What is the butterfly effect?
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It’s basically a description of chaos theory.
Chaos theory is a description of chaotic systems. A chaotic system is a system where every single action is deterministic based on the initial conditions, but if we even slightly change the initial conditions, the outcome is wildly different.
Basically, weather is a chaotic system. Let’s say we accounted for every possible variable in the weather but one butterfly. That means we know exactly how the weather is supposed to behave throughout all of time in a world where that butterfly doesn’t exist. And let’s assume that prediction says there’s supposed to be clear weather in Kanas in the next 3 days. Well if that butterfly flaps it’s wings, it just changed the conditions that we measured. Now the entire outcome is now completely different and now 3 days later there’s a tornado in Kansas.
A double pendulum is a very simple example of a chaotic system. If you watch some videos of that, you will see that they look as if they start from the same position, but slight variations in that starting position completely changes the path the pendulum takes.
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