![]() 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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