Chaos Theory

LeGuin The Late of Heaven and the film of the same name about the subject, gives us Paul McGarr, Edward Lorenz, who was doing work on simple models of the climate of the Earth at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the early 60, took a step that was key. He used a computer and a simple set of deterministic equations to try and understand something about the weather. The rise in the use of fast computers after the Second World War was, and remains, vital in the joint development of chaos theory. Specifically, as noted a members. tripod.

com, in 1960, the meteorologist Edward Lorenz was, unintentionally, the second step towards the Chaos Theory. Enthusiast of the time, was studying law and atmospheric simulations from their most basic parameters. One day, to look more closely at a series of data, copied the numbers from the previous printing and introduced into the machine. The result was shocked. His time, a short distance from the starting point, differed somewhat from that obtained before, but after a few months-fiction-like patterns were losing completely. Lorenz discussed his numbers and discovered that the problem was in the decimals, the computer kept six, but to save space it just introduced three, convinced that the result hardly impaired. This innocent act established the end of the long-term forecasts showed the extreme sensitivity of nonlinear systems: the so-called "butterfly effect" or "sensitive dependence on initial conditions." It is the influence that the slightest disturbance in the initial state of the system can have on the outcome (Lopez, 2002).