About a decade later, chaos theory started to catch on in scientific circles. Scientists soon encountered other unpredictable natural systems that looked random even though they weren’t: the ...

And that compounding is what leads to chaos. A shocking series of discoveries in the 1960s and ‘70s showed just how easy it is to create chaos.

Chaos theory is why we will never be able to perfectly predict the weather. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works.