SOURCE: https://www.imperiumpublication.com/post/the-butterfly-effect
I’ve always marvelled at the remote possibility of a butterfly’s wings setting off a cascade of chain around the world . Hence the semi-famous “butterfly effect”. However, this is far more of a metaphorical device, than it is a concretely provable occurrence. It ties in with the notion that one cannot possibly know all contributing factors to a more cataclysmic event, and is linked to chaos theory – made famous in pop culture in 1993, i.e. Jurassic Park.
The term entered the vernacular after a book published by Ray Bradbury, titled “A Sound of Thunder”, which is set in 2055. The hero the story is Eckels, who travels back in time 65 million years to hunt a dinosaur. He is warned not to stray off the path during the hunt, but his basal instincts prevail, and stray he does after being frightened by a T. Rex. Once Eckels and his party return to 2055, they find the world has completely changed, and not in a good way. Eckels then finds a crushed butterfly under his boot, and it dawns on him that his misstep set in motion a chain reaction of compounding events – which produced an alternate future.
On a more light-hearted note – well after this story, but before Jurassic Park – us Gen Xers fondly recall the Back to the Future movie series (mostly the first one, though), following Marty McFly through his time-traveling escapades, where Doc Brown warns him that with one small change “the consequences could be disastrous”. And sure enough, in 1955 Marty almost prevents his mother and father getting together, albeit acting with the best of intentions.
So let’s do a bit of time travel “forward” from that year, into the real world in 1963, when an award-winning paper was published by the eminent Edward Lorenz, a meteorologist and mathematician. It was entitled “Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow”. In this paper, Lorenz posited that one cannot trust weather prediction models because knowing the exact starting conditions is next to impossible, and even a seemingly tiny change can throw off the results. Lorenz stressed this all-important point, that we can’t pinpoint what exactly causes a system to tip. And the metaphorical butterfly symbolizes this unknown (or rather, unknowable) factor.
Basically, Lorenz was a bit of a party pooper. He told the whole academic world that their predictions are useless since they don’t know with certainly what the initial conditions are.
We can find evidence of this strewn throughout history, most recently in this century…back in 2008, during the major financial crisis. No model could have predicted this outcome, due to imperfect knowledge of the underlying conditions – not just in degree, but of kind. It didn’t help that derivative swaps were so darn convoluted and obscure, either.
I think we can all recall, with astonishing clarity, some moments from our lives when if it wasn’t for some chance happening that such-and-such would – or would not have – occurred. However, I find that sometimes the objective nature of cause-and-effect gets dropped from our more cherished anecdotes, e.g. “If I hadn’t gone to the party that night, I never would have met my spouse.” Well, no… you could’ve gone to the party and never met him or her anyway.
But perhaps I digress a tad. And that’s a pretty darn pedestrian example, to boot.
A more consequential and astounding example is that story of a man who had a bad burrito at home in the morning on 9/11/2001, and as he was commuting to Lower Manhattan, he had to make a quick exit but then had a bathroom mishap that prevented him from making it to the office on time. But then he looked up after a loud bang, and saw his office was engulfed in smoke. Wow. One can’t describe the sense of relief.
All because of a bad burrito.
Of course, that didn’t have a whole chain reaction in between the events, but it’s nonetheless pretty darn incredible. For chain reactions of the very small things, I think of the old verse “for want of a nail”, which Ben Franklin resurrected. “But for want of a nail, the battle was lost.” All about how a nail was needed for a horseshoe, needed for a horse, needed by the rider in battle. One might give pause to think that such proverbial wisdom might be perverted into addictions!! I.e. if not for spinning this wheel, or pulling this lever one more time… but even then, there are plenty of tragic anecdotes from lottery winners who wished they’d never won it. It’s true.
Taking a segue from this, one of the best books I’ve read in recent years has been Atomic Habits, by James Clear. He provides several notable examples of how very small changes in a system, or procedure, or environment, etc., compounded to a great magnitude when it came time to deliver. The one example that stands out is that of the British cycling team at the Olympics. Read that book if you haven’t done so already.
Who knows? It may very well change the trajectory of your life