And specifically to the point, here’s a passage from James Gleick, “Chaos, Making a New Science”, p. 25:“How can we calculate how quickly a cup of coffee will cool? If the coffee is just warm, its heat will dissipate without any hydrodynamic motion at all. The coffee remains in a steady state. But if it is hot enough, a convective overturning will bring hot coffee from the bottom of the cup to the cooler surface. Convection in the 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. Because the heat dissipates, the because friction slows a moving fluid, the motion must come to an inevitable stop. Lorenz drily told a gathering of scientists, “We might have trouble forecasting the temperature of the coffee one minute in advance, but we should have little difficulty in forecasting it an hour ahead.” Or, as Hiram says, I can’t predict what you’ll be doing in an hour, but I’ve got a pretty good idea what you’ll be doing in a hundred years.
And specifically to the point, here’s a passage from James Gleick, “Chaos, Making a New Science”, p. 25:“How can we calculate how quickly a cup of coffee will cool? If the coffee is just warm, its heat will dissipate without any hydrodynamic motion at all. The coffee remains in a steady state. But if it is hot enough, a convective overturning will bring hot coffee from the bottom of the cup to the cooler surface. Convection in the 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. Because the heat dissipates, the because friction slows a moving fluid, the motion must come to an inevitable stop. Lorenz drily told a gathering of scientists, “We might have trouble forecasting the temperature of the coffee one minute in advance, but we should have little difficulty in forecasting it an hour ahead.” Or, as Hiram says, I can’t predict what you’ll be doing in an hour, but I’ve got a pretty good idea what you’ll be doing in a hundred years.