The Hockey Schtick
"According to
the originator of chaos theory, Edward Lorenz, you must know all the
current conditions of the atmosphere, everywhere within it, to predict
what the atmosphere will be doing in the distant future. “In view of the
inevitable inaccuracy and incompleteness of weather observations,
precise very-long-range forecasting would seem to be nonexistent,”
Lorenz concluded. So even if the molecules in the air all interacted
nonrandomly, in a totally cause-and-effect (deterministic) manner, you
still couldn’t predict with certainty what they would do or what the
weather would be."
Lorenz "was studying the equations that
describe the atmosphere, trying to figure out how well math could be
used to forecast the weather. He found that even if you had all the
right equations for describing changes in the atmosphere, you couldn’t
predict the weather very far into the future."
"When Lorenz ran
[a crude weather model] using the rounded numbers, he found dramatic
differences from the forecast using the full six-digit data. He had
discovered the key concept behind chaos: sensitive dependence on initial
conditions."
No comments:
Post a Comment