Weather and Chaos: The Work of Edward N. Lorenz

A twelve-minute film, by its own account the first about Lorenz made with scientists who worked alongside him, among them MIT’s Kerry Emanuel and Daniel Rothman. It starts from one question: why can we predict a solar eclipse centuries ahead but the weather only a week or two? The answer it follows is Lorenz’s discovery, made with an early digital computer, that some systems may never be predictable, “not because they are too complex, but because ‘chaos’ is built into their underlying math.” It also asks what the butterfly effect actually meant in his work, before it entered popular culture.