I would guess that Lorentz’s work on deterministic chaos does not get many counterfactual discovery points. He noticed the chaos in his research because of his interactions with a computer doing simulations. This happened in 1961. Now, the question is, how many people were doing numerical calculations on computer in 1961? It could plausibly have been ten times as many by 1970. A hundred times as many by 1980? Those numbers are obviously made up but the direction they gesture in is my point. Chaos was a field that was made ripe for discovery by the computer. That doesn’t take anything away from Lorentz’s hard work and intelligence, but it does mean that if he had not taken the leap we can be fairly confident someone else would have. Put another way: If Lorentz is assumed to have had a high counterfactual impact, then it becomes a strange coincidence that chaos was discovered early in the history of computers.
I would guess that Lorentz’s work on deterministic chaos does not get many counterfactual discovery points. He noticed the chaos in his research because of his interactions with a computer doing simulations. This happened in 1961. Now, the question is, how many people were doing numerical calculations on computer in 1961? It could plausibly have been ten times as many by 1970. A hundred times as many by 1980? Those numbers are obviously made up but the direction they gesture in is my point. Chaos was a field that was made ripe for discovery by the computer. That doesn’t take anything away from Lorentz’s hard work and intelligence, but it does mean that if he had not taken the leap we can be fairly confident someone else would have. Put another way: If Lorentz is assumed to have had a high counterfactual impact, then it becomes a strange coincidence that chaos was discovered early in the history of computers.
I buy this argument.