Chapter 1

Foundations

Every autobiography is the fragment of a theory.

—Leigh Gilmore, The Limits of Autobiography1

The young meteorologist started his computer run and walked down the hall for a cup of coffee. When he returned, the direction of both his life and his science had radically shifted. Ed Lorenz was experimenting with models of the weather on an early desk-sized computer. His research project called for him to input variables for atmospheric conditions and then let the computer grind out future weather patterns according to well-established algorithms based on meteorological laws. On this occasion, he decided to repeat an earlier computation in order to examine longer-term output in more detail. Normally, the computer ran these calculations ...

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