Daily Archives: February 24, 2011

Just Tell Me What it IS!

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Abstruse Goose: Moment of Clarity(?) – part 2

(Maybe it’s just me, but for some reason only half the page is displaying; at first I thought maybe it was a joke I wasn’t getting, but the text that normally appears under the image was missing as well. In case you have similar viewing issues, it is actually a nine panel cartoon. I saw the whole thing here, in the Feb 22 cartoons)

Spin is one of the harder things to explain to non-physicists or science amateurs, because the conversation invariably goes back to “what’s really going on here?” Sorry, dude, it’s quantum mechanics. That request can’t be processed.

The Discovery of Chaos

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Lorenz and the Butterfly Effect

Lorenz soon found that his error was a seemingly trivial one. He had rounded the numbers he wrote down to three decimal places, while the computer stored values to six decimal places. Simply rounding to the nearest thousandth had created a tiny error that propagated throughout the system, creating drastic differences in the final result. This is the origin of the term “butterfly effect”, where infinitesimal initial inputs can cause huge results. Lorenz had discovered the first chaotic dynamical system.