The Butterfly Effect

Posted by Miguel on December 02, 2004 at 10:49:45

Little things we do are important. For the whole page: http://www.ca.omf.org/content.asp?id=13860

Curiously, the article is about the Holy Spirit. Maybe Chaos theory, quantum mechanics, dynamic systems, etc. will eventually explain what mysticism in many religions have already been saying for ages?

"Edward Lorenz was a physicist working in Massachusetts in the 1960s. Lorenz was developing a computer programme that could determine the probable development of weather systems based on current conditions. As he was inputting data into the system, Lorenz accidentally entered a number and missed out the last three of six decimal places. Although it seemed unlikely that such a negligible discrepancy could make any significant difference to the outcome, Lorenz also entered the correct number anyway to be sure. To his astonishment he discovered that rerunning the programme with the extra three decimal places produced completely different results. A change of little more than a hundred-thousandth led to an entirely new outcome.

As Lorenz was later to explain, it was if something as seemingly insignificant as the beat of a butterfly’s wing in Peking could end up generating a hurricane in New York. Since then, the phrase ‘The Butterfly Effect’ has come to describe the way in which an apparently negligible variable can have a surprisingly vast influence."