Science
Chaos Theory
When the present determines the future, but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future
Chaos theory is a study about randomness and unpredictable behavior in a system that obeys deterministic laws, meaning that a particular initial condition always evolves in the same way. Chaos theory state that a small change in the initial conditions may lead to drastically different behavior. This is also known as the butterfly effect introduced by Edward Lorenz from the idea that the mere flapping of a butterfly’s wing can cause a hurricane several weeks later.
Edward Lorenz was a mathematician and meteorologist who combined the two disciplines to create chaos theory. During the 1950s, Edward Lorenz searched for a means of forecasting the weather. In an experiment to model a weather prediction, he makes the initial conditions to be 0.506, instead of 0.506127. The result was a different prediction. From this, he concluded that the weather must change on a dime. A small change in the initial conditions has immense long-term implications. It shows that even detailed atmospheric modeling cannot make precise long-term weather predictions because we never know the initial conditions precisely enough to accurately predict the weather after a certain point in time. That tiny…
