Whats the butterfly effect?

Question

i tried to understand the wikipedia article but i didn't really get it

Answer 1

If a butterfly flaps it's wings in china, the small gust of wind it creates can have a domino effect, causing a hurricane in america.

Basically a small event can change other small event - all these accumulate to make a change in a big event.

Go back in time - stop introduce hitlers grandma to a super hot guy...she doesn't fall in love with his grandpa...no hitler...no WW2 etc.

Answer 2

OK, At its simplest, the butterfly effect is just a name for the observation that a trifling change in a complex system may have large unanticipated and potentially disastrous effects in a remote part of the same system.

The classic example is the butterfly - it flaps its wings in Sumatra and Louisiana is hit by massive hurricanes. This of course is just an unproven theoretical effect. The basic thinking that provides such conceptual models is called chaos theory.

As the Wikipedia article had it, the butterfly effect is that of "sensitive dependence on initial conditions.  Small variations of the initial condition of a nonlinear dynamical system may produce large variations in the long term behavior of the system".  

This is mathematically demonstrable but hard to prove in fact because it's hard to link cause and effect over many steps in a complex dynamical system.

Does that help?

Answer 3

You might be recalling in the L.A. Law tv series, where a couple was having s*x in a new "butterfly" position.  It was never shown what on earth the "butterfly" was. If I am not mistaken, the two having a relationship was a total surprise to the other characters on the show. She never told who he was.

  The fictional movie "The Butterfly Effect" (2004) was about "a young man blocks out harmful memories of signficant events in his life. as he grows up, he finds a way to remember these lost memories and a supernatural way to alter his life.