My Alter Ego's blog

Edward N. Lorenz, a Meteorologist and a Father of Chaos Theory, Dies at 90.

When I read James Gleick's Chaos (a book I recommend to anyone who hasn't read it), one of the things that most struck me was the story of Dr. Lorenz and his weather simulation program, and how his insight into "sensitive dependence on initial conditions" led him to realize that long-term weather prediction was impossible. It was interesting to see how, in the years following the publication of Chaos, a phrase that Lorenz coined to describe sensitive dependence on initial conditions--the Butterfly Effect--entered mainstream consciousness and became the underlying premise for a movie starring Ashton Kutcher. I wonder what Dr. Lorenz thought of all that. Odd to think that the ripples generated from an obscure scientist's puzzlement over divergent numbers on a computer printout would lead to the production of a Hollywood movie, a somewhat-improbable series of events that are, in an oddly recursive sense, the perfect example of the very phenomenon that Dr. Lorenz discovered.