Welcome to Quantum Magazine's podcast.

Each episode we bring you stories about developments in science and mathematics.

I'm Susan Vallett.

The history of chaos theory isn't how it's always played out in textbooks.

It turns out women were a driving force behind it.

A little over half a century ago, chaos started spilling out of a famous experiment.

It came from the vacuum tubes and diodes of a Royal Mickby, LGP-30.

This desk computer was literally the size of a desk. It weighed some 800 pounds and sounded like a propeller plane.

It was so loud that it even got its own office on the fifth floor in Building 24, a drab structure

near the center of MIT.

Instructions for the computer came from down the hall from the office of a meteorologist

named Edward Norton Lorenz.

The story of chaos is usually told like this.

Using the LGP 30, Lorenz made paradigm wrecking discoveries.

In 1961, he programmed a set of equations into the computer that would simulate future weather.

But he found that tiny differences in starting values could lead to drastically different outcomes.

This sensitivity to initial conditions was later popularized as the butterfly effect.

It made predicting the far future a fool's errand,

but Lorenz also found that these unpredictable outcomes weren't quite random either.

When visualized in a certain way, they

seemed to prowl around a shape called a strange attractor. About a decade later, chaos theory

started to catch on in scientific circles. Scientists soon encountered other unpredictable natural

...