Forms and Imagination You can see all kinds of interesting forms in the steam as it billows. It is not unlike reading tea leaves, tarot cards, or rune stones. And we all know about fortune cookies. The ancients may well have employed similar methods of steam divination, illuminating steam through a narrow slit in a wall as the sun rose early in the morning, or reading swirls in the morning fog rising from a lake as the sun came over a mountain.
Humanity has a long history of trying to predict the future by various means, including divination.
We figure that one thing influences another, and that by looking at subtle things, we may see the forces at play, and thus predict how they will act in the future. Today, since we understand those forces better, so we tend to favor mathematical models. Sometimes with better results. After all, most of our buildings and bridges are still standing. Mathematical models were used to determine the least amount of material needed to keep them standing.