: What is the butterfly effect?
In: Mathematics
When a butterfly flaps its wings, it moves air, right? But the amount of air it moves is so tiny that its easy to think that on a large scale, it doesn’t matter. For example, if trying to track where a thunderstorm in Asia came from, it would sound ridiculous to think that a butterfly flapping its wings in North America would have anything to do with it. But as it turns out, it totally does. The gist is that small things do have big consequences. It is one of the foundations of Chaos Theory.
So back in the mid 20th century, some scientists were studying weather patterns. They had this big mathematical equation to account for wind, humidity, temperature, rainfall, etc etc. At one point, one of the scientists wanted to get some results from a certain point in the experiment. So he entered the numbers from an earlier starting point, but to save time, he didn’t type out the full values. For hypothetical example for one value instead to typing 5.72383, he just typed 5.723, because anything after the 3 is so small and unimportant that it just represents a gust of wind, or half a degree change in a football field or something. Small stuff, right? But the numbers that followed ended up being very different. The first day or so were the same, but after about two or three days, the entire global weather patterns were different.
It’s interesting stuff. One of those weird things where some people were just innocently studying one thing and stumbled upon some fascinating discovery that changed everything.
There’s a really cool book about it called Chaos by James Gleick that explains chaos theory really well to lay people.
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