Accidental Roundup of Numbers Led to Chaos Theory

An accidental observation of a meticulous meteorologist, Edward Lorenz, has catalysed and spawned the birth of chaos theory.

To save time, he copied and pasted computer printout of weather data, then started the simulation halfway of its original course.

He left for coffee while the computer program continued to run.

One hour later, the computer program had output two month’s worth of simulated weather data. Much to Lorenz’s chagrin, the weather predictions bore no resemblance to the previous calculation. Lorenz painstakingly examined his deterministic equations with close scrutiny, but nothing seemed to be wrong.

Soon he realized the 6-digit numbers he entered (0.506127) were rounded off to 3 decimal places (0.506) on the computer printout.

Furthermore, the minuscule difference of 0.0001, equivalent to one part per 10,000, doubled in size every 4 days. By the second month, the simulated data no longer resembled the original figures.

There would be a thunderstorm in Kansas on a particular day in one forecast, while clear blue sky in another forecast. A tiny difference in the degree of accuracy had generated dramatically different weather forecasts.

Lorenz’s discovery completely overthrew the scientific consensus at the time off the window. The contemporary consensus rested upon Sir Issac Newton’s 1687 Principia and Pierre-Simon Laplace’s 1814 postulate that nature was a clockwork universe.

If an omniscient, omnipotent intellect knows of all the precise locations and momentums of every atom in the universe, Laplace believed that by applying the deterministic physical laws of nature, this intellect could predict the past and future of the universe.

Before Lorenz’s time, nature was prevalently thought of as a perfectly predictable system because of the laws of classical mechanics.

Related posts:

We provide technical documentation to AEM Content Authors when it comes to authoring the component. It is helpful for AEM authors to understand & authoring the functionality of components. Ordinarily, we see the help (?) icon on the component dialog which contains the help path of respective component documentation.

In the world of computer science, there are many programming languages, and no single language is superior to another. In other words, each language is best suited to solve certain problems, and in…