Talk:Butterfly effect

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

	Physics Portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Physics, which collaborates on articles related to physics.
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the assessment scale. [FAQ]
???	This article has not yet received an importance rating within physics.
Help with this template Please rate this article, and then leave comments here to explain the ratings and/or to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the article.

This page has been cited as a source by a media organization. See the 2005 press source article for details. The citation is in: Jim Six. "The root of chaos is in my back yard.", NJ.Com, June 23, 2005.

Contents 1 The issue of disambigaution 1.1 Stock market, Etc. 2 Sound of Thunder 3 Rv: Why 4 Utterly wrong 5 Poe 6 Animation 7 Recurrence link 8 controversy 9 Mathematical definition 10 Possible contradiction between this article and Chaos Theory article 11 ????????

[edit] The issue of disambigaution

I wonder if we need a disambiguation page? --Jeff 06:20, 30 May 2004 (UTC)

How can the error bound exceed 100%? Wouldn't that mean it's wrong more than all of the time? — Daniel 18:44, 15 Feb 2005 (UTC)

The "action drift over time" section was not encyclopedic, so I removed it. I tried to clear up some confusing parts, but it could still use some work. Should there be at least some mention of the cultural references present in some of the earlier edits? Comments/suggestions welcome! — BryanD 03:46, Apr 26, 2005 (UTC)

Is it not possible to have a more than 100% error? In chemistry, if you are supposed to have yielded say 10 grams of a certain chemical, and you yield 25, is that not a percent error of 150?

yes, it isn't...Banno 08:38, Jun 25, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Stock market, Etc.

I've removed stock market as an example: problems in prediction of that have more to do with knowledge affecting the result than with butterflies. Also revised the why NWP is difficult bit. Again, butterfly level stuff isn't really relevant in practice. William M. Connolley 10:26, 10 October 2005 (UTC).

Just as much as "lucy cakes" and "the horoscope". Drivel! But I believe in domino's, however, but tryin' to potray Butterfly's as the "domino effect" of Nature, y'right. Perhaps on a more global level, I guess. Big winds and/or tidal waves, sub-surface drifts, etc. But flappin' your wings...only as gettin' a fan in'yo face. Simple as THAT! It's no use in speculasation'--OleMurder 23:58, 12 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Sound of Thunder

Why is concept described as "abused" by popular media dealing with time travel? The time travel itself is irrelevant, it only provides a way of changing the initial conditions. The butterfly effect is a consequence of unpredictability over a sufficiently long time scale, it doesn't matter what the start and end times are, nor what model is used, etc.   — Lee J Haywood 22:40, 19 November 2005 (UTC)

Its abused because typically (as in "sound of thunder") they go back in time and are really really careful not to crush any butterflies. But! Just their mere presence (let alone the floating walkway) would be enough to totally change the weather and hence all history. William M. Connolley 01:01, 20 November 2005 (UTC).

Ah, A Sound of Thunder was already on my list of things to watch but I didn't know from the article that the characters were trying not to change anything. I have seen The Butterfly Effect which, to be fair, mainly involves a character that is deliberately trying to change things – even if the results are unpredictable. I've used some of your words to clarify the article a bit. Thanks.   — Lee J Haywood 09:44, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

I disagree with simply changing "used" to "abused" without further explanation, as this implies that these uses of the term in science fiction constitute "abuse" (i.e. a misuse or fundamental misunderstanding of the term). It implies that these things are inappropriate uses of the term butterfly effect. As I understand it, these examples have the basic notion correct ... that seemingly insignificant changes can produce long-term effects that are both huge and unpredictable. The fact that the details are not completely accurate (underestimating just how insignificant the changes can be and still produce enormous effects) falls within the normal parameters of science fiction. I recommend (1) changing "abused" back to "used", but (2) adding a paragraph about why the use is often inaccurate in its details.   — F Bunting 19:05, 22 November 2005 (UTC)

Second point (for my own clarification), Lee wrote: "Just their mere presence (let alone the floating walkway) would be enough to totally change the weather and hence all history." Changing "would" to "could" is more accurate. True?   — F Bunting 19:05, 22 November 2005 (UTC)

I agree – though it was William that mentioned the walkway, not me (my fault for not indenting properly, I suppose). I've changed the article to take account of your comments, though I'll leave it to someone else to explain why popular use is often inaccurate. Thanks.   — Lee J Haywood 23:20, 22 November 2005 (UTC)

