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#ButterflyEffect #Theory #Tornado
Before you get ahead of yourselves, no, we are not talking about the 2004 film that featured the famous actor, Ashton Kutcher. We are talking about the actual theory that states the butterfly effect is when a small change, or non important action can result in very large differences later in time. This theory is derived from the work of Edward Lorenz, an american mathematician and meteorologist founder of the modern chaos theory, which in general terms, states the same theory as the butterfly effect. The concept’s name comes from the theory that a simple butterfly flapping its wings, may result in a tornado in another part of the world or in the future. Of course, a single act like the butterfly flapping its wings cannot cause a typhoon. The butterfly does not power or directly create the tornado, but the term is intended to imply that the flap of the butterfly's wings can cause the tornado: in the sense that the flap of the wings is a part of the initial conditions of an interconnected complex web; one set of conditions leads to a tornado, while the other set of conditions doesn't. The flapping wing represents a small change in the initial condition of the system, which cascades to large-scale alterations of events, just like a domino effect. Had the butterfly not flapped its wings, the trajectory of the system might have been vastly different. But it's also equally possible that the set of conditions without the butterfly flapping its wings is the set that leads to a tornado. Small events can, however, serve as catalysts that act on starting conditions. It all started when In 1961, Lorenz was running a numerical computer model to redo a weather prediction from the middle of the previous run as a shortcut. He entered the initial condition 0.506 from the printout instead of entering the full precision 0.506127 value. The result was a completely different weather scenario. Another part of the butterfly effect has to do with time traveling, and how one time traveler’s action can cause change in the course of events. In the movie The Butterfly Effect, actor Ashton Kutchner plays a man who has found a way to travel back in time to his youth. Each time he returns to his childhood, he makes minuscule changes that radically alter his life in the present, inevitably leading to terrifying results. There is one theory that states that because of time travelers, the world has been saved a lot of times. But that’s a topic for another video. Troy Shinbrot, a Rutgers biophysicist, got his PhD dissertation at the University of Maryland based on his groundbreaking butterfly effect experiments. Shinbrot also explained how NASA uses the butterfly effect, “NASA currently directs trajectories of spacecraft using the butterfly effect. The first example that I know of was the International Cometary Explorer. They used the fact that the butterfly effect applies to trajectories in the solar system. With tiny amounts of hydrazine fuel, they created little puffs that steered the spacecraft halfway across the solar system to meet up with comet Giacobini-Zinner That's how they achieved the first ever scientific cometary encounter." A domino effect or chain reaction is the effect produced when one event sets off a chain of other or similar events, which can be related to the butterfly in the sense that one thing can modify or lead to other events. Examples of real life butterfly effect examples could be the following: In one of our past videos we talked about how the assasination of Archduke Ferdinand triggered World War 1, after a first assasination attempt failed, the security of the archduke changed the route of return, but the driver never got the message, so if he would have taken the correct directions, the killer would have never had a chance to shoot Ferdinand and his wife. Another example being the most famous one, is Adolf Hitler being rejected two times by the Academy of fine arts in Vienna, and nonetheless by a Jewish professor. If he would have been accepted, maybe the world would have enjoyed a very talented artist, or not. Either way, if none of these two events happened, maybe both world wars would have never happened, and the world would have dealt with so much suffering, or maybe yes. We will never know what the outcome would have been if these events would not have happened. Be sure to comment on any other butterfly effects you know of. Please don’t forget to like and subscribe, see you next time. |