Like the results of a wing’s flutter, the influence of Lorenz’s work was nearly imperceptible at first but would resonate widely. And the butterfly effect, also known as “sensitive dependence on initial conditions,” has a profound corollary: forecasting the future can be nearly impossible. The idea came to be known as the “butterfly effect” after Lorenz suggested that the flap of a butterfly’s wings might ultimately cause a tornado. The unexpected result led Lorenz to a powerful insight about the way nature works: small changes can have large consequences. To his surprise, that tiny alteration drastically transformed the whole pattern his program produced, over two months of simulated weather. On this day, Lorenz was repeating a simulation he’d run earlier-but he had rounded off one variable from. The computer model was based on 12 variables, representing things like temperature and wind speed, whose values could be depicted on graphs as lines rising and falling over time.
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