The “Butterfly Effect” is a metaphor that encapsulates the concept of sensitive dependence on initial conditions in the chaos theory; namely that small differences in the initial condition of a dynamic system may produce large variations in the long term behavior of the system. This is a great theory that can be applied to specific aspects of life and life in general. I believe it can be applied to my life in the sense that every event that has occurred in my life; big, small, good or bad. I would not change anything, because they all came together to bring me to where I am today.
I was not always a social and outgoing individual and I considered myself unlucky in life
The computer model was based on 12 variables, representing things like temperature and wind speed, whose values could be depicted on graphs as lines rising and falling over time. On this day, Lorenz was repeating a simulation he’d run earlier—but he had rounded off one variable from 506127 to 506. To his surprise, that tiny alteration drastically transformed the whole pattern his program produced, over two months of simulated weather.
butterflies…but maybe more should be. The movie The butterfly effect(which opened in theaters nationwide on January 23) may not include any nefarious insects, but it is based in part on a concept from chaos theory that suggests that something as subtle as the flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil could trigger a tornado in Texas.
The term "butterfly effect" was coined by meteorologist Edward Lorenz, who discovered in the 1960's that tiny, Butterfly—scale changes to the starting point of his computer weather models resulted in anything from sunny skies to violent storms—with no way to predict in advance what the outcome might be.
In the movie The Butterfly Effect, actor Ashton Kutchner plays a man who has found a way to travel back in time to his youth. Each time he returns to his childhood, he makes minuscule changes that radically alter his life in the present, inevitably leading to (you guessed it) terrifying results.
Human time travel is a purely fictional concept, but according to Rutgers biophysicist Troy Shinbrot, the idea that small changes can lead to dramatically different outcomes is firmly rooted in the physics of chaos theory, at least for some systems.
"If you're willing to suspend your disbelief long enough to accept the possibility of time travel," says Shinbrot, "then, yes, the movie sounds like it has a reasonably plausible premise, from a physics point of view."
Shinbrot should know—his PhD dissertation at the University of Maryland was based on groundbreaking butterfly effect experiments.
Scriptwriters, it seems, have found that the butterfly effect is a useful tool for establishing dramatic tension.
For scientists like Shinbrot, it can be a useful tool for manipulating chaotic systems. In fact, Shinbrot's dissertation was part of an effort to learn how to make small adjustments to a chaotic system to choose the system's outcome.
"NASA currently directs trajectories of spacecraft using the butterfly effect," says Shinbrot. "The first example that I know of was the International Cometary Explorer. They used the fact that the butterfly effect applies to trajectories in the solar system. With tiny amounts of hydrazine fuel, they created little puffs that steered the spacecraft halfway across the solar system to meet up with comet Giacobini-Zinner That's how they achieved the first ever scientific cometary encounter."
As for the adventures Kutchner faces in The Butterfly Effect, says Shinbrot, "If he had a better model for the system that is his life, perhaps he could have chosen better outcomes.
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