That’s similar to the Black Mirror (Netflix) episode “Nosedive” where Bryce Dallas Howard’s character lives in a society largely driven by social ratings. She’s so close to getting the 4.x/5.0 rating she needs to get the discount that would let her live in some idyllic gated community and her invite to be her long time BFF’s maid of honor is just the push she needs. But due to an unfortunate mishap, one thing leads to another and her rating spirals to oblivion.
I think these are more examples of a “cascading failure” than a “butterfly effect”. BE is more about chaos theory and small, seemingly random changes having disproportionately large influences. A CF is more a chain reaction caused by complex interconnected systems with such tight tolerances that a small failure causes one system to collapse, which caused another and so on until catastrophe.
Make any decision you want, thoughtfully or otherwise. Because one interpretation of Quantum Theory holds that, with every “decision” made in the universe (for some all-expansive definition of “decision”), multiple universes are immediately spawned, one for every possible choice for that decision, in each of which a different choice for that decision having been made.
Even dying or not dying (a “decision” under the all-expansive definition of “decision”) spawns at least two universes, one in which you die and one in which you live. This is the well-known Theory of Quantum Immortality.
Now excuse me while I go skydiving without my parachute and alter the history of all the worlds.
I think some here are going by the popular understanding of what (this part of) chaos theory means: that small events can sometimes be the trigger of, or catalyst for, larger events.
But if that’s all that we meant by a chaotic system, then it would hardly be new information to humans: we’ve essentially always known that; certainly since the discovery of fire.
The problem is with the word “cause” in the butterfly metaphor. Most people take it to mean some sort of 1 to 1 correspondance between the butterfly and the tornado. If we go back to the simulation that inspired the metaphor, we can see what was intended.
Basically Lorenz found that any change at all, no matter how small, in one of the input variables to his system, would eventually lead to a different result set. Plugging in 10.0 vs 10.00000001 would eventually, after running the simulation for a while, give completely different results.
So, in the metaphor, the butterfly is representing “any change at all”, and the tornado is part of the “different result set”.
Bearing this in mind we can say:
The statement about the butterfly is essentially true about any part of the system. Every butterfly, every movement, will eventually result in a different result set, if the world’s weather runs for long enough.
We don’t need to imagine a special “rube goldberg” set of events connecting the butterfly to the tornado.
If we’re really going to say the butterfly “caused” the tornado, then to be consistent we’d have to say all weather after that date, for the rest of time was also caused by the butterfly.
I spent a lot of time thinking about this 2 Christmases ago. While driving cross-country to visit relatives, I stopped to buy a burger and soda. A few minutes after returning to the highway an 18-wheel tanker truck lost control, rolled over, and swept thru my lane taking out the car behind me. I wondered where I would be had the attendant been slightly slower getting my meal. The difference between myself and the unfortunate car was literally seconds.
Even more bizarre, the next Christmas my cousin was killed on the same road* – in a crash with a tanker truck.
*over 100 miles away, but on the same highway, traveling for the same reasons.
Interesting aside – “Butterfly effect” seems to derive from two very different and independent origins, both referring to the way that infinitesimal causes can lead to significant (and unpredictable) outcomes.
One , which I think is the real origin of the term, is due to mathematician and meteorologist Edward Lorenz, who observed that small changes in the initial conditions in weather calculations lead to large and unpredictable changes in the outcome (the story is told in several place, most notably in James Gleick’s popular book Chaos). Lorenz in 1963 attributed the analogy of small changes in input being like changing the movement of air due to the flapping of a seagull’s wings (although, interestingly, he attributed this statement to another, unnamed meteorologist). Later, according to Wikipedia
The other origin is from Ray Bradbury’s 1952 time-travel story the Sound of Thunder, in which a time traveler stepping on and killing a butterfly causes some weird changes when he gets back to the present. (Words are spelled differently, and his favored candidate lost, rather than won, an election). I suspect that most people think of the Bradbury story rather than the Lorenz analogy, or even its pithy statement form.
Actually, most people probably don’t think about the origin at all. The idea is clear enough, although Boston Globe writer Peter Dizikes claims most people get it wrongh, anyway:
There’s arguably yet another link between butterflies and the effect – plotting a Lorenz Attractor’s trajectories on a computer, the resulting form can look like butterfly’s wings, but this can’t be responsible for the metaphor.
