor, as well as a meteorologist, and in 1961 he accidentally came to the conclusion that weather forecasting was never going to be an exact science.
As the New York Times recently noted, while using a computer program to simulate weather conditions, Dr. Lorenz started a second simulation,
“...One day he wanted to repeat one of the simulations for a longer time, but instead of repeating the whole simulation, he started the second run in the middle, typing in numbers from the first run for the initial conditions.
“The computer program was the same, so the weather patterns of the second run should have exactly followed those of the first. Instead, the two weather trajectories quickly diverged on completely separate paths.
“At first, he thought the computer was malfunctioning. Then he realized that he had not entered the initial conditions exactly. The computer stored numbers to an accuracy of six decimal places, like 0.506127, while, to save space, the printout of results shortened the numbers to three decimal places, 0.506.
“When typing in the new conditons, Dr. Lorenz had entered the rounded-off numbers, and even this small discrepancy, of less than 0.1 percent, completely changed the end result.
Even though his model was vastly simplified, Dr. Lorenz realized that this meant perfect weather prediction was a fantasy. “
NYT
Edward Lorenz
He wrote a paper on the effect titled “Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?
The theory of Edward Lorenz was popularized in a Ray Bradbury Bradbury's Sound of Thunder
The eminent scientist recently passed away at age 90.
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