What is the butterfly effect?
In: Mathematics
The butterfly effect is a description of chaotic systems like the weather. It goes like this,
“The weather is so sensitive to initial conditions that the flapping of a butterfly’s wings can cause a hurricane in a decade”
It’s meant to show that even a small deviation from starting points can lead to drastically different outcomes. The butterfly didn’t actually cause any hurricanes, but if you don’t account for that butterfly, then all the atoms you didn’t account for will hit each other, and bump into the other atoms, which keep bumping into the other atoms until you no longer have a similar system, aka, a hurricane vs. clear weather.
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