can anyone explain me the butterfly effect?
In: Physics
The scientist and mathematician Edward Lorenz was studying long-range weather forecasting with a computer simulation. One day he ran a weather simulation that had a start value of 0.506127, but when he reran it he decided to just enter 0.506 because he assumed that the last three tiny digits wouldn’t make much difference.
He was very surprised to see that while the weather in the simulation started off similar, soon it diverged completely into different weather. He realized that weather has “sensitive dependence on initial conditions” — a tiny difference in weather at the start would result in huge changes down the line. As a poetic example, he later wrote that the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil could later set off a tornado in Texas.
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