Thinking Beyond Science

Lorenz – Research Meteorologist who established the theoretical basis of weather and climate predictability, as well as the basis for computer-aided atmospheric physics and meteorology.

Laws of nature v/s Laws of Astronomy, both are well known.

Global Atmospheric Research Program was a fifteen-year international research programme led by the World Meteorological Organization and the International Council of Scientific Unions. It began in 1967.

When creating the first computers, Von Neumenn had overlooked the possibility of chaos, with instability at every point.

In weather systems, when a weather system comes arbitrarily close to a state that it has passed through before, it would stay arbitrarily close to the patterns that followed. The Butterfly effect acquired a technical name : sensitive dependence on the initial conditions.

The Lorenz Attractor In popular media the ‘butterfly effect’ stems from the real-world implications of the Lorenz attractor, i.e. that in any physical system, in the absence of perfect knowledge of the initial conditions (even the minuscule disturbance of the air due to a butterfly flapping its wings), our ability to predict its future course will always fail. This underscores that physical systems can be completely deterministic and yet still be inherently unpredictable even in the absence of quantum effects. The shape of the Lorenz attractor itself, when plotted graphically, may also be seen to resemble a butterfly.

In Chaos Theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in the later stage.