13. Chaos 13. Chaos


Chaos, a new branch of mathematics, began in the 1960s. It explains things like the shape of a snowflake, Jupiter’s great red spot, heartbeats, brain waves, disease epidemics, traffic jams, the pattern of smoke rising or water falling from a tap. Much of the background work for chaos was done by people trying to predict the weather.


← chaos starts ← smooth flow ← chaos starts Tap Kettle ← smooth flow


The Weather


In the 1950s, there was optimism about weather forecasting. It was hoped we would soon be able to predict the weather for months and years in advance, that aeroplanes would seed clouds to make rain and that scientists would even be able to stop rain.


In 1961 a scientist named Edward Lorenz (1917 – 2008) put weather data into computer programs to predict the weather. Then he put the same data into the same programs but rounded a certain figure off to the fourth decimal place. He found the new weather prediction was almost the same for two to three days but then changed dramatically, caused by the effects of chaos. Small changes in the initial conditions of a system can lead to huge differences in the outcome (the weather a few days later in this case). His conclusion has been called the ‘butterfly effect’. This effect claims that if a butterfly flaps its wings in a garden in Brazil it will set in place a sequence of chaotic events which will affect the weather worldwide in a few days’ time, possibly causing a tornado in Texas.


Lorenz immediately knew that the future of long-range weather forecasting was doomed.


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