Butterfly Effect

As I read some of our postings, it occurs to me that in some ways The Butterfly Effect applies to all of our issues... it has implications for the environment, the relationship of cause and effect, how we and everything in the world are all connected, and how the slightest distraction might become a major source for transformation or cataclysmic diversion.

In the film Havana, Robert Redford, a gambler well-versed in the odds, explains to a companion, "A butterfly can flutter its wings over a flower in China and cause a hurricane in the Caribbean. They can even calculate the odds."

About a year ago Peter Dizikes explored the implications of the Butterfly Effect in popular culture:

The butterfly effect is a deceptively simple insight extracted from a complex modern field. As a low-profile assistant professor in MIT's department of meteorology in 1961, Lorenz created an early computer program to simulate weather. One day he changed one of a dozen numbers representing atmospheric conditions, from .506127 to .506. That tiny alteration utterly transformed his long-term forecast, a point Lorenz amplified in his 1972 paper, "Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?"

In the paper, Lorenz claimed the large effects of tiny atmospheric events pose both a practical problem, by limiting long-term weather forecasts, and a philosophical one, by preventing us from isolating specific causes of later conditions. The "innumerable" interconnections of nature, Lorenz noted, mean a butterfly's flap could cause a tornado - or, for all we know, could prevent one. Similarly, should we make even a tiny alteration to nature, "we shall never know what would have happened if we had not disturbed it," since subsequent changes are too complex and entangled to restore a previous state.

So a principal lesson of the butterfly effect is the opposite of Redford's line: It is extremely hard to calculate such things with certainty. There are many butterflies out there. A tornado in Texas could be caused by a butterfly in Brazil, Bali, or Budapest. Realistically, we can't know. "It's impossible for humans to measure everything infinitely accurately," says Robert Devaney, a mathematics professor at Boston University. "And if you're off at all, the behavior of the solution could be completely off." When small imprecisions matter greatly, the world is radically unpredictable. (Peter Dizikes http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/06/08/the_meaning_of_the_butterfly/?page=full)

The Butterfly Effect might capture the imagination for excursions in a variety, perhaps infinite, directions.