What is the butterfly effect?
In: Mathematics
It’s an idea that an action can have major unintended consequences. In the 1960s, a meteorologist Edward Lorenz was experimenting with predicting the weather with computers, and found that something as small as a butterfly flapping its wings one way or another could dramatically alter weather patterns, because that small flap of the wings would shift air a little, and that little shift could be enough to change something on the large scale.
It’s been used a lot in time travel stories, with the idea that if you go back in time and make a tiny change, like stepping on a twig, the chain reaction that comes from that could change the future in a huge way. So like, a time traveler could step on a twig, and then an animal that would have eaten that twig starves, and then another animal can’t eat it, and the chain reaction occurs that results in a world where humans never existed.
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