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When Ed entered Dartmouth College in 1934, he had long ago made up his mind to be
a mathematician. He graduated with a bachelors degree in mathematics in 1938 and entered Harvard to continue his study of math. With the outbreak of World War II, Lorenz
joined the Army Air Corps, who assigned him to attend army meteorology classes at MIT.
He learned to regard the weather as a combination of density, pressure, temperature,
three-dimensional wind velocities, and the atmospheres gaseous, liquid, and solid content.
The equations that describe this host of variables define the current weather conditions. The
rates of change in these equations define the changing weather pattern.
What Lorenz was not taught, and only much later discovered, was that no one knew
how to use these nonlinear dynamic meteorology equations to actually predict weather and
that most thought it could not be done. The equations were too complex and required too
much initial and boundary data.
Lorenz tried to apply the dynamic equations to predict the motion of storms. As computers were not commonly available in the early 1950s, most of this work was carried out
on blackboards and with slide rules and paper and pencil. Each calculation was tediously
time-consuming. Lorenz was never able to reach any meaningful results while handcalculating these equations.
In 1958 Lorenz obtained that Royal-McBee LGP-30 computer (about the size of a
large desk) to develop his sets of dynamic, nonlinear model equations. The results of those
computer simulations showed that tiny initial differences amplified over time, rather than
gradually normalizing out. If the model was right, weather was chaotic and inherently
unpredictable.
Several years of atmospheric testing convinced Lorenz and others in his department
that he and his model were correct. The atmosphere was a chaotic rather than a predictable
system (such as the system of interactions between inorganic chemicals, or the physical pull
of gravity). A drive to use a new tool to complete an old project had turned into one of the
most profound discoveries for the science of meteorology.
Lorenz will always be known as the person who discovered the true nature of the atmosphere and who thereby discovered the limits of accuracy of weather forecasting.
Fun Facts: Actor Jeff Goldblum played the role of Ian Malcolm in the
Jurassic Park movies. Malcolm is a mathematician who specializes in
the study of the chaos theory and refers to himself as a chaotician. A
central theme of these movies is proving that Malcolms chaos theories
are right.
More to Explore
Fuller, John. Thors Legions. Boston: American Meteorological Society, 1990.
Gleick, James. Chaos: Making a New Science. New York: Viking, 1991.
Lorenz, Ed. The Essence of Chaos. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1993.
. A Scientist by Choice. In Proceedings of the Kyoto Prize for 1991. Kyoto,
Japan: The Inamori Foundation, 1991.
Parker, Berry. Chaos in the Cosmos. New York: Plenum Press, 1996.
Quarks
Year of Discovery: 1962
What Is It? Subatomic particles that make up protons and neutrons.
Who Discovered It? Murry Gell-Mann
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