In the 1960s the MIT meteorologist Edward Lorenz rediscovered Poincaré’s results on his own—once again, by accident. He was producing a computer model of weather dynamics, and he ran a simulation that projected a weather system a few days ahead. Later he tried to repeat the same simulation with the exact same model and what he thought were the same input parameters, but he got wildly different results. He initially attributed these differences to a computer bug or a calculation error. Computers then were heavier and slower machines that bore no resemblance to what we have today, so users were
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