The Butterfly Effect

It has been said that something as small as the flutter of a butterfly's wing can ultimately cause a Typhoon halfway around the world.

Do you believe in The Butterfly Effect?

I do, I often find that the smallest choices I make lead to huge and disasterous consequences.

Possible but unlikely. I think it's mostly big choices poorly made that cause big problems.

definently! 😱
ive had a bad experience which i dont really want to say, but lets just say it was bad. and all that couldve changed if something tiny had happened.
i was in the city, and the thing happened on my way home. id missed the train to get home, but if i hadn't it wouldve never happened and i wouldnt be scarred for life.
before id left, mum was arguing with me to take her mobile, but i didnt want to because it was ugly (silly me, caring about somethings looks). if i had've agreed to take it, we wouldve spared 30 minutes from the arguing we did, and it wouldve never happened.
or if i hadnt looked in that last shop window i did, it would have never happened.

a tiny thing such as the speed you walk at, can change the rest of your life!

Originally posted by m!$hA
a tiny thing such as the speed you walk at, can change the rest of your life!

True Misha. Too bad we can't know it until after it's happened.

Thats not called ''The Butterfly Effect'' its called the ''Chaos Theory'' by the way.

Not to be picky - but the butterfly effect is a model used to describe a concept within chaos theory: Sensitive Dependence on Initial Condition to give it it's full name. Chaos theory is about the underlying order in apparently random events.

The Butterfly theory is not primarily about how small events shape larger ones - but is supposed to model how erratic and irregular conditions are hard to simulate.

The more small seemingly inconsequential information you have to discard to try to understand something - the less stable the model is. Over time something small (EG: the movement of air over a butterflys wing) can become magnified until the errors within the system model exceed %100 and your model becomes worthless.

Even in the way that the theory has come to be misinterpreted - (thanks to crappy movies) - doesn't mean to say "if only I had not done this - that would not have happened" thats not Chaos, thats just regret. It's not about being in the wrong place at the wrong time, it's about the events themselves and what causes them to happen, or not.

whew. I don't think I explained this very well....

Seems to make sense to me; I suspect that, like most such bits of science, to explain it in full would take forever.

So I guess this thread will have to be about the mis-labelled phenomenon BC speaks of... which is a form of domino effect, isn't it?

Originally posted by Mr Zero
Not to be picky - but the butterfly effect is a model used to describe a concept within chaos theory: Sensitive Dependence on Initial Condition to give it it's full name. Chaos theory is about the underlying order in apparently random events.

The Butterfly theory is not primarily about how small events shape larger ones - but is supposed to model how erratic and irregular conditions are hard to simulate.

The more small seemingly inconsequential information you have to discard to try to understand something - the less stable the model is. Over time something small (EG: the movement of air over a butterflys wing) can become magnified until the errors within the system model exceed %100 and your model becomes worthless.

Even in the way that the theory has come to be misinterpreted - (thanks to crappy movies) - doesn't mean to say "if only I had not done this - that would not have happened" thats not Chaos, thats just regret. It's not about being in the wrong place at the wrong time, it's about the events themselves and what causes them to happen, or not.

whew. I don't think I explained this very well....

I stand corrected!

Originally posted by Ushgarak
I suspect that, like most such bits of science, to explain it in full would take forever.

But not by me - I'm bumping up against the edge of my ignorance as it is.

Originally posted by Mr Zero
Even in the way that the theory has come to be misinterpreted - (thanks to crappy movies)

It just uses the essence of the theory that a small change (i.e. removing or adding a "butterfly"😉 has big unpredictable effects.

Originally posted by Raz
I don't think it was misinterpreted by the movie of the same name.

It just uses the essence of the theory that a small change (i.e. removing or adding a "butterfly"😉 has big unpredictable effects.

AH! But strictly thats not the essence - the essence is that ignoring the small things can lead to big change.

Not changing small things can etc... If you see what I mean.

Originally posted by lil bitchiness
Thats not called ''The Butterfly Effect'' its called the ''Chaos Theory'' by the way.

Aren't they pretty much of a muchness?

Originally posted by BlackC@t
It has been said that something as small as the flutter of a butterfly's wing can ultimately cause a Typhoon halfway around the world.

Do you believe in The Butterfly Effect?

I do, I often find that the smallest choices I make lead to huge and disasterous consequences.

I believe that theory SOMEWHAT...

though it contradicts with one belief that I hold...
Which is the idea of Yin Yang... that for every good there is an evil... for every birth... a death... etc...

I'm still a little torn between the two but I am doing my research and trying to make a decision.

Damn it! I got the movie and the chaos theory mixed up......

Could a global mod please rename it 'The Chaos Theory'?

Mr Zero, it can only be regret sometimes, other times it can be chaos. Take a car crash for example, if somebody's hand slips on the wheel or something they cause an accident and a lot of people die over a small mistake, chaos I tell ya'!

i belive in it.
coz a lot of things happen that were totally impossible to hapen. and just a tiny thing made them happen 😖

Originally posted by Raz
I don't think it was misinterpreted by the movie of the same name.

It just uses the essence of the theory that a small change (i.e. removing or adding a "butterfly"😉 has big unpredictable effects.

Originally posted by Mr Zero
AH! But strictly thats not the essence - the essence is that ignoring the small things can lead to big change.

Not changing small things can etc... If you see what I mean.

we have a saying in Norway " that a small mound can tip a great load"
There are some truth to that saying, a small thing/happening can create great consequence

Originally posted by Mr Zero
AH! But strictly thats not the essence - the essence is that ignoring the small things can lead to big change.

Not changing small things can etc... If you see what I mean.

The butterfly effect is a theorem of chaos theory that small variations in the initial conditions of a dynamical system can produce large variations in the results.

And the name itself is based on a book that is quite similar to the movie, in that a time-traveller goes back to make small changes that have big effects.

Read more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect

Originally posted by Raz

The butterfly effect is a theorem of chaos theory that small variations in the initial conditions of a dynamical system can produce large variations in the results.

And the name itself is based on a book that is quite similar to the movie, in that a time-traveller goes back to make small changes that have big effects.

Read more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect

Eh ... Wikipedia.

Mr. Zero is right. This might become more obvious if you consider how Lorenz discovered the butterfly effect. He was doing computer work, and was getting wildly wrong answers. He investigated, and discovered that the reason for this was that he was only rounding to three digits, instead of six. He was using the right data--there's nothing in there about data being changed--but because he ommited a few trivial details, his results were extremely inaccurate and unreliable. This prompted him to realize that weather prediction was doomed to inaccuracy, because there were millions of details that couldn't be provided, like the flapping of a butterfly's wings--and that's the butterfly effect.

But couldn't you interpret that as the fact that when the results were rounded UP they would give different results to when they were rounded DOWN? i.e. a small change would make a huge unpredictable difference.

Also I think the dictionary definition of the "butterfly effect" does kind of lean to what I was saying:

a chaotic effect created by something seemingly insignificant, the phenomenon whereby a small change in one part of a complex system can have a large effect somewhere else

Source: Webster's New Millennium™ Dictionary of English