Posted on 04/16/2008 8:11:13 PM PDT by mikrofon
Edward Lorenz, an MIT meteorologist who tried to explain why it is so hard to make good weather forecasts and wound up unleashing a scientific revolution called chaos theory, died April 16 of cancer at his home in Cambridge. He was 90.
A professor at MIT, Lorenz was the first to recognize what is now called chaotic behavior in the mathematical modeling of weather systems. In the early 1960s, Lorenz realized that small differences in a dynamic system such as the atmosphere--or a model of the atmosphere--could trigger vast and often unsuspected results.
These observations ultimately led him to formulate what became known as the butterfly effect--a term that grew out of an academic paper he presented in 1972 entitled: "Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?"
Lorenz's early insights marked the beginning of a new field of study that impacted not just the field of mathematics but virtually every branch of science--biological, physical and social. In meteorology, it led to the conclusion that it may be fundamentally impossible to predict weather beyond two or three weeks with a reasonable degree of accuracy.
(Excerpt) Read more at web.mit.edu ...
Someone at MIT's gonna get it for that....
Wow, had one of those “THAT guy was still alive?” moments.
Ah... But Al Gore can predict what the weather will be like in fifty years. LOL
It’s not just about the weather.
The behavior of liquids or saturated steam, rushing through pipes at high velocity, is chaotic. Interior erosion of piping, such as those in power plants, occasionally rupture without warning because of the difficulty in predicting where such erosion will occurr. People die becuase of these accidents, mostly due to the very high temperatures of the water or saturated steam.
Sad news here.
sad ping here
Bump for a great man.
Now thats funny
Very sad my mom said if we farted it would rain in a day or so
RIP.
LOL
(However, I don’t think the Butterfly Effect had anything to do with confusing ballots in FL ;)
You’re the one. You caused Katrina.
Quite a man, may he R.I.P.
One thing I have wondered (without possessing the mathematical or technical knowledge to answer this):
If a change of something like 0.0001 can produce dramatic effects somewhere down the line (some of idea of the “butterfly effect” I hope) then there would seem to be enormous indeterminacies in trying to assess anything as vast and complex as the earth’s climate.
i.e., can any of the current “climate change models” come ever remotely close to representing all of the complexities of earth’s actual climate?
But-but-but- we know global warming is true!
Read James Gleick's Chaos back in the late 80's - good book for understanding chaos theory from a layman's point of view.
Positive feedback oscillators are used in every nearly every radio and every computer in existence, but they work in tightly controlled circuits. When tight control is lost the circuit function goes nuts.
Everyone has heard squealing and crackling in public address systems from too much feedback. That is chaotic math at work on the feedback loop. Some feedback gives squeals, just a little more feedback gives crackling, and just a little more feedback give popping and banging noises as the amplifier saturates at its limits. This phenomenon is not caused by electrical laws but by mathematical laws acting on signal levels and the feedback loop parameters.
Seeing a moving graph output of a running positive feedback system is a revelation - aha! this is how nuclear chain reactions work, massive amounts of positive feedback causing massive spikes in output.
Chaotic math also seems to work on the human ego - too much positive feedback results in chaotic behavior.
:o)
Two or three weeks? Hell, most of the time they can’t get it right within two or three DAYS. I can’t even count the number of times I’ve canceled weekend plans because the forecast I saw on Wednesday was dead wrong.
Bump for morning reading.
That's not to say that chaos theory (or its descendant, complexity theory) isn't relevant--it definitely is! It means that we have to develop our models with these characteristics in mind.
In any case, RIP, Dr. Lorenz.
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