Science discovers a complex world
The ideas of interconnectedness and chaos in nature are recent discoveries in scientific and academic philosophies that have traditionally viewed reality as clockwork; however, these ideas are hardly new to humanity. Regardless, traditional science has attempted to identify and explain the predictable, while dismissing irregularities as errors in measurement, until some started to notice universal patterns in irregularities. Gleick (2008) told how the US government in the 1980s attempted to implement Von Newman’s vision that small modifications in variables could allow humans to control the weather. However, the weather control experiments failed because even the most complex forecasting systems could produce a predictability window of only three days, with seven-day forecasts being useless.
The reasons for the failed experiment could be found in Lorenz’s observations while running computerized weather simulations in 1961. Lorenz expected to be able to predict the behavior of his weather simulation by entering the same variables. However, minute differences caused by computer rounding errors caused random behavior that produced unpredictable results in different trajectories that appeared to start with the same initial conditions. In other words, Lorentz found that small differences in initial conditions had a large impact on how events unfolded. This “sensitive dependence on initial conditions” (Gleick, 2008, p. 23) would become known as the Butterfly Effect and served as the foundation of chaos theory.
Like most revolutionary scientific discoveries, Lorentz’s observations were hardly original, but his unique contribution to Western science was that the same kind of sensitivity to small changes can affect even simple systems. The resulting chaos theory helped to show how chance appears in a deterministic world; that predictability requires perfect knowledge of the universe and exact laws of nature. Even in the unlikely case that natural laws become clear, humanity will not likely ever know the state of the entire universe (Strogatz, 2008). As stated by Lorentz, (1963) “any physical system that behaves non-periodically is unpredictable” (Gleick, 2008, p. 18).