Chaos Part of 4/31 e he’d typed in .506. But the computer’s c | Blinkist Summary Book

Chaos
Part of 4/31

e he’d typed in .506. But the computer’s calculations actually ran up to the sixth decimal point: .506127. Somehow this tiny difference was enough to throw the weather prediction completely off the previous track.
Lorenz was shocked. Like other scientists at the time he believed that small fluctuations didn’t have big effects on large-scale systems like the weather. Instead his mistake revealed how unstable unpredictable and chaotic these systems really could be.
Lorenz dubbed it the butterfly effect . This means systems like our weather are so sensitive to small disturbances that a butterfly flapping its wings in Beijing today could be responsible for a raging storm next month in New York. In science-speak this is also known as “sensitive dependence on initial conditions” – and it became the cornerstone of the new field of chaos theory.
Simple nonlinear systems can produce incredibly complex behavior.
Sensitive dependence on initial conditions is everywhere. If you’ve ever mis