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| A monarch butterfly in Vista, Calif. Photo: Gregory Bull/AP |
“It
simply deals with unpredictability in complex systems,” he says. “The
shorthand is ‘the butterfly effect.’ A butterfly can flap its wings in
Peking, and in Central Park, you get rain instead of sunshine.
Goldblum is right that chaos theory deals with unpredictability, but his description of the butterfly effect is a little misleading.
When meteorologist Ed Lorenz, the so-called “father of chaos theory,” first invoked a butterfly’s wings, it wasn’t to say that we can’t predict the weather in New York because we can’t account for all the butterflies in China...
Here is the story behind the confusion, as recounted in a 2014 paper by physicist Timothy Palmer, mathematician Gregory Seregin and mathematical physicist Andreas Doering. At the time, all of them were affiliated with the University of Oxford. Palmer further detailed the mix-up in a 2017 lecture at Oxford...
“The Butterfly Effect isn’t one simple idea; it encompasses a set of mathematical discoveries that have been expressed in different ways at different times,” he said in an email.
It’s easy to see how “the butterfly effect” could have come to take on multiple meanings. Lorenz wrote about the term’s “cloudy history” in his book, “The Essence of Chaos,” noting that his 1963 paper featured a graph that was said to resemble a butterfly, which may have created some confusion.
Goldblum is right that chaos theory deals with unpredictability, but his description of the butterfly effect is a little misleading.
When meteorologist Ed Lorenz, the so-called “father of chaos theory,” first invoked a butterfly’s wings, it wasn’t to say that we can’t predict the weather in New York because we can’t account for all the butterflies in China...
Here is the story behind the confusion, as recounted in a 2014 paper by physicist Timothy Palmer, mathematician Gregory Seregin and mathematical physicist Andreas Doering. At the time, all of them were affiliated with the University of Oxford. Palmer further detailed the mix-up in a 2017 lecture at Oxford...
“The Butterfly Effect isn’t one simple idea; it encompasses a set of mathematical discoveries that have been expressed in different ways at different times,” he said in an email.
It’s easy to see how “the butterfly effect” could have come to take on multiple meanings. Lorenz wrote about the term’s “cloudy history” in his book, “The Essence of Chaos,” noting that his 1963 paper featured a graph that was said to resemble a butterfly, which may have created some confusion.
Source: Washington Post
