Managing Software for Growth: Without Fear, Control, and the Manufacturing Mindset

Weird Science

One of the first people to notice that something was amiss with Newtonian explanations of the world, one of the first to notice what became known as chaos, was a research meteorologist at MIT in the 1960s named Edward Lorenz. Being a meteorologist, he wanted to predict the weather. His scientific training told him he should be able to. He simply needed to find the rules that would let him forecast accurately.

To do that he created what he called “toy weather” on a primitive computer—a simplistic mathematical weather system defined by only twelve variables related by a handful of simple rules. After running his program many times, he came to a conclusion that everybody already knows instinctively: You can't predict the weather accurately ...