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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The essential concept is that Big things can have Small Beginnings.
The idea of the Butterfly-Effect isn’t that the flap of the wings is magnified up into a hurricane-force wind, it’s that there is a chain of events set in motion which leads to something disproportionately bigger, and the longer the period of time you look at, the greater the spread of effects are.
The classic example is that you (a time-traveller) travel back to the age of the dinosaurs, and while you’re there you swat a bug that was going to bite you.
That bug’s descendants through time number countless billions or trillions of insects.
Its descendants will have bitten people and animals throughout millions of years of history.
All of that has stopped, and while doubtless people are still going to get bitten by bugs, it won’t be in the same way, or the same times.
The Spanish explorer bitten by an insect and killed by fever lives on, and becomes a political figure, and now we have recognisably different history with more or fewer wars, and different alliances.
When you come back to your own time-period, it may not be recognisable. The Americas might predominantly be spanish-speaking, or Spain might be gone entirely. Conquered by the Incans.
That’s Chaos Theory.
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