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| image by Doug Brown via sxc.hu |
The Butterfly Effect is another often misunderstood science concept, made worse by New Agers lumping this in with their “We’re all one, man.” mantra.
It’s often stated that everything is connected no matter how small. And the flapping of a butterfly’s wings contributes to the winds of a typhoon.
The problem is the butterfly effect deals with chaotic systems.
These are systems in which a slight change in the initial conditions results in massive changes in the output of the system. Take the basic pendulum. Change the position its motion begins and its trajectory varies greatly in response.
While this is nice to know in order to study how these system change you need Chaos Theory.
It consists of complex mathematical techniques, used to model the behavior of these systems and predict the outcome of changing the initial conditions. Such an application is the study of air turbulence as well as predicting weather patterns.
Well I hope this was informative, later.