Getting a handle on the problem of the two Tareks begins with the story of an eclectic mathematician and meteorologist working at MIT in 1961. Edward Lorenz had been using then-cutting-edge computers to try to crack weather for about a year. Weather was a tricky problem. While events such as the return of Halley’s Comet could be precisely calculated decades in advance, and tides and eclipses had surrendered long ago to scientific prediction, weather remained elusive. Lorenz hoped that the new technology would enable him to find a similar level of clockwork determinism in the Earth’s climate.
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