Cluelessness Pt. 3
Monday, January 6
One more on this theme, from James Gleick’s Chaos: Making a New Science
The modem weather models work with a grid of points on the order of sixty miles apart, and even so, some starting data has to be guessed, since ground stations and satellites cannot see everhere. But suppose the earth could be covered with sensors spaced one foot apart, rising at one-foot intervals all the way to the top of the atmosphere. Suppose every sensor gives perfectly accurate readings of temperature, pressure, humidity, and any other quantity a meteorologist would want. Precisely at noon an infinitely powerful computer takes all the data and calculates what will happen at each point at 12:01, then 12:02, then 12:03
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.
Even for experienced meteorologists, all this runs against intuition. One of Lorenz’s oldest friends was Robert White, a fellow meteorologist at M.I.T. who later became head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Lorenz told him about the Butterfly Effect and what he felt it meant for long-range prediction. White gave Von Neumann’s answer.
“Prediction, nothing,” he said. “This is weather control.” His thought was that small modifications, well within human capability, could cause desired large-scale changes.
Lorenz saw it differently. Yes, you could change the weather. You could make it do something different from what it would otherwise have done. But if you did, then you would never know what it would otherwise have done. It would be like giving an extra shuffle to an already well-shuffled pack of cards. You know it will change your luck, but you don’t know whether for better or worse.
