Is the butterfly effect real? Not the movie.?

Question

Is the butterfly effect real? Not the movie.?

Answer 1

Dynamics of a system is how it behaves through time. What the butterfly says, essentially, is that the dynamics is very sensitive to initial conditions, let me illustrate this in an example. A grand father clock has a pendulum, swinging with periodic motion, if you pull the pendulum bob up, after a fixed amount of time it will come back to that point, after the same time it will come back again. this is assumed that no friction exist. This system is independent of initial condition, it is always predictable of where the bob is. If we now add friction, and a driven force, then the bob will be swinging in a very complicated motion, very sensitive to where it had begun when t=0, which is, essentially, our initial condtion. a slight change in this condtion could result in massive change in the behaviour of the pendulum bob. butterfly effect basically creates a more visual and less mathmatical example, by exagerating the sensitivity of the world to a point where a minuscle change in air pressure, due to the wings of the butterfly in australia, causes a massive turbulence of air pressure or a hurricane in north america. I hope i illustrated this well.

Answer 2

Yes, whether or not a butterfly flies to a particular flower or not can cause a hurricane to form in another part of the world years from now or not. The catch, though, is that because of chaos theory's unpredictable nature for details, you cannot *control* or *predict* a hurricane by the use of small (butterfly scale) perturbations of the atmosphere.

Answer 3

If by it you mean small changes in the initial conditions of a chaotics system will produce gargantuan unpredictable changes - then yes.

The butterfly effect is used to illustrate the idea of a chaotic system by treating weather patterns as a chaotic system. The question is are we right in treating the weather system of earth as a chaotic system? Perhaps it's only partially chaotic.

So whether it's real or not depend on how chaotic the weather system really is. if it is totally chaotic, then, yes, the butterfly effect is real. A quiver of wings in Okasaki japan can produce a twister in kansas.