Ten small things that changed the world.
A butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil.Weeks later there is a tornado in Texas.
Winter, 1961. A man called Edward Lorenz worked at a university in America. He had a computer the size of a fridge. He used it to guess the weather.
One day he wanted to run part of a guess again.
So he typed the numbers in a second time, copying them off a printout. But the printout was short. The computer had been using 0.506127. He typed 0.506.
That is a difference of about one part in four thousand. Nothing.
He pressed go and went to get a coffee.
When he came back, the computer had made two months of weather. It looked nothing like the first run. Different storms. Different days.
So he checked the machine. The machine was fine. He checked his sums. They were fine too.
The only thing that had changed was that one small number.
He had not broken the computer. He had found something.
You can know all the rules. You can have a perfect machine. And you still cannot say what the weather will do next month.
Not because you are bad at it. Because you can never measure today exactly. A tiny mistake today turns into a huge mistake later.
Picture two snooker balls. You hit them almost the same way. After one bounce they are nearly together. After ten bounces they are at opposite ends of the table.
Nothing strange happened. The small gap just doubled, every bounce.
That is why weather forecasts stop being much use after about ten days. Not because computers are weak. Because of the coffee.
Lorenz did not pick the butterfly. He turned up to a talk in 1972 with no title for it. A man called Philip Merilees wrote one for him. Lorenz had been using a seagull.
He said the opposite of what he gets quoted for. In that same talk: “If a flap of a butterfly’s wing can be instrumental in generating a tornado, it can equally well be instrumental in preventing a tornado.” Asked straight out whether a butterfly really can cause a tornado, he said: “Even today I am unsure of the proper answer.”
And it cannot. A butterfly moves a very small amount of air. That push is so small it turns into heat and vanishes long before it could grow into a storm. No weather model has ever made a butterfly cause a tornado.
Weather has equations. History does not. Nobody can run 1989 again with one thing changed and watch what happens instead.
But there is something nearly as good.
When a rocket blows up, or a bank loses half a billion dollars in an hour, somebody has to find out why. It is the law. They go back and back until they find the smallest thing that started it, and then they write it down.
Those reports are where the next ten stories come from.
Every number here comes from the report named at the end of that story. Where reports disagree, the story says so. The pictures are made images of the objects. They are not photographs of the real things.
Send it. If it holds up, it goes on the page with your name on it. The only rule is the one the ten had to pass: something has to be written down somewhere, by somebody who had to find out what happened.
Long Story Short. Cut a real sentence to the bone without breaking it. A new one every day, and it takes about a minute.
No pitch, no digest. Just the next one when it is finished.