Reading through Chaos...

The book begins by talking about a meteorologist called Edward Lorenz. He created a "toy weather". "He appreciated the patterns that come and go in the atmosphere, families of eddied and cyclones, always obeying mathematical rules, yet never repeating themselves."

"To make the patterns plain to see, Lorenz created a primitive kind of graphics. Instead of just printing out the usual lines of digits, he would have the machine print a certain number of blank spaces followed by the letter a. He would pick one variable - perhaps the direction of airstream. Gradually the a's marched down the roll of paper, swinging back and forth in a wavy line, making a long series of hills and valleys that represented the way the west wind would swing north and south across that continent, The orderliness of it, the recognizable cycles coming around again and again but never twice the same way, had a hypnotic fascination."

"A partiular kind of fluid motion inspired Lorenz's three equations: the rising of hot gas and liquid, known as convection. In the atmoshpere, convectiong stirs air heated by the sun-baked earth, and shimmering convective waves rise ghost-like above hot tar and radiators. Lorenz was just as happy talking about convection in a cup of coffee. [...] How can we calculate how quickly a cup of coffee will cool? [...] Convection in coffee becomes plainly visible when a little cream is dribbled into the cup. The swirls can be complicated. But the long-term destiny of such a system is obvious. [...] the motion must come to an inevitable stop."



"When a liquid or gas is heated from below, the fluid tends to organize itself into cylindrical rolls (left). Hot fluid rises on one seid, loses heat, and descends on the other side - the process of convection. When heat is turned up further (right), an instability sets in, and the rolls develop a wobble that moves back and forth along the length of the cylinders. At even higher temperatures, the flow becomes wilds and turbulent."

I thought the image of the fluid would be useful and so I took a picture of it with my phone. I'd like to find a better picture on the internet.

These quotes are helpful to my project because it is the first evidence I have to argue that pure randomness does exist. Also, fluid dynamics is mentioned so a different side of mathematics is involved, rather than probability which I have mainly come across. I feel as though I am making a lot of progress in terms of collecting differenct sources for my dissertation.