Butterfly maker, Wheeler – broken – John Wheeler and Edward Lorentz died this week.
John Wheeler was a collaborator of Einstein who brought General Relativity out of ‘relative’ obscurity, and searched for a unified field theory. He dies in the same year that a major experimental milestone this search, the Large Hadron Collider, is switched on. There is a long interview of Wheeler preserved for prosperity on the fabulous People’s Archive. In this segment, after the link, he talks about coining the term ‘Black Hole’.
Edward Lorentz was the father of Chaos Theory, the person who discovered, the ‘Butterfly Effect’, hugely complex and unpredictable behaviors that appeared when the results of very simple ‘toy’ mathematical models of weather patterns were fed back into themselves. I can’t find a single video of Lorentz, unfortunately.