Butterfly Effect
As humans living in modern times, we’re living in a World of speed. We have many things to do in a limited time period. For most of us, 24 hours of a day is well planned. We spend most of our times at work, in Turkey at least 45 hours per week. After work, depending on the life style you have, you may spend some time with family, beloved ones or just by yourself.
In this high speed routine, we’re planning our hours to find the most beneficial way to live.
In order to have a well planned life, we need some deterministic data. Weather is the best example of it, most of us control the weather app on our smart phones every day. If it’s going to rain we should be prepared, it also effects the traffic, above all it effects our outfit choice.
Such as weather, there are many other data that we trust in order to plan our lives. We need to know about the external factors, we assume that the data we have about them is deterministic. If we experience a shift in those information we have, most of the time we get angry, because in the data we should trust.
A scientifically important and very interesting change of result occurred more than 50 years ago; a meteorology professor named Edward Lorenz experienced an unexpected result in his work. Edward Lorenz, a professor at MIT, entered some numbers into a program simulating weather patterns, by repeating previous calculations. Then he left his office for a short break and when he turned back he noticed an unexpected result that led him to great scientific developments. The computer program that he was using was based on different variables such as temperature, wind speed etc. On that day, the only thing he did was to round off one variable from .506127 to .506. That tiny modification transformed the whole pattern that his program produced.
With this unexpected result, Lorenz observed that there are systems that can show uncertain behavior. By going forward with that, he came up with an important theory / term called ‘Butterfly Effect’. From a scientific description the term means: ‘’ the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state.’’’’ [1]In short terms it was one of the great discoveries about the nature, meaning; the small changes can have large consequences.
The name of the theory comes from Lorenz’s suggestion that a butterfly’s wings might create tiny modifications in the atmosphere that may finally change the path of a tornado or delay, accelerate or even prevent the instance of a tornado in another location.[2]
Today, after decades of this great discovery, we’re trying to live according to the data that we assume is deterministic. The nature itself approved that all the predictions we have about it can change with a small accident. With all the scientific developments throughout the history, we thought that we can calculate all potential scenarios. At some point an unexpected result changed everything we know about the system of nature. All the predictions we have, all the calculation systems became dependent on small events, so to say initial conditions.
It still seems possible for us to forecast some information about the external conditions. With all the technology we have we’re trying to minimise the unexpected changes that may cause a change on the result. At the end we should always remind ourselves that the nature can always come with a surprise, all the data we have about it can change in a minute with an unnoticeable event.
References
[1][2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect
https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/en/science/leading-figures/when-lorenz-discovered-the-butterfly-effect/
https://www.technologyreview.com/2011/02/22/196987/when-the-butterfly-effect-took-flight/
https://archive.org/details/philosophicaless00lapliala/page/n9/mode/2up
