I remember reading that a butterfly on the otherside of the world can cause a hurricane on the opposite side, and it’s down to chaos theory, could someone explain what chaos theory is please? Thanks
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Let’s leave the chaos theory as a whole for a bit and concentrate on the weather part.
The way I had it explained years ago is this. The equations we currently use for modeling and predicting weather are “numerically unstable”.
What that means is normally when you do calculations, you expect a small change in numbers on one side to affect the result in a small way. For example – if you want to know how far you’ll travel after 10 hours of going 100 km/h you’ll get 1000 km. If you change the speed by 0,1 and have 100,1 km/h, the final answer is 1001 km, so it changes just as much as the input.
In case of numerically unstable equations, a very minor change on one side can cause a difference in levels of magnitude. In the example I have it would mean that for some reason changing the speed just 0,1 meant you traveled 10 000 or 100 000 km.
That of course doesn’t happen with speed and distance, but it does happen with our weather models.
The butterfly and hurricane are just a metaphor to illustrate that. No butterflies actually cause hurricanes, from what I understand it says more about how insufficient our current models are than about some mystical characteristic of the world we live in.
As a side note, it hapens a lot with physics and maths. The way they work are often misconstructed to give people this weird mystical idea which is actually very far from the truth. Main examples would be the number pi or the fibonnaci sequence, there is nothing mystical and spiritual about them, there are just mathematical concepts that we use to describe various, rather mundane things.
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