Butterfly effect - what the term means: description in simple words, examples from life. Butterfly effect

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Butterfly Effect

Butterfly Effect- a term in natural sciences denoting a property of some chaotic systems. A small impact on a system can have large and unpredictable consequences somewhere else at another time.

History of the term

Deterministic-chaotic systems are sensitive to small influences. In a chaotic world, it is difficult to predict what variations will occur at a given time and place, and errors and uncertainty increase exponentially over time. Lorenz Edward Norton called this phenomenon the "butterfly effect": a butterfly flapping its wings in Iowa can cause an avalanche of effects that can culminate in the rainy season in Indonesia (the "butterfly effect" also evokes an allusion to R. Bradbury's 1952 short story "And thunder struck”, where the death of a butterfly in the distant past changes the world of a very distant future. You can also see an allusion to the Brothers Grimm fairy tale “The Louse and the Flea”, where the burn of the main character ultimately leads to a global flood).

“Small differences in initial conditions give rise to huge differences in the final phenomenon... Prediction becomes impossible” (A. Poincaré, according to Horgan, 2001).

"Butterfly effect": history of the term

The “butterfly effect” is associated with the name of the American meteorologist Edward Lawrence. The scientist associated the term with chaos theory, as well as with the dependence of the system on its initial state.

The idea itself was first voiced in 1952 by the American science fiction writer Ray Bradbury in the story “A Sound of Thunder,” where, having found himself in the past, a dinosaur hunter crushed a butterfly and thereby influenced the fate of the American people: voters chose an ardent candidate instead of a loyal one. fascist.

Did this influence Lawrence's continued use of the term? Big question. But the year of publication gives reason to believe that Bradbury’s thought was primary, and the scientist scientifically substantiated and popularized this definition.

In 1961, after a weather forecast failure, Edward Lawrence stated that if such a theory were correct, one flap of a seagull's wing could change the course of the weather.

Current usage of the term "butterfly effect"

Now this term has become quite popular. It is often used in scientific articles, newspaper materials and television programs. In 2004, an American feature film called “The Butterfly Effect” was released, and in 2006 its second part appeared.

However, the use of such a term in most cases is not entirely correct or incorrect. Most often it is associated with the travel of people (film characters, for example) through time, and this already has an impact on history. A person does not even need to change anything in the past for the future to be different. Hence the distortion of the term “butterfly effect” in the minds of the mass audience.

Modern scientists have long proven that all natural sciences are in incredibly close connection with each other. Events that occur within certain natural objects entail changes that affect other spheres of existence. Since then, people have been interested in the question of what the butterfly effect is. Of course, in the old days this phenomenon did not have such a poetic name, but it definitely took place in history and science.

The origin of this concept

Nowadays there is a phrase that has a global character, and it goes like this: “The flapping of a butterfly’s wing in Singapore can lead to a strong tornado in North Carolina.” These words are familiar to almost every person, and it would seem that they are as old as the hills. But they were actually first uttered by a mathematician and meteorologist named Edward Lorenz. The scientist was one of the founders of chaos theory, and he also actively studied what the butterfly effect is within the framework of this mathematical apparatus. The fact is that deterministic-chaotic systems are very shaky and unstable. Even the slightest leap in one place entails a storm of change in another. Lorenz described such instability and sensitivity not only from a scientific point of view, but also in a language understandable to everyone, using a metaphor. That is why the phenomenon “butterfly effect” is so called and is simple and accessible even to a child.

Chaos theory

Our ancestors believed that the human environment is something stable, a certain substance that always lives according to clear laws and norms. However, the well-known Lorentz discovered a new model of existence called dynamic or deterministic chaos. In the category of systems that are, so to speak, in a chaotic mode of operation, he included literally everything that surrounds us - the atmosphere, water columns, tectonic plates and even the human body.

In the middle of the last twentieth century, of course, this became a huge sensation, which many accepted with skepticism, but soon it was thanks to this discovery that scientists were for the first time able to connect mathematics, physics, biology and other fields of knowledge. An important aspect is also that Lorentz explained what the butterfly effect is in chaos theory. If the entire biological organism called the Earth, its interior, inhabitants and atmosphere live and interact in a chaotic manner, then the slightest fluctuations can cause global changes.

How does science fiction border on reality?

