What is the butterfly effect?
In: Mathematics
Basically it is that what seems like insignificant details can have extreme effects over time.
My favorite example is the first month or so of world war 1 (up to the miracle on the Marne). Agreements between England and Belgium, some pretty haphazard but lucky troop deployment, and that the French commander was able to convince the British commander to go on the offensive rather than try to get his boys off the continent.
This really almost went the other way. History would have been very different if the initial German advance had not been blunted at the Marne- WW1 would have looked a lot more like the Franco-Prussian war and it is impossible to conceive of the world if Germany had won WW1 in the first month or so of the conflict. No British expansion into the Middle East, no Adolf Hitler earning a medal for trying to save his dying CO, no communist revolution in Russia.
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