Are You Using the Butterfly Effect to Your Advantage?
Maybe you’ve heard of the terrible 2004 movie The Butterfly Effect, starring Ashton Kutcher and Amy Smart. But maybe you didn’t realize the butterfly effect is not about science fiction. It’s about real science, and about real life. It’s about how tiny alterations can cause massive changes. So how can we begin using the butterfly effect to create improvements in our prosperity and productivity?
What is the butterfly effect?
It may seem like a preposterous idea, but tiny changes can and do result in big effects in nature. One source cites the example that “if a butterfly flaps its wings in India, that tiny change in air pressure could eventually cause a tornado in Iowa.”
Edward Lorenz, a meteorology professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was studying weather patterns in the 1960s. Unlike his colleagues, Lorenz felt it was not possible to predict future weather conditions based on history. While running a computer program to test various weather simulations in the 1960s, he made an unusual discovery. He noticed that rounding off one variable from .506127 to .506 dramatically changed weather predictions in his model.
More than a decade later, others coined the term “butterfly effect.”