The book theorems of the Greek sages, physical laws that were discovered in the Middle Ages, have now encountered facts that have completely refuted them. Within the framework of sciences such as quantum physics and mechanics, it has been proven that parallel lines can intersect at infinity, time can go both forward and backward, and the teleportation of particles over long distances is a very real phenomenon. Such experiments have somewhat revolutionized our understanding of what the butterfly effect is, adding new, seemingly paranormal aspects to this phenomenon. If a certain particle can go into the past, it may behave differently there than the last time, which will entail a time paradox. In other words, this is the butterfly effect, as a result of which the particle ends up in the past, and its actions entail a complete change in the present, and as a consequence, the future.

Human life and its structure

As you may have guessed, the above phenomenon also occurs in the everyday life of each of us. What the butterfly effect is in everyday life was shown in the 2004 film of the same name. The main character of the picture literally changed reality, incarnating himself as a small one. The screen clearly showed how just one phrase from a child completely changed his future, as well as the future of his friends and family. A similar example was also shown in the film "Mr. Nobody".

The choices we make in the moment change more than just our lives. It completely changes the picture of the future. For a clear example, you can take the choice of profession. A certain Mr. X decides to become a doctor. While studying at a medical school, he fails. Nevertheless, this person does his best to obtain a doctor’s diploma and occupy a corresponding position in a certain clinic. It is probably not worth saying how many lives would be at risk in this situation. However, Mr. X could stop his studies in the second or third year and transfer to the university that would teach him what he really has a passion for. As the saying goes,

65 years ago, the classic American science fiction story by Ray Bradbury, “A Sound of Thunder,” was published. It described a journey into the distant past, where one of the heroes accidentally crushed a butterfly. This led to unpredictable consequences, radically changing the future. In the early 60s of the last century, a young assistant at the Department of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Edward Lorenz, received a number of unusual diagrams. Their shape resembled the wings of a butterfly, and Lorenz, a great fan of science fiction, immediately called the pattern he discovered the butterfly effect. This soon became a universal concept that explains many mysterious phenomena when minor events lead to enormous consequences, such as typhoons, large-scale epidemics, or the collapse of colossal glaciers from the dome of Antarctica.

Round Errors

In fact, the butterfly effect is far from a simple idea, resulting from a very complex mathematical theory of chaos. It all started when Lorenz tried to create a set of computer programs that could predict long-term weather changes. Once he did not round off thousandths of meteorological quantities such as wind force, humidity and atmospheric pressure. Unexpectedly, this led to a phenomenal result. It turned out that these tiny changes in data completely changed the long-term forecast.

For a whole decade, Lorenz refined his theory, but it became famous thanks to the determination of another meteorologist. In 1972, a prestigious international conference took place, but Lorenz did not have time to present the title of the report. There was absolutely no time left, and his colleague boldly did this, giving the work a completely non-academic title: “Forecasting: Will the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil cause a tornado in Texas?” It was from this moment that a heated discussion of the Lorenz butterfly effect began.

In that old work, Lorenz tried to prove that the far-reaching consequences of minor atmospheric anomalies constitute two very interesting problems at once. Firstly, you should not criticize weather forecasts and mock weather forecasters, because it turns out that creating an accurate long-term weather map is almost impossible. Secondly, in many processes it is simply impossible to “catch the butterfly” and identify the turning point that leads to the real final result.

Generally speaking, many philosophers are very wary of Lorenz’s butterflies, because if small inaccuracies in some natural phenomena are of such great importance, then it can be argued that our world is in some way completely unpredictable...

The birth and death of a tornado

According to Lorenz diagrams, an innumerable number of natural interactions can not only cause a tornado with the flapping of a butterfly's wings, but also extinguish a hurricane in the bud. Thus, if a person interferes with the surrounding nature, for example, by disturbing the ecological balance, then we are unlikely to ever reliably know what would have happened in the alternative “Earth without people” scenario. And all this because all subsequent changes are very difficult to track and restore the sequence of events.

During his lifetime, Lorenz sadly noticed that most of the climatologists around him perceived his original constructions exactly the opposite. The most important idea in Lorentz's theory is that we cannot easily trace a significant event and its connection with the present. Having argued that the flapping of a butterfly's wings can cause a storm, we must immediately move on to the next question: how can we confidently say that it was this atmospheric anomaly that caused the birth, and not the death, of a devastating tornado? It turns out that Lorenz’s research provides an opportunity to take a fresh look at the problem of cause-and-effect relationships, but does not contain simple answers to predicting the future.

