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 | Paul Hillsfrom Paul Hills, London Well David, your reply brought to mind one of the most poetic Renaissance paintings, Dosso Dossi's picture of Jupiter painting butterflies with his discarded thunderbolt lying on the ground - could Dosso have known that one flap of a butterly's wing could have set off a tornado or recharged the thunderbolt? Just in case you wanted to see the painting, it is in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna (or illustrated in P. Humfrey & M. Lucco, Dosso Dossi, p.171). Sorry ... this all takes us far from NOW. As ever, thank you for inspiration, Original message from David to Paul: Thank you Paul "The "Butterfly Effect" is often ascribed to Lorenz. In a paper in 1963 given to the New York Academy of Sciences he remarks: One meteorologist remarked that if the theory were correct, one flap of a seagull's wings would be enough to alter the course of the weather forever. By the time of his talk at the December 1972 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C. the sea gull had evolved into the more poetic butterfly - the title of his talk was: "Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wings in Brazil set off a Tornado in Texas? In the applet we also see a second incarnation of the Butterfly - the amazing geometric structure discovered by Lorenz in his numerical simulations of three very simple equations that now bear his name." David Read other contributors' letters:
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  David C. Wood | Professor of Philosophy |
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