It’s not an academic question any more to ask what’s going to happen to a cloud. People very much want to know–and that means there’s money available for it. That problem is very much within the realm of physics and it’s a problem very much of the same caliber. You’re looking at something complicated, and the present way of solving it is to try to look at as many points as you can, enough stuff to say where the cloud is, where the warm air is, what its velocity is, and so forth. Then you stick it into the biggest machine you can afford and you try to get an estimate of what it’s going to do next. But this is not very realistic. James Gleick
About This Quote

The cloud is a difficult problem in physics because there are so many aspects to it. In order to study the cloud, people will take air samples from different points in the atmosphere and they will use computers to analyze these air samples. They will also take radar measurements from satellites in the sky. Then they will use these data to find out what is going on with clouds and their movement in the atmosphere. The question that has been posed in this quote is what can be done to help develop a method of predicting what a cloud will do next.

Source: Chaos: Making A New Science

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