Riddles of the weather kitchen

As a meteorologist, Lorenz tried to explain many of the mysteries of the weather with the help of the phenomenon he discovered. According to his bold assumption, the cause of the most powerful storms born in the Gulf of Mexico may be a small weather anomaly in the South Atlantic.

After the scientist’s death in 2008, a number of Latin American weather forecasters tried to connect the butterfly effect with the amazing Pacific El Niño phenomenon. In some unknown way, this periodic atmospheric anomaly somehow influences the birth of devastating tornadoes, causing multi-billion dollar losses in the southern states of the United States.

At the same time, many American conspiracy theorists are simply convinced that at the Pentagon’s secret testing sites they have long been trying to breed “weather butterflies” capable of causing storms in various parts of the world. In any case, this could be a real fuse for the hypothetical “climate weapon” that has been talked about a lot lately.

The main parameter here is hurricane wind as one of the areas of research in atmospheric physics. This science has been trying for many years to predict the trajectories of air vortices, but still cannot predict their strength, and therefore the scale of possible destruction.

Hurricane equation

For a quarter of a century, meteorologists have been working hard to create reliable computer models of bad weather. The stumbling block here is the so-called hurricane equation, which cannot be solved based on classical ideas about the mechanism of its formation. One can imagine that a powerful hurricane is forming somewhere in the southeastern Caribbean Sea. There, currents of warm and humid air meet cold winds blowing from the Andes. Intensive condensation of water vapor occurs with the formation of a powerful cloud cover. However, if we try to set all the necessary parameters, we will not be able to determine the course and increase in wind strength. In particular, the calculated wind speed will always be much lower than the actual one.

It is well known that the stronger the wind, the larger the waves on the surface of the water. The waves here act as a natural roughness of the water surface, against which air currents rub. Meanwhile, if we consider the balance between the supply of energy and its absorption due to friction, it turns out that the stronger the wind, the larger this absorption will be. That is, the waves should extinguish the wind, just like in the title of the cult work of the Strugatsky brothers, but in reality this does not happen.

Hypothesis of Russian geophysicists

At the end of the last century, a group of employees from the Department of Nonlinear Geophysical Processes of the Institute of Applied Physics of the Russian Academy of Sciences from Nizhny Novgorod expressed a very unusual hypothesis. Based on the principles of Lorentz's theory, they proposed that the resistance of the ocean surface paradoxically decreases as the wind increases.

Then, in 2003, an article by American researcher Kerry Emmanuel was published in the journal Nature, describing a similar phenomenon. He based his conclusions on long-term data on wind speeds inside tropical cyclones using falling GPS sondes from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Hurricane Center. Based on a generalization of the results of these measurements, it turned out that the drag coefficient of the sea surface is significantly lower than the value obtained in calculations of conventional winds.

Russian scientists are studying “butterflies that generate hurricanes” at a unique installation “Complex of large-scale geophysical stands”, consisting of a pool with a high-speed wind-wave channel. Today this complex is included in the list of installations of national importance in Russia.

Net for catching “hurricane butterflies”

Experiments by Nizhny Novgorod geophysicists yielded amazing results. Using a high-speed video camera that shoots up to half a million frames per second, it was possible to record the amazing processes of the birth of hurricane butterflies. This is how an understanding of the mechanism of occurrence of hurricane winds in the embryo of a storm arose. It became clear that at a certain stage the air currents of the growing typhoon were rushing over the waves like a hydrofoil glider or a colossal ekranoplan. In this case, the mass of air forms a foam cushion over the waves made of solid wings, which smoothes out the excitement. At the same time, resistance to air flows over the sea surface drops sharply.

Scientists counted the drops and realized that they had found the most effective mechanism for generating splashes, which greatly changes the pattern of hurricanes. Previously, it was believed that splashes are formed when pop-up bubbles burst and their number is disproportionately smaller. It turned out that if the results of the Nizhny Novgorod laboratory experiment are translated into natural conditions, the formation of hurricane winds becomes clear. Scientists have realized what an effective mechanism for the flow of energy into monstrous winds is, and have come close to predicting the destructive ability of a particular hurricane.

However, “Lorenz butterflies” were also found in sciences very far from meteorology.

Insects of financial crises

A decade ago, several enthusiasts from the virtual club of fans of financial forecasts Smartmoney began researching the market “according to Lorenz” and immediately caught the “butterfly of the financial crisis.” It turns out that Sony's growing logistical problems could have a critical impact on an entire network of shareholders, sellers and investors. So an ominous forecast appeared on the Smartmoney website: “One butterfly, in this case a Japanese butterfly, launches a whole critical process in the global chain of partners.” Unfortunately, no one listened to the unusual opinion of the “economic amateurs”. And the 2008 crisis struck...

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The butterfly effect is a unique phenomenon that managed not only to become another boring discovery, but also to get into cinema and the press. It confirms the correctness of popular sayings that an insignificant act can lead to serious consequences unimaginable at first glance.

Butterfly effect - what is it?

This phenomenon may not occur in every system: only in one that is called chaotic. It is based on the famous chaos theory, which states that any complex system is unpredictable and its parts can mix together in ways that are unexpected for it. The butterfly effect is a phenomenon that can affect a biological system at any level. A person who is influenced throughout his life by positive and negative factors that determine his health is also susceptible to it. There are several points of view on it:

In differential equations, you can slightly change the conditions and this will significantly affect their solution.
The butterfly effect determines the behavior of the ball on roulette in a casino, because its fall depends on a lot of circumstances.
In a world of chaos, it is impossible to predict the behavior of systems, but the likelihood of them getting out of control is steadily increasing.

Why is the butterfly effect called that?

The name was coined by American mathematician and meteorologist Edward Lorenz. He was the first to make the assumption, giving it a bizarre form of metaphor. Edward believed that the flapping of the wings of one butterfly in Iowa could trigger an avalanche of other actions: for example, causing a storm during the rainy season in Indonesia. The butterfly effect is a concept named for its association with the plot of Ray Bradbury's story "A Sound of Thunder."

Butterfly effect - psychology

The phenomenon ceases to be boring as soon as it enters the sphere of the humanities. The butterfly effect in psychology echoes Lorenzo's belief, but complements it with the individual's ability to influence collective reality, just as a drop of rain fills a cup. Man is designed in such a way that it is easier for him to deny the possibility of influencing the outcome of a war, the growth of the population of stray animals, and public opinion. Knowing what the butterfly effect is, how to understand and apply its effect to your advantage? The use of a phenomenon for the purpose of personal development consists of the following stages:

awareness of positive and negative in detail;
accepting traits that you previously had no desire to put up with;
the reward for finding a balance between irreconcilable qualities;
combining all internal forces to strengthen the fight against difficulties and circumstances.

The butterfly effect in life

In the real world, you can find true-to-life cases of a small event influencing the course of history. The following personalities know what the butterfly effect is and what each of its consequences means:

Resident of Stockton, California. In 2003, he was unable to pay off a $250,000 mortgage, which triggered a global banking crisis.
Norman Bolog is a breeder who created unpretentious varieties of vegetables and fruits that saved a huge number of people from hunger during droughts and crop failures in the 20th century.
Catherine the Second - her husband, Peter the Third, was such an uninteresting interlocutor that she spent all her time in the library. Deep knowledge helped her fairly rule the country for many years.

Butterfly effect - interesting facts

The butterfly effect is a phenomenon that became the main character of the Hollywood film of the same name. Ashton Kutcher's character uses his memory with enviable regularity to travel into the past in order to change events that led to a chain of tragedies in the future. The painting itself has become a symbol of the butterfly effect. Either because of the release of higher-grossing films or because of the illness of the actors, its premiere was postponed for one year.

Butterfly effect and chaos theory

This pattern actually appeared thanks to chaos theory and became one of its signs. This teaching is based on mathematical concepts used in modulating systems. The media, cinema and scientists have created a wrong image of the doctrine: for example, thanks to Jurassic Park, people know that society should seriously fear the unity of chaos and nature. There is no such second phenomenon as the butterfly effect, which chaos theory would make world famous, so people are afraid of the unknown. In its most primitive form, its postulates can be revealed as:

It does not deny the very essence of ordering. Systems can be programmable, but no one can give guarantees.
She focuses on the consequences of misfortunes caused by chaos.
It does not follow the expected periodicity. Time delays and feedback prevent the system from adjusting to the schedule.
It works on the principle of bifurcation. Taking bizarre forms and breaking all the rules, chaos is guaranteed to return to order.

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