James Glieck Quotes That Will Inspire You to Live Your Best Life

1. Had he stopped with the Butterfly Effect, an image of predictability giving way to pure randomness, then Lorenz would have produced no more than a piece of very bad news. But Lorenz saw more than randomness embedded in his weather model. He saw a fine geometrical structure, order masquerading as randomness.

2. Implicitly, the mission of many twentieth-century scientists — biologists, neurologists, economists — has been to break their universes down into the simplest atoms that will obey scientific rules.

3. In science as in life, it is well known that a chain of events can have a point of crisis that could magnify small changes. But chaos meant that such points were everywhere. They were pervasive. In systems like the weather, sensitive dependence on initial conditions was an inescapable consequence of the way small scales intertwined with large.

4. That was acceptable, his father told him: you can always try to solve a problem by proving that no solution exists.

5. The Butterfly Effect was no accident; it was necessary.

6. The computer will still be unable to predict whether Princeton, New Jersey, will have sun or rain on a day one month away. At noon the spaces between the sensors will hide fluctuations that the computer will not know about, tiny deviations from the average. By 12:01, those fluctuations will already have created small errors one foot away. Soon the errors will have multiplied to the ten-foot scale, and so on up to the size of the globe.

7. The repetitions were never quite exact. There was pattern, with disturbances. An orderly disorder.