The real significance, as pointed out in Gleick’s book, is that tiny change in initial conditions surprisingly eventually result in huge and unpredictable changes in outcome. Lorenz left off a few decimal places in the numbers he fed in to his computer, thinking it wouldn’t make a significant difference. It did, which was a shock. It ultimately doomed the 1950s hopes of man-made weather control.
as for Bradbury’s story, it touched a nerve, but it also rubbed people the wrong way. It always bugged me not that the changes Bradbury’s characters observed were unpredictable, but that they were so small and specific to the character’s life. A Lorenz-style change would’ve been more overwhelming, like causing Rome not to be founded, or humans not developing, or even mammals being wiped out. Bradbury’s dinosaur-hunting story bothered hard SF writer L. Sprague de Camp that he wrote his OWN dinosaur-hunting story, A Gun for Dinosaur, in which his engineering instincts were better satisfied. Like A Sound of Thunder, it’s considered a classic.
NO. Nothing that you do is changing the course of history at all, ever (unless you are one of those people who popularizes lies about the past).
It MIGHT be altering the probabilities of the future, however.
I know you are using the slang phrase “altering history” to MEAN affecting the future in a way that is out of proportion to the act itself. I think there are two main things to recognize in this overall consideration/discussion subject:
Yes, the actions of one butterfly in The Philippines can be the trigger for much larger events down the timeline. But there is more than one butterfly in The Philippines. So figuring out which exact one to pin the eventual tornado on is a bit tricky.
Recognizing that small acts can have larger results is important, however, turning that recognition into an actionable life plan, or decision engine, is, shall we say, rather a dicey trick.
After all, if you do get caught up in considerations of causality, you might suddenly find yourself pausing, rather than waving away the awful smell that just came out of your own tukas. After all, if a butterfly can cause a tornado, your waving might be triggering a typhoon.
This! The loss of most horseshoes results in no great historical change at all. However, the loss of a horseshoe could result in the loss of the kingdom.
We have absolutely no way of knowing in advance which case is going to apply.
It’s been years since I read “A Sound of Thunder”, but it’s my recollection that the changes were not as trivial as you’re making them out to be. While they were nowhere near as drastic as mammals being wiped out, the guy who got elected in the altered timeline was basically the next Hitler. I remember having the impression that in this altered timeline humanity in general was more brutish, although I can’t recall if there was something other than the changed spelling (which would be a pretty trivial difference) that made me think this.
I think you are making the fundamental misunderstanding of chaos theory that I was talking about upthread. While it may be true that removing that butterfly from the system would have meant no tornado, there is no one-to-one correspondence between the butterfly and the tornado. The butterfly is not solely resposible for the tornado; the whole system is.
Absolutely. There is no way you could predict perfectly the long-term chaotic effect of some minute change to a system.
Again, this is the popular understanding of chaos theory – that small changes might result in a big change somewhere down the line. But that’s not actually what this part of chaos theory is saying at all (and, if that’s all it were saying, would hardly be news for mankind: we’ve always known that).
It’s saying that some systems are super-sensitive to initial conditions, such that any change, no matter how small, will eventually result in large-scale changes.
“Eventually” is completely unbounded though, so in a sense the second part of your sentence is right for the wrong reason: Maybe only one horseshoe will result in this kingdom being lost.
However it’s false to say all the rest will not cause great changes. Or at least not consistent with our current understanding of chaotic systems.
Considering what could have been the case, one guy rather than another winning an election (even if he turns out to be a monster) , along with some spelling changes, still counts as pretty damned trivial in my book.
I read a book adaption of Back to the Future where Marty asks Doc Brown is his spending fifty cents to see a movie could alter the future Doc explains: Say that 50 cents put the years gross from $990.75 to $1,000.25. The four figure gross has the movie theater owner deciding to keep it open instead of closing the theater. Two years later a boy who would be President goes to see a movie there, and is killed in a fire in the theater.
??? I’m not seeing the difference. The “might” applies to whether or not a given environment has the property of super-sensitivity. The horseshoe analogy only works if the entire situation is on a cusp (a bunch of 'em!)
Without that environment in place, the loss of a horseshoe isn’t going to make much difference, and there isn’t any way that it “might.” The battle has to be a close thing, by itself, for a small difference to tilt it.
I may be mistaken, but has anyone actually claimed that every butterfly wing-flap causes vast changes in the weather? Or, perhaps conversely, is anyone claiming that every big weather event was caused by some tiny disturbance? If they are, I certainly don’t agree with them. If that were the case, wouldn’t perceived reality be more…chaotic? Wouldn’t it be much harder to discern ordinary cause and effect?
