re: #417 albusteve

he has nothing but words, tons of words

In this forum, that’s all any of us has.

But here’s a thought. Go to this link and reflect on the fact that what you’re looking at really does make concrete, exact sense to those of us with the technical training to follow. If it’s Greek to you, that’s OK; I can’t read Greek and maybe you can. But there’s things to know about the way the real world works that don’t come clear without long study and a considerable helping of talent.

wikipedia explains Lyapunov exponents…

About the simplest example I can think of in this vein is this: you take a number somewhere in the interval 0 to 1, and you double it and then subtract 1 if it’s greater than 1. That gives you a new number between 0 and 1. You repeat that move t times. If two numbers start very near each other, separated by some little quantity h, then after t steps, doing this rule to each, what can you say about how far apart they’ll be?

For bonus points, what does this have to do with the distinction between predicting the weather, and predicting the climate?