What is the butterfly effect?

jbean

Are you thinking of a premise of Chaos Theory that claims the beating of a butterfly's wings in Thailand somehow affects the price of a low-fat double mocha latte in New York City? Jan 22 04, 7:54 PM

peasypod

I agree with jbean on this one, being a physics professor myself I could teach you all about the chaos theory, etc etc, but I will shorten it by saying a tidal wave can hit the shores of say west coast USA just by the random flutter of a butterfly in Japan, given the right conditions. Jan 22 04, 8:52 PM

guiscard

Thanks jbean & peasypod. Succinctly, it is the sensitivity to initial conditions displayed by some types of nonlinear systems, where a small change in a parameter can cause a very large change at a later time. [Jan 22 04 10:00 PM] guiscard writes: Interestingly, the idea was rediscovered in the 60's by Edward Lorentz who tried to reproduce some output on a weather computer. But when he fed back in the data, he put in a number like 4.231234963 instead of 4.23123496123443197. This insignificant rounding error produced a completely different weather system in his model within a couple of days (just like real weather!) Jan 22 04, 9:11 PM