I just got through watching the movie “The Butterfly Effect.” (decent movie, I could probably form a religion from its basic plot.) The name of the movie comes from a statement you sometimes hear from those who work in chaos theory:<\/p>\n
\nThe flapping of a single butterfly’s wing today produces a tiny change in the state of the atmosphere. Over a period of time, what the atmosphere actually does diverges from what it would have done. So, in a month’s time, a tornado that would have devastated the Indonesian coast doesn’t happen. Or maybe one that wasn’t going to happen, does. (Ian Stewart, “Does God Play Dice? The Mathematics of Chaos”)\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
And I have to say that I’ve never understood what I’m supposed to take from this statement. Sure many systems are chaotic and we can have large differences in behavior from seemingly small changes in the initial conditions. But I sometimes get the feeling that a causal relationship is being made in this statement: if it weren’t for the butterfly, the people in the path of the tornado would be fine, i.e. the butterfly caused the tornado. But this clearly isn’t true. There are plenty of other effects which are also casually necessary for the tornado. Do I get to blame the butterfly if an even smaller change in the wavefunction of single proton somewhere in the upper atmosphere changes the initial conditions by even a smaller amount than the butterfly and this in turn changes the entire outcome of whether there is a tornado? In fact, I would argue that we can only blame the butterfly if other changes in initial conditions of comparable size do not change the outcome of whether there is a tornado or not. Chaos may be ubiquitous, but I wish we’d all stop blaming the butterfly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I just got through watching the movie “The Butterfly Effect.” (decent movie, I could probably form a religion from its basic plot.) The name of the movie comes from a statement you sometimes hear from those who work in chaos theory: The flapping of a single butterfly’s wing today produces a tiny change in the … <\/p>\n