Increasingly in the 20th century, scientists have come up against natural phenomena that don't yield their patterns so readily to observation and analysis; e.g., the weather. Scientists presumed that predicting weather patterns accurately was only a more complex version of predicting the positions of the planets. It was more complex because there were more variables. That is, the movement of the planets is such a massive undertaking that it can only be affected measurably by a very few things: the position the planet from the sun, the mass of the two, and to a much smaller degree, the positions and masses of the other planets in the solar system. Interestingly, when more variables enter the picture, the predictions get much less accurate: e.g., in calculating the motion of a moon of a planet instead of the planet itself, since a moon is small enough that now both the sun and the planet have to be considered.

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