The Problem With The Butterfly Effect

MinutePhysics is on twitter - @minutephysics

Minute Physics provides an energetic and entertaining view of old and new problems in physics -- all in a minute!

Created by Henry Reich

[ruroruro]

Insane man completely destroys the State of Kansas by starting multiple tornadoes while ranting about the Butterfly Effect.

[AnonymousFreakYT]

Damn. I always assumed his voiceovers were sped up.

Nope, he just talks ridiculously fast.

[JRAN]

Damn these drawings are getting more realistic!

[ExperimentalFun]

The way I always understood The Butterfly Effect is that one tiny little difference can go on to create 2 differences that go on to create 4 differences, that can go on to create 8 and so on, not exactly to those numbers but the point being that a single point of change can compound into many changes that can lead to a big changes down the line.

[JBantha]

So I've been killing butterflies for nothing?!

[Squantle]

This video has all the energy of a guy approaching you at a party and talking at you for an hour, but you can’t find an opportunity to escape the conversation.

[smkks]

The butterfly -> tornado allegory has always been just that, an allegory. Lorentz never meant it to be taken literally. And yeah, he kinda did weather simulations, so that's why it's mostly associated with weather.

[dominikbeitat]

Wow. For a guy who started out with lil' stick figures, your drawing has become almost lifelike now!

[rdbury]

It's not even that clear that "the butterfly effect" is named after the butterfly flapping it's wings. One alternative possibility is that the Lorenz attractor actually resembles a butterfly. Another one is that it comes from the Ray Bradbury story "A Sound of Thunder" where the death of a prehistoric butterfly "causes" noticeable changes in modern times. I personally like the idea that it's named after all three of these things.

[husaynbootwala]

He is going to be very sorry if there happens to be a tornado in Kansas 😂

[juzoli]

I think your problem is not really with the butterfly effect. The theory is just fine.
The problem is with the general INTERPRETATION of this theory.

Many people think that these small changes WILL lead to big changes in the future. But usually they don’t. Some changes will lead to big changes, but most of them don’t. The focus is on the UNPREDICTABLE nature of it. So we have absolutely no idea which small change will lead to a big future change.


I like to think about it the other way around, starting from the effect, not from the cause. Think about ANY major thing around you or in the universe. Your birth, the existence of a tree, the orbital distance of the Earth, whatever. For every single such thing, you will find some minor event in the past, which if happens a bit differently, it wouldn’t exist today or would be very different.
The butterfly effect only works in retrospect.

[josuedavid]

I really like the whole vlog style walking through the woods. Its cool to feel like you're having a conversation with the voice you've been listening to for the past 8 years

[OceanBagel]

I've always taken it to be more of a long-term effect, like how a small change can stack up over time to end up resulting in a larger change. Like maybe it won't diverge that much right away, but the small change can cause a different small change and eventually the changes will start to stack up. In that sense, it's more an example of where time travel paradoxes can come from.

[goclbert]

I didn't think people were interpreting the butterfly effect with such a narrow lense. Even Jeff Goldblum said it was about unpredictability.

[bestpseudonym]

The most elegant description of chaos I've heard: A chaotic system is any system in which the approximate present does not predict the approximate future.

[pbp]

“Enjoy your tornadoes.” If Henry turns out to be a sociopathic murderer the Royal Canadian Mounties will point to that statement as the red flag they ignored.

[Sabarok]

What about replacing the butterfly effect with a commute? How much of an effect would leaving at a different time have on your drive? When you get to a stop sign, you arrived just before another car, so you carried on and made it to the stoplight just before it went yellow. If you'd left 2 seconds later, you'd get to that stop sign just after the other car, and then the stop light would have turned red, and everything after it would have a lot of differences on what cars are around you. It's unpredictable because we don't know what change will happen from our departure time. Maybe it's not a perfect analogy since things like stoplights will regulate the input variations, but I think it's one that's easier to understand. People have enough experience with the "groundhog day" trope in media to understand how small changes to inputs can create different outputs.

[Chromnom]

I feel like this video is the first one I've seen, that I can play at 0.75 speed and it feels like someone talking normally :D

[georgiosrinakakis]

I always thought that the "the butterfly effect" is just a simple story to metaphorically explain a chaotic system. Are there any people believe it that a butterfly can cause a hurricane?

[LupinoArts]

Regarding our first reason: Weather is a thing everybody can get as a complex system since people deal with it on a daily basis. Far fewer people can conceptualize a chaotic pendulum, let alone a three-body planetary system unless they are somewhat trained in physics. So the "butterfly effect" can at the least be a gateway into the beautiful world of complex systems.