新概念英语（第四册，新版）学习（原文及全文翻译）——Lesson 14 - The Butterfly Effect（蝴蝶效应）

Lesson 14 (New Version) - The Butterfly Effect

Beyond two or three days, the world's best weather forecasts are speculative, and beyond six or seven they are worthless.

The Butterfly Effect is the reason. For small pieces of weather -- and to a global forecaster, small can mean thunderstorms and blizzards -- any prediction deteriorates rapidly. Errors and uncertainties multiply, cascading upward through a chain of turbulent features, from dust devils and squalls up to continent-size eddies that only satellites can see.

The modern weather models work with a grid of points of the order of sixty miles apart, and even so, some starting data has to be guessed, since ground stations and satellites cannot see everywhere. But suppose the earth could be covered with sensors spaced one foot apart, rising at one-foot intervals all the way to the top of the atmosphere. Suppose every sensor gives perfectly accurate readings of temperature, pressure, humidity, and any other quantity a meteorologist would want. Precisely at noon an infinitely powerful computer takes all the data and calculates what will happen at each point at 12:01, then 12:02, then 12:03...

The computer will still be unable to predict whether Princeton, New Jersey, will have sun or rain on a day one month away. At noon the spaces between the sensors will hide fluctuations that the computer will not know about, tiny deviations from the average. By 12:01, those fluctuations will already have created small errors one foot away. Soon the errors will have multiplied to the ten-foot scale, and so on up to the size of the globe.

JAMES GLEICK, Chaos

参考译文——蝴蝶效应

要预测未来两三天之后的天气，世界上最好的天气预报系统也有一定的猜测成分，超过六七天的天气预报简直可以说没什么用。

原因在于蝴蝶效应。即使对于小片区域的天气——对全球性的气象预报而言，“小片区域的天气”可指雷暴雨或暴风雪——任何预测的质量也会很快下降。小的误差和不可靠性不断累积，不断放大，最终就能形成一系列湍流特征，从小尘暴和暴风发展到只有卫星上才能看清全貌的席卷整块大陆的旋涡。

现代气象模型以一个坐标图来显示，图中各点大约间隔60英里。既使如此，有些初始资料也不得不依靠推测，因为地面工作站和卫星不可能覆盖地球上的每一个地方。假设地球上可以布满传感器，各传感器相隔1英尺，并按1英尺的间隔从地面一直排列到大气层的顶端。再假定每个传感器都能准确读出温度、气压、湿度和气象学家所需的任何其他数据。在正午时分，一个功能巨大的计算机搜集了所有的资料，并算出每一个点上12:01、12:02、12:03时可能出现的情况。

计算机无法推断出1个月以后的某一天，新泽西州的普林斯顿究竟是晴天还是雨天。正午时分，传感器之间的距离会掩盖波动（对平均值的细微偏离），而计算机对此无从知晓。到12：01时，这些波动就会对1英尺远的地方造成偏差。很快这种偏差会增加到10英尺的范围，如此等等，一直到全球的范围。

参考资料：

https://en-nce.xiao84.com/nce4/20307.html