When Chaos Takes Flight: The Science of the Butterfly Effect
- Raissa Senoaji
- Jan 3
- 3 min read
In the midst of complications and uncertainties, many people choose to flip a coin to decide their fate. Seems fair, doesn’t it? There are an infinite number of factors that could affect the result of the flip; You can never predict the outcome. Now, say you calculate the exact force at which you flick the coin, consider the weight and rotation of the coin, even the external force of the wind in the air. Could you, then, accurately predict the face the coin will land? Probably not, but it would be much more accurate than blindly guessing. However, if you did the same experiment 1000 times in a row, you’d be surprised by how accurate the predictions can be. So, is flipping a coin even random at all, if we can technically—albeit difficulty—predict its outcome? Well, nothing is truly random, not even a coin flip. What it is, is chaotic.
What is Chaos?
Chaotic seems like a very unusual word to use here, but chaos means a very different thing in scientific and mathematical terms. Chaos doesn’t mean randomness or messiness, but a system wherein the results are ultra sensitive to changes in the initial conditions. Imagine that you roll 2 identical balls down a hill with the exact same initial conditions, but you roll one at 5AM and the other at 5PM. With simple intuition, you’d know that there’s no way that the balls will stop in the same position. Even if they rolled within 5 seconds of each other, there’s still no guarantee that they will land in positions even remotely close to one another. Such a system is dynamic and nonlinear, and the result is not due to a simple cause-and-effect relationship. It’s chaotic.
Most things in our world are chaotic; from weather forecasts, the stock market, to human emotions. For centuries now, people have been explaining how the world works with laws of physics created by the likes of Einstein and Newton, and frankly, these equations work in perfect and ideal conditions. But life isn’t perfect. There are countless things that just don’t go how they are supposed to. This leads to even the tiniest and most insignificant things affecting the results of seemingly unrelated and irrelevant systems.
The Butterfly Effect
When you simplify all of these technical terms into real and understandable English, it boils down to the butterfly effect. It is well known that the butterfly effect is when something small happens, which leads to something else, which eventually leads to a sort of chain reaction until it finally becomes something so major and so uncorrelated to the initial thing that happened. Ed Lorenz, the mathematician who coined the term “butterfly effect”, claimed that a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil could lead to a tornado in Texas. It might take a really long time, but it could happen. If the butterfly didn’t flap its wings and decided to stay still at that very second in Brazil, the people of Texas would be safe and sound in their farms; A drastic change in results.
Predicting the future?
Knowing this, can we conclude that butterflies cause tornadoes? Should the American government just carefully inspect every single Brazilian butterfly to predict Texas’s weather? While that would be outright idiotic, predicting the future might not be impossible. According to chaos theory, all systems—no matter how chaotic—are deterministic. This means that there is a cause-and-effect relationship, but we just don’t know what cause leads to what effect, and by how much. It is, therefore, virtually impossible to predict the future unless we have a supercomputer that calculates all the possible outcomes considering the infinite number of factors coming into it. Of course, this would only work if a Brazilian butterfly doesn’t flap its wings and cause the computer to shut down.
“When the present determines the future but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future.”
This is how Ed Lorenz defined chaos. Chaos theory is a whole new branch of mathematics and science that helped new innovations and findings in the world and, though not accurately, can lead to approximate predictions to many processes in the short-run. Lorenz did his fair share of experimentation to strengthen his theories; He graphed his findings through differential equations plotted in phase space (seen in the top of this article) which, funnily enough, is in the shape of a butterfly’s wings. Coincidence? I think not.
References:
Bishop, R. (2015). Chaos (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). Stanford.edu.
Fractal Foundation. (2018). What is chaos theory? – fractal foundation. Fractalfoundation.org.
Wells, S. (2023, July 10). Explainer: What is chaos theory? ScienceNewsExplores.
Comments