No, it was my fault for not reading properly. Thanks for making the change. This is my first foray into wikipedia and didn't feel like editing without discussion (is that the norm?). Incidentally, I also thought it unfair to let Sound of Thunder stand as the prime example of the "abuse" of the theory, seeing as how it is based on a story written 10 years before Lorenz worked out the details of the theory. I think it's fine now.   — Frederick B 23:37, 22 November 2005 (UTC)

If you don't vandalise and try to keep typos to a minimum, you can change any article any way you like. No-one owns any article and if anyone who happens along doesn't agree with something they can, and will, simply change it. Even if you mess up and totally remove or corrupt the content of an article, it will simply be reverted to the previous version.

On a different note, I was wondering if it would be reasonable to mention Sliding Doors in this article? Though technically there is a massive change right at the beginning (missing the train in one reality, catching it in the other), the butterfly effect starts a few moments earlier when she is slowed-down fractionally by a boy on the stairs – but only in one reality. The other point is that neither reality converges, and there are the effects that she has on other people, that propagate to yet more people. Thanks.   — Lee J Haywood 19:38, 23 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Rv: Why

I reverted this. The anon version is garbled. NS isn't a good source anyway. Certainly, initial condition error is at a vastly greater scale than butterflys wings. There *is* some stuff about the relative sizes of model and initial error. But saying that BE is a figleaf is wrong.--William M. Connolley 18:28, 26 November 2005 (UTC).

[edit] Utterly wrong

Just like everyone else, we got it utterly wrong. Although Lorenz analyzed the butterfly effect in the '63 paper, he didn't give it any fancy interpretation (and certainly not its name) in terms of butterflies and tornadoes there. I checked it myself. See this. Or, if that doesn t work: Journal of Neuroendocrinology Volume 16 Issue 1 Page 1 - January 2004

Of course the now popularized fanciful notion of the butterfly effect can't possibly work. Most people intuitively understand this. From a practical standpoint if it were true, weather would degenerate into a completely chaotic, extreme system with no calm periods and be nothing less than a continuous series of tornadoes one after another in all parts of the globe. The concept ignores the fact of frictional losses in the air causing the air motion to be damped out. The miniscule air disturbance from the butterfly’s wings dies out and causes no effect whatsoever. But this is the kind of romanticized pseudoscience that makes more common-sense oriented people shake their heads and wonder what Scientists do all day. D. Whyte

You are wrong. The butterfly effect works as advertised, though its fairly easy to misunderstand it and most people do. See [1] and [2] (yes I wrote them). William M. Connolley 16:24, 23 December 2005 (UTC).

I suspect D.Whyte's confusion is between cascading effects and sensitive dependency on initial conditions. I.e. an implicit mental model in which if small things can have large effects, large effects must have still larger effects. I would have thought that the phase space graph I added to the page would help the conception.

I wonder if it would be worth pointing out a really simple example/analogy. One that comes to mind: A ball placed near the top of a hill might roll into any of several valleys on different sides (attractors). Right at the crest, which direction it rolls will be affected by very small difference in placement, or even by other small factors like a micro-current of air (or a butterfly flapping nearby). Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters 18:52, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

A while back I added the simple exampe of a ball sitting at the crest of a hill. In a complete brain glitch, I described that as "non-dynamical" when I meant to write "non-chaotic". An anon editor recently took out the adjective altogether, and just made the example and example. It's probably good as it is, but I wonder if other editors think the first paragraph should alreay try to distinguish strange and non-strange attractors... or is that way too much baggage? Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters 19:10, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

I agree; I've just re-edited to make the point that simple and easy-to-understand systems can have this property William M. Connolley 19:45, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

I reinstated the example of the butterfly beating his wings in the introduction. It's certainly not quite correct as far as the theory goes, but since it is the most popular etymology of the term I thought it deserved mention. --TheOtherStephan 05:24, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

I took it out. We already present the origin a paragraph later, and using the actual example locations from Lorenz' paper, and without all the spelling errors (it's funny how everyone seems to remember different geographic places for the illustration; the concept is the same regardless, but we might as well cite the actual originating one). Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters 06:14, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

I thought I remembered reading in James Glick's book that the term Butterfly effect actