Have you ever seen the butterfly effect theory or Mr. Nobody? If you did so, you must know what I am going to talk about and if you didn’t, no worries, the main goal of this article is to introduce you to the theory of chaos, also known as the butterfly theory.
Can the flapping of a butterfly's wings in Brazil cause a tornado in Texas? Do my actions, even the most insignificant ones, have a consequence on the world around me? Do we all have this power to influence history or is it just a theory? If I take a different path if I made another decision, will my life be the same or will it take a completely different turn from the initial one? The following article will try to answer these questions. Let’s start.
Sometimes, by wanting to change a precise event in the past, you could end by losing everything you ever had, like shown in the movie The butterfly effect or Donnie Darko. As you may know, time is not a linear concept, as we usually perceive it, but more like a complex entity that is hard to define. It’s like with faith, when you try to explain it, it loses all of its sense. The butterfly effect is a theory of chaos that entails huge consequences from tiny actions.
Let’s take a concrete experiment for example. If we study all of the possible movement of a pendulum, we observe that it keeps being attracted to a specific point called a fixed point attractor, most of the time the origin of the cartesian coordinate system. However, if we take multiple pendulums and submit them to the exact same conditions, they will not react the same and take different trajectories that never cross each other. From being arbitrarily close together, they end up on totally different trajectories.
In a chaotic system, any difference in initial conditions, no matter how tiny, will be amplified to a different final state, that’s what we call Sensitive dependence on initial conditions.The Paradox resides here: the system is both deterministic and unpredictable because we can never precisely know the exact initial conditions, that’s why the weather is not always right and that’s also why we can’t predict more than one week in advance, even with our huge supercomputers.
The butterfly effect has always fascinated men on so many levels. We all have once thought about how would history be changed if an event didn’t happen? What if America was never discovered? What if Christof Columbus indeed discovered India instead? What if the first world war didn’t occur? Many examples exist of instances where a tiny detail led to a dramatic change. In each case, the world we live in could be different if the situation had been reversed, like with key moments in history such as the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the Chernobyl disaster, or the Cuban Missile Crisis.
In conclusion, we can’t predict how our individual estate will evolve but we can say how a collection of states evolve, as an ensemble, interesting, isn’t it?
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