Modern-day oracles with a supercomputer
Humans have always sought to see the future and have called on many aids, from the movements of the stars to the fuzzy midsection of a woolly bear caterpillar (a wider brown band supposedly meant a milder winter). Sometimes the divination is all in fun; remember those paper “cootie catcher” fortune-tellers from childhood? But at other times, our lives depend on it. For millennia, humans have closely observed changes in the weather in an attempt to deduce patterns that might help predict the next drought, flood or hurricane. By about 650 B.C., the Babylonians had developed weather predictions based on the appearance of clouds and other atmospheric phenomena. Aristotle followed with Meteorologica, a treatise based on his observations of the weather as well as his study of astronomy and chemistry. Starting in the Renaissance, scientists invented tools to more precisely monitor weather, forming the basis of atmospheric physics. Nicholas of Cusa designed...