Certainty in Alchemy

"We have a phenomenon very like that in industry," Galiagante said when she was done. "It's called green thumb syndrome. It sometimes occurs when a new plant establishes a complicated but known procedure for the first time. Your people set it up perfectly but nothing happens. The oxides won't reduce, the catalysts won't… cattle. Punishing the technicians accomplishes nothing. The reaction simply refuses to run. Eventually management will fly in somebody who's worked on the procedure before ...

 The Origin of Chaos Theory

Lorenz and his team were working to develop a weather forecasting program on an early computer known as a Royal McBee LGP-30.21 They thought they were getting somewhere until the computer started spitting out erratic results. They began with what they thought was exactly the same data and ran what they thought was exactly the same code—but the program would forecast clear skies over Kansas in one run, and a thunderstorm in the next. After spending weeks double-checking their hardware and t...