At the time, though, few could see it. Lorenz described it to Willem Malkus, a professor of applied mathematics at M.I.T., a gentlemanly scientist with a grand capacity for appreciating the work of colleagues. Malkus laughed and said, “Ed, we know—we know very well—that fluid convection doesn’t do that at all.” The complexity would surely be damped out, Malkus told him, and the system would settle down to steady, regular motion. “Of course, we completely missed the point,” Malkus said a generation later—years after he had built a real Lorenzian waterwheel in his basement laboratory to show
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