Snippets taken from the print edition, article is available online here (subscription required)
"Scientists were probably the last people to find out about chaos. Everyone knows our lives are chaotic and unpredictable in the long run... Our predictions must be flexible: I often say that the most successful people are those who are good at plan B. Chaos theory is an area of science and mathematics that deals with plans B to Z, describing unstable situations where small changes can cascade into larger and larger long-term effects.
...until the last 30 years few [scientists] recognised that scientific environments can be quite unpredictable in the long run, even where change is governed by precise rules. It is instability rather than complexity that causes chaos: meteorologist Edward Lorenz, one of the founders of chaos theory, suggested in 1960 that the flap of a butterfly's wing in Brazil might set off a tornado in Texas, for example. His point was that we can never know all the factors that determine our weather; at best we can only predict the details a few days ahead. Scientists have now found that many other situations are equally unstable.
Computer models have greatly helped us to understand how pervasive chaos is throughout science... But I continue to wonder, if nearly all scientists missed this pervasive phenomenon, what other obvious phenomenon might we all be missing now? Maybe chaos is trying to tell us something."