The discovery of the new science, Chaos, brought on much skepticism from established scientists. This new notion, Chaos, can be defined as the existence of unpredictable or random behaviour. The study of chaos was the beginning of analyzing disorder in the atmosphere, in turbulent seas, in fluctuations of wildlife populations, and in oscillations of the heart and the brain. In the first chapter of Chaos, by James Gleick, the reader learns about Lorenz,a meteorologist who built a weather simulation program on his computer. This program mirrored real world weather trends, until one day Lorenz made a small rounding error while entering his data, and skewed all his results. From his small miscalculation, Lorenz discovered that the weather cannot be predicted long term because small disturbances, such as rounding to a wrong decimal or the disturbance of the air by a butterfly, was enough to change weather patterns.
From this, he went on with his extensive research and discovered the phenomenon known as “sensitive dependence on initial condition”, which is referred to as the butterfly effect. The term butterfly effect refers to the idea that a butterfly flapping its wings can create small changes in the atmosphere, which may alter the path of a tornado. The butterfly flapping its wings represents a small change in the initial state of a system, which causes a chain of events leading to larger chaotic events. While the butterfly itself doesn’t case the tornado, the flapping of its wings is part of the initial condition of the system
I find this very interesting because it shows how small actions, such as a butterfly flapping its wings, or a person making a decision to tie his shoe, can have larger results that influence the lives of many people. How is it possible that such a small animal and such small movements in the air can drastically change events on ourplanet?
Figure 1: Lorenz Attractor: Example of butterfly effect representation
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