The butterfly effect and chaos theory are interesting facts. What is the butterfly effect in chaos theory in simple words from the point of view of physics? Butterfly effect - the meaning of the term, expression. Butterfly effect: examples from life, description

Explanation of the butterfly effect concept and real-life examples.

Chaos theory is an area that connects mathematics and physics. The concept is based on the fact that the behavior and development of complex systems are significantly influenced by initial conditions and minor changes. Even small adjustments can have a significant impact on the results.

The butterfly effect is a small thing that can significantly change the course of events. Simply put, even a small flap of a butterfly's wings can displace a tornado and give it direction. Therefore, every little thing in a huge system matters.

• Many physicists, even before the advent of chaos theory and its explanation, drew attention to the fact that even minor changes can lead to huge consequences. They noticed that if numbers are not rounded or rounded, the numbers obtained are significantly different from each other. Therefore, they cannot be neglected.
• The term became popular in 2004 after a number of newspaper publications. Later a film came out that somewhat distorted the concept of the butterfly effect. The heroes of the film returned to the past and changed events, which led to a change in the future. In fact, even if nothing changes, the future cannot be the same due to the excessive complexity of the system.
• Another basic property of chaos is the exponential accumulation of error. According to quantum mechanics, the initial conditions are always uncertain, and according to chaos theory, these uncertainties will quickly grow and exceed the permissible limits of predictability.
• The second conclusion of chaos theory is that the reliability of forecasts quickly decreases over time. This conclusion is a significant limitation for the applicability of fundamental analysis, which, as a rule, operates on long-term categories.

The name was coined by the famous meteorologist and physicist Edward Lawrence. Although initially in 1952 a story by the writer Bradbury was published. It was in this story that the writer described that a crushed butterfly influenced the presidential election. And instead of a normal candidate, voters chose a fascist. Thus, Lawrence scientifically explained this effect.
He believed that the flapping of a butterfly's wings in Brazil could cause a destructive tornado in America.
Although a little later the scientist himself denied his theory. If it were true, then the flapping of a seagull's wings could completely change the weather and all forecasts would be useless.

Life itself is chaotic, and even small changes can have dire consequences. There are many examples of this.

Examples of the butterfly effect in life:

1. Demolition of the Berlin Wall. This happened due to an incorrect interpretation of the new law by the press secretary. The document indicated that some East Germans were occasionally allowed to visit West Berlin. But the law did not clearly spell out the subtleties. Therefore, they decided that the law applies to all Germans, and at one time a mass of people decided to cross the border. As the border guards became discouraged, discontent among the masses grew. A huge number of people simply tore down the wall to cross the border.
2. The Second World War. The story is truly revealing. In 1918, one British soldier did not kill a wounded German and about 20 years later this German became the cause of the Second World War. If a military man had shot Hitler then, there might not have been a war.
3. The emergence of terrorism. It all started with a murdered dog that was fed glass food by a city council member. The little boy, who was the owner of the dog, told everyone in the area about the death of the dog and the culprit. Thus, the city councilman did not get into Congress. After this incident, the boy became interested in politics and, as an adult, entered Congress. He became the organizer of American aid for the Afghans. Thus, the Mujahideen won the war, giving rise to the Taliban and Al-Qaeda organizations. This became the starting point for terrorist attacks.

As you can see, it is impossible to control a complex system and even minor changes can lead to detrimental consequences.

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:

1. In differential equations, you can slightly change the conditions and this will significantly affect their solution.
2. The butterfly effect determines the behavior of the ball on roulette in a casino, because its fall depends on a lot of circumstances.
3. 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:

1. Resident of Stockton, California. In 2003, he was unable to pay off a $250,000 mortgage, which triggered a global banking crisis.
2. 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.
3. 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:

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

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...

Ashton Kutcher and Amy Smart simply played superbly in the acclaimed movie “The Butterfly Effect”. According to the plot, the main character, having inherited a certain illness from his father, did not remember some moments of his life - those moments in which unusual and sometimes even terrifying events occurred. Then, having matured and entered college, Kutcher's hero discovers an amazing ability in himself - in the process of his diary entries, which he made at the insistence of his doctor, he can return to his childhood years and change the future by changing his actions.

Thus, some, sometimes even minor actions, had a huge effect on the events of the future. This, in fact, is called the butterfly effect. But a film is a film, and the heroes of Amy Smart and Ashton Kutcher, having managed to unravel the mystery of changing the future, made it so that it was acceptable to them and all the people around them. In our lives, you and I cannot look into the future to see how our current actions affect it. However, no one has canceled the butterfly effect, and today we will try to understand in more detail what this phenomenon is, and whether it exists in the world of reality, and not just cinema.

What is the butterfly effect?

The concept of the “butterfly effect” is used, as a rule, in the natural sciences, and it denotes a special property of some chaotic systems, according to which even a small impact on the system can have the most unpredictable and large consequences in some other place and at another point in time.

Such systems, in which all processes occur as if by chance, despite the fact that they are determined by certain laws, are particularly sensitive to minor influences. In a world where everything is chaotic, it is very difficult to predict what changes may occur at a particular time and place, and uncertainty increases exponentially as time passes.

The presented phenomenon was called the “butterfly effect” by the American mathematician and meteorologist Edward Lorenz. It is defined as follows: a butterfly that flaps its wings, for example, in Iowa, is capable of initiating an avalanche of other effects that can reach its climax in Indonesia during the rainy season.

By the way, if you think about it, you can find a description of a similar phenomenon in the Brothers Grimm fairy tale “The Louse and the Flea”, in which the burn of the main character becomes the cause of the global flood, as well as in the story “And A Sound of Thunder” by Ray Bradbury, in which the death of the butterfly in the past is radically changes the world of the future. And the French mathematician Henri Poincaré said that minor changes in the initial conditions give rise to large changes in the final phenomenon, and prediction becomes possible.

But let's step aside from the scientific field of knowledge, filled with opinions, theories and hypotheses, and think about life - is there a butterfly effect in it?

The butterfly effect in people's lives

Have you ever thought that from time to time an accident, to which we do not attach any special significance, can turn our whole life upside down? Remember again the words of Edward Lorenz, and then do a little analysis of your life. It is likely that you can remember at least one case where the butterfly effect took place. If we get philosophical, we can conclude that our everyday life is quite chaotic, like, for example, the life of the world and nature around us, and we ourselves are part of them, and, therefore, we can be called one whole.

Just imagine how you would not have met your current life partner several years ago if at a certain moment you had boarded a different bus, gone on other errands, and returned home by a different route. What would happen in your life now? What would happen if you decided not to answer the question that your future other half asked you when you met? How would things have been if life had not brought your parents together many years ago? What would you be doing now if this article had not caught your eye?

In our lives, absolutely everything is connected to each other; there is nothing in it that should not be; All events have a cause and all events are consequences of something. Based on all this, a “chance”, which we initially do not attach importance to, can become the reason that our whole life will change dramatically, and events that we could not even think about will begin to occur.

First story

For example, here is a short story that we found on the Internet: one girl dated a young man for several years and really wanted to marry him. But no matter how much she talked about it, and no matter what hints she made, the young man was in no hurry to propose. But one day the girl’s grandmother fell ill, and the very next day the young man proposed his hand and heart to his beloved.

But you shouldn’t think that the guy, fearing that the grandmother would not be able to recover, wanted to make sure that she could see her granddaughter under the aisle. The situation was like this: a young couple went to the village to visit their grandmother to look after her and help with the housework. When the guy was chopping wood, he accidentally cut himself on the blade of an ax, and his passion gently and carefully treated the wound and bandaged his hand.

So what's the connection?

And the connection is that in childhood the guy was already in a similar situation, and then his mother treated the wound for him. When the girl showed concern for the guy, he immediately imagined a picture from the past in all details, and the understanding came to him that next to him was exactly the girl with whom he wanted to live his life.

This can be explained by the fact that the “picture” of a happy family was formed in the young man’s childhood, and his mother’s attitude towards him was firmly imprinted in the subconscious. Having met his chosen one, a “puzzle” automatically began to assemble in his mind, and the guy was not even aware of how what happened in the past could manifest itself in the present.

Second story

We can give one more example, which we also found on the Internet: one woman, being always a responsible and careful employee, for some reason regularly visited her boss, who, at every opportunity, tried to reproach her for something, humiliate her, reprimand her, remark, etc. But one fine day, this woman’s son made a plasticine figure in kindergarten, after which the boss stopped her attacks.

You can ask a logical question: why did this happen? Perhaps the woman decided to give the figurine to her boss, and she appreciated the action and decided to change her behavior? However, things were completely different.

When a woman took her son from kindergarten, he constantly played with his figurine in the car on the way home, which is why he left crumbs of plasticine. The next morning, when the lady went to work, she sat on plasticine and stained her skirt. At work, she was constantly nervous and embarrassed about this. When the boss asked her to come into the office for a conversation to arrange another “debriefing,” our heroine, instead of worrying as usual, paid all her attention to how to make sure that no one saw the stains on her skirt.

