Edward Lorenz
I just noticed that Edward Lorenz died. I've long admired his contributions to chaos theory. Which brings something to mind: if I had to make a list of the top three scientific principles most likely to be invoked in inapt situations by non-scientists who don't really know what they're talking about (and I'm probably guilty of this on occasion), the list would be: 1) relativity; 2) Heisenberg uncertainty principle; and 3) chaos theory.
posted by Stuart Buck at
10:00 AM
1 Comments:
I'd add to that the 2nd law of thermodynamics. I've heard people talk about it as if it is some general rule that order always decays into disorder. This simplification misses the fact that the 2nd law only applies to a closed system, which is an important distinction.
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