The atmosphere is such a roiling mess that it defies analysis even by today’s most sophisticated meteorological algorithms. But its complexity didn’t stop the French scientist Pierre-Simon Laplace from cracking one simple aspect of atmospheric behavior in the late 1700s. Despite never seeing a global weather map, Laplace developed a theory predicting that continent-size pressure waves would periodically sweep around the globe.
“Atmospheric modeling of the pencil-and-paper kind was pretty damn crude until the 20th century, and yet Laplace managed to do this,” said
David Randall, an atmospheric scientist at Colorado State University. “I think it’s astounding.”