Some bosses, into which category this woman’s boss belonged, have a need to command and push someone around all the time. And it is very important that this has the desired effect on the object of influence. By constantly “bullying” her employee, the boss got what she needed, because she was the first to give her her energy, because I was worried and nervous.

Indifference, as we know, neutralizes the ardor of power-hungers, and that day the woman, concerned only with her skirt and appearance, showed absolute indifference to the attacks of her boss. As a result, the boss didn’t get what she usually got, she stopped clinging to the woman and found a new employee whose reaction caused the effect the boss wanted. The woman began to receive only pleasure from work and the fact that she would again have to endure bullying.

Finally

Everything we talked about today indicates that the butterfly effect is always present in a person’s life, and every time it manifests itself in one form or another. And if you have an insatiable desire to make changes in your life, you don’t need to start everything from scratch, because you can change one thing so that it entails changes in another.

Just remember that your life is in your hands, and what and how to change in it is up to you and no one else!

What is the butterfly effect?

The term “butterfly effect” was coined by Edward Nolan Lorenz. It was with this concept that he described the sensitivity of complex systems to initial conditions in his works in 1961. However, the dependence of the system on the initial conditions was noticed long before Lorentz’s work. It was believed that there is a certain critical point at which even the smallest events acquire special significance and lead to an unpredictable outcome.

What is this butterfly effect?

Describing what the butterfly effect is, talked about weather forecasting. He came to this concept after realizing that when he rounded the input data for a weather forecast using a digital model, he got completely different results than when he took numbers with all decimal places.

Thus, Lorenz came to the conclusion that it is impossible to make a long-term weather forecast, since many natural phenomena have a tremendous impact on weather conditions in individual places and on the climate of the entire Earth. That is, even the flapping of a butterfly's wings in one part of the Earth can lead to or prevent a tornado in another part of the Earth.

Lorenz shared his discovery with other scientists. One day he received an idea that using the butterfly effect it was possible to achieve large-scale changes in the Earth's climate. To do this, you just need to make small changes in nature under human control. However, Lorenz believed differently: we can force nature to behave differently, but we will never be able to predict what this will lead to. We will know for sure that this will entail changes, but what kind of changes will they be? We cannot know whether the changes will be positive or negative.

The term "butterfly effect" is especially applicable to chaotic systems. It is in them that it is difficult to predict what even the smallest impacts will lead to in the final result. If the butterfly did not flap its wings, then nothing in the system would change from the original version, and the course of events would be completely different than in reality, where the butterfly flutters.

In simple terms, the concept of the butterfly effect suggests that any small action can cause serious consequences in the future or elsewhere, both for the entire system and for its individual participants.

The butterfly effect in our lives

The butterfly effect is often used in science fiction or cinema and is associated with time travel. Thus, according to the concept of the butterfly effect, any action in the past triggers an avalanche of consequences in the present and future, which can lead to unpredictable results. Thus, a person traveling into the past can exclude the possibility of himself being born if his actions entail the death of his ancestor. In this case, he will not be born at all, which means he will thereby destroy his present.

If we talk not about science fiction, but about our everyday life, then we see the butterfly effect everywhere, we just don’t pay attention to it. Let's look at what the butterfly effect is, using specific examples for clarity.

Example about a student

By pure chance, a medical university student passed the entrance exams. However, he has difficulty studying. There are many options for the development of events, here is one of them: he may be expelled. And then, perhaps, many people will be saved whom he could have ruined by becoming a certified doctor. Or they may leave him to study, and he will receive a diploma instead of someone truly gifted and capable of changing the world or the lives of several people for the better.

An example about a disaster

A person who gets behind the wheel while drunk is heading from one city to another. It could cause a huge accident that will change the fates of dozens of people, who, in turn, will affect the lives of hundreds more of their relatives and friends. But the police stop him, thereby breaking the chain leading to disaster.

Thus, one snowflake falling in the mountains can lead to the death of several cities and thousands of people, causing an avalanche. The fall of a snowflake is an insignificant event. The death of thousands of people is a tragedy. An avalanche will also affect other nearby areas in terms of weather, disrupting the normal course of life.

The actions of one person or group of people can cause conflict between entire peoples and countries, lead to global military action, which can then lead to the destruction of life over vast territories, and in modern conditions, the entire planet.