Be present, as it resenawww.elpais.com, Lorenz, meteorologist, discovered in 1960 that small differences in a dynamic system as the atmosphere can cause enormous changes. In 1972, this American scientist presented a study entitled: can the flapping of the wings of a butterfly in Brazil cause a tornado in Texas?. Its findings opened a new field of studies that included virtually all branches of the sciences, and in the specific case of weather, led to the conviction that it was impossible to predict the weather beyond two or three weeks with some degree of accuracy. To demonstrate that certain systems have limits of prediction, Lorenz ended with the Cartesian universe and it gave rise to the third scientific revolution of the 20th century, after the theories of relativity and quantum physics, said Kerry Emanuel, Professor of atmospheric science at MIT.
During his professional life he received countless awards for his scientific work, among them, the Crafoord prize that grants the Sweden Royal Academy of Sciences created in recognition of scientific work not included in the Nobel prizes. In 1991, he received the Kyoto Prize for planetary science and Earth. On that occasion, the jury that decided the award noted that Lorenz had his most daring scientific achievement to discover the Deterministic chaos, a principle which brought with him the most dramatic changes in human vision of nature from the time of the English naturalist Isaac Newton. Definitely for meteorology, their discoveries meant the acceptance that there is no overall security in forecasts. But also other sciences were shaking for their studies, and that Lorenz ran into the chaos theory by chance. During the repetition of a few calculations on the computer on a climate model, it erred and placed a figure barely changed and as a result got two completely different results. He died at the age of 90.