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We all probably learnt in Yeshiva that when someone scratches their finger it can have effects across the world. I just saw this sentence buried in a post on the N.Y. times today:
In theory, a butterfly flapping its wings halfway across the world could have caused the eddies that gave birth to Hurricane Irene
Wow! The Ribono Shel Olam and his wonderful ways!
That’s an old saying, “A butterfly flapping its wings in China can cause a tornado in the Great Plains”. I don’t know how true it actually is though.
everything is deeply intertwingled.
– Ted Nelson
It’s a major misunderstanding of a certain branch of mathematics made popular by a movie made in 1993.
What are “eddies”?
Thank you Tomche. Very thorough explanation!
Tomche: It’s nowhere near a scientific fact. I’m sorry that (gasp!) the NYT wrote something as true that wasn’t. It’s an old saying to show the importance of actions that became a blockbuster movie. It’s not true at all.
In 1961, Edward Lorenz was using a numerical computer model to rerun a weather prediction. As a shortcut on a number in the sequence, he entered the decimal .506 instead of entering the full .506127 the computer would hold. The result was a completely different weather scenario. Lorenz published his findings in a 1963 paper for the New York Academy of Sciences noting that “One meteorologist remarked that if the theory were correct, one flap of a seagull’s wings could change the course of weather forever.” Later speeches and papers by Lorenz used the more poetic butterfly. According to Lorenz, upon failing to provide a title for a talk he was to present at the 139th meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1972, Philip Merilees concocted “Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?” as a title. Hence the popular term, “The Butterfly Effect.”
(found it on 5TJT.COM A DAF YOMI ARTICLE)
Luckily enough we have butterflies on the other side of the globe to counter act it.
Little things, big reactions. Amazing.
Check the Wikipedia article “Butterfly effect”:
In chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions; where a small change at one place in a nonlinear system can result in large differences to a later state. For example, the presence or absence of a butterfly flapping its wings could lead to creation or absence of a hurricane.
Although the butterfly effect may appear to be an esoteric and unusual behavior, it is exhibited by very simple systems: for example, a ball placed at the crest of a hill might roll into any of several valleys depending on slight differences in initial position.
The term “butterfly effect” itself is related to the meteorological work of Edward Lorenz, who popularized the term.
The butterfly effect is most familiar in terms of weather; it can easily be demonstrated in standard weather prediction models…
Eddies in the space-time continuum, of course. ^_^
“It’s a major misunderstanding of a certain branch of mathematics made popular by a movie made in 1993.”
Chaos theory, I presume?
If butterflies can cause storms, imagine what an eagle can do. If not, well, eagles are pretty powerful anyway.
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