Please no butterfly analogies.
In: Mathematics
Consider the difference between dropping a bowling ball from the 10th floor and dropping a small feather from a the 10th floor.
In the first case you should be able to predict the landing spot to a meter even if you’re dropping the bowling ball by hand. You could quite easily improve the accuracy by dropping the ball with a robot arm or waiting till the wind is down. You can drop the ball from a higher place and the calculations won’t be much more complicated. If you control the conditions to a reasonable precision, your result will be reasonably precise.
In the second case, you’d be lucky if the feather landed at the feet of the building you’re dropping the feather from. You can’t even predict the landing spot with very complicated computer models. Even if you control the conditions to a really good precision – dropping the feather inside a big building to reduce wind, using a robot arm to drop the feather – your result will be wildly inaccurate. You can’t control the conditions well enough to get reasonably good precision.
The first system can be predicted with pretty simple models. The second one needs to be so precise that it’s practically impossible to predict.
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