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The butterfly effect or sensitive dependence on initial conditions is the property of a dynamical system that, starting from any of various arbitrarily close alternative initial conditions on the attractor, the iterated points will become arbitrarily spread out from each other. Experimental demonstration of the butterfly effect with six ...
Sep 26, 2024 · butterfly effect, idea in chaos theory that describes how small changes to a complex system’s initial conditions can produce dramatically different outcomes. The butterfly effect was most prominently researched by meteorologist Edward Lorenz in the early 1960s; however, ideas relating to the theory predate Lorenz’s identification of the ...
Jun 9, 2023 · The butterfly effect is the idea that small things can have a big impact. It's named after the story of a butterfly flapping its wings and causing a hurricane. Citation. Loading... We may think the butterfly effect means that a small change (like the flap of a butterfly's wings) can have huge consequences (a tornado in China).
- Nathan Chandler
Edward Lorenz (born May 23, 1917, West Hartford, Connecticut, U.S.—died April 16, 2008, Cambridge, Massachusetts) was an American meteorologist and discoverer of the underlying mechanism of deterministic chaos, one of the principles of complexity. After receiving degrees from Dartmouth College and Harvard University in mathematics, Lorenz ...
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
- A Brief History
- Error Growth and The Prediction of Complex Systems
- Initial Errors, Model Errors and Environmental Variability
- Taming The Butterfly: The Probabilistic Approach to Prediction
- Butterfly Effect, Causality and Chance
- From Facts to Fiction
- Summing Up
- References
On December 29, 1972 Lorenz presented a talk in the 139th meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science held in Washington, D.C. entitled Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wings in Brazil Set a Tornado in Texas? The principal message of the talk was that the behavior of the atmosphere is unstablewith respect to per...
A physical system such as the atmosphere is inevitably subjected to small uncertainties in the initial conditions, that need to be specified when running a model providing information on its future evolution. Such uncertainties are inherent in the process of experimental measurement, which even in its most sophisticated form is limited by a finite ...
Much like experiment, the modeling of a physical phenomenon has also its limitations. First, once a certain level of description is chosen small scale processes (like e.g. local turbulence in the context of atmospheric dynamics) are automatically overlooked, since they exceed the adopted (finite) resolution. Furthermore, many of the parameters buil...
The sensitivity and intrinsic randomness of complex systems symbolized by the butterfly effect signals the limitations of the traditional deterministic description, in which one focusses on a detailed, pointwise evolution of individual trajectories. Now as seen earlier, owing to the finite precision of the process of measurement in nature an instan...
The ubiquity of the butterfly effect in large classes of complex systems prompts one to reflect on the connection between two concepts that have been regarded as quite distinct throughout the history of science and of ideas in general, namely, causality and chance. Classical causality relates two qualitatively different kinds of events, the causes ...
The concept of the butterfly effect refers to a real world phenomenon of universal bearing, well beyond the framework of atmospheric physics in which it was initially proposed. It highlights the fact that science is not in the position to predict everything once sufficient information is gathered, owing to the existence of intrinsic limitations. In...
Classical science has emphasized stability and permanence. Developments spanning the last decades show, on the contrary, that instability, sensitivity and unpredictability underlie large classes (if not most) of phenomena occurring on macroscopic time and space scales - the scales of our everyday experience. There is a need for the decision makers,...
History of the butterfly effect concept 1. P. Duhem, La Théorie physique: son objet, sa structure, Marcel Riviére, Paris (1906). 2. J. Hadamard, Les surfaces á courbures opposées et leurs lignes géodésiques, J. Math. Pures et Appl. 4, 27-73 (1898). 3. R. Hilborn, Sea gulls, butterflies and grass shoppers: a brief history of the butterfly effect in ...
The notion that the flap of a butterfly's wings could change the course of weather was an idea that Lorenz himself used. However, he used it to describe something much more radical -- he didn't know whether the Butterfly Effect was true or not. Tim Palmer is Royal Society Research Professor in Climate Physics at the University of Oxford. View ...
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Apr 16, 2008 · Edward Lorenz, an MIT meteorologist who tried to explain why it is so hard to make good weather forecasts and wound up unleashing a scientific revolution called chaos theory, died April 16 of cancer at his home in Cambridge.
