His Death was Unpredictable

(Props to Craig)

Or
Butterfly Defect
(Kudos to Craig)
Edward Lorenz, pioneer of the chaos theory concept that Michael Crichton beat to an unmerciful death in Jurassic Park, has died at the age of 90. Lorenz developed a mathematical model for how air moves in the atmosphere, then discovered that subtle changes in variables yielded wildly divergent results, which he termed the butterfly effect, a concept later stomped to a brutal end by the Ashton Kutcher nosebleed-fest film. Lorenz described the phenomenon in his page turner Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow, and the complex dynamical object is now known as the Lorenz attractor, which was the nickname of Italian screen siren sirer Carlo Ponti as I cruelly smack my joke into pulp. For Lorenz, the dramatic difference in outcome resulting from such minute changes made him realize that perfect weather prediction was a fantasy, but that doesn’t stop your local news from wasting hours of air time touting the Weatherificator 5000 and trying to get you to swallow their complete winter forecast made in mid-August.

Filling a Black Hole

John A. Wheeler, the theoretical physicist who coined the term black hole as well as conceiving of wormholes and quantum foam, will soon be full of wormholes, succumbing to pneumonia at the age of 96. Wheeler’s collaborators included Niels Bohr, Robert Oppenheimer, Edward Teller and Albert Einstein. Bohr, Wheeler and Einstein spearheaded the efforts to build the atomic bomb, with Wheeler motivated by a note from his brother, fighting in Europe, that read simply “Hurry up.” Joe Wheeler died in Italy.