Name: The essence of chaos
ISBN: 9780203271162

The essence of chaos

The study of chaotic systems has become a major scientific pursuit in recent years, shedding light on the apparently random behaviour observed in fields as diverse as climatology and mechanics. InThe Essence of Chaos Edward Lorenz, one of the founding fathers of Chaos and the originator of its seminal concept of the Butterfly Effect, presents his own landscape of our current understanding of the field. Lorenz presents everyday examples of chaotic behaviour, such as the toss of a coin, the pinball's path, the fall of a leaf, and explains in elementary mathematical strms how their essentially chaotic nature can be understood. His principal example involved the construction of a model of a board sliding down a ski slope. Through this model Lorenz illustrates chaotic phenomena and the related concepts of bifurcation and strange attractors. He also provides the context in which chaos can be related to the similarly emergent fields of nonlinearity, complexity and fractals. As an early pioneer of chaos, Lorenz also provides his own story of the human endeavour in developing this new field. He describes his initial encounters with chaos through his study of climate and introduces many of the personalities who contributed early breakthroughs. His seminal paper, "Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wing in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?" is published for the first time.

What Hacker News says

photochemsynJul 2023

The El Nino pattern is not an oscillation... it is a fluctuation. Nobody has ever been able to predict the next El Nino based on the historical record. That's typical of fluctuations driven by non-linear phenomena. These are systems that display sensitive depenence to initial condition. Even a trivial research effort should have revealed this. Go read Edward Lorenz 1995 Essence of Chaos.

https://uwapress.uw.edu/book/9780295975146/the-essence-of-ch...

This is really embarrassingly ignorant and incorrect. Classic case of experts in one field having no idea of what's been going on in another field for decades and so making fools of themselves.

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photochemsynJan 2023

> "it's tricky to prove that a weather result would or would not have happened if the cloud seeding effort didn't take place."

It's notable that weather modification programs of the 1950s were iniated before the discovery of sensitive dependence on initial conditions (popularly known as 'chaos') in weather systems, by Edward Lorenz. His 1995 book, "The Essence of Chaos" is still the best overview of the subject:

https://uwapress.uw.edu/book/9780295975146/the-essence-of-ch...

The 2010 book by JR Fleming, "Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control" is a good review of failed weather modification schemes in the past:

https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/1028

The problem is kind of like that of tossing pebbles down a mountainside - regardless of whether there's an avalanche, you can't tell if the avalanche would have happened anyway, or if the 100th pebble launched triggered the avalanche. Putting enough energy into the system to guarantee a result of some kind (a stick of dynamite for the avalanche analogy) is prohibitive since weather systems tend to contain a gigantic amount of energy.

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photochemsynOct 2022

I don't think Palmer has ever published anything on quantum mechanical systems, so this claim seems questionable and might be some kind of ideological viewpoint. Seems to wander well beyond the author's sphere of expertise.

Palmer has nevertheless done a lot of interesting work in atmospheric and oceanic systems. Here's one, which also explains why current warming trends would persist for decades even if we halted all fossil fuel use tomorrow, something many seem to not have grasped:

"Uncertainty in Weather and Climate Prediction", Slingo & Palmer (2011)

> "In terms of seasonal to decadal prediction, the predictability of the system resides primarily in the oceans, where the greater thermal capacity and the much longer dynamical time scales for adjustment impart a memory to the coupled ocean–atmosphere system, which exceeds that for the atmosphere alone by several orders of magnitude. Nevertheless, the ocean, like the atmosphere, is a chaotic, nonlinear system, and so an ensemble approach to seasonal to decadal prediction is fundamental to forecasting on these time scales also."

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsta.201...

Anyone wanting a solid introduction to the notion of chaos in fluid dynamics should look at work of the original researcher who discovered the phenomenon, Ed Lorenz (1995) The Essence of Chaos.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/154291.The_Essence_of_Ch...

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m0nasticApr 2011

I'm curious if you liked Lorenz's book more (The Essence of Chaos).

As someone woefully unqualified to critique either, I'd be interested in the opinion of someone closer to the subject matter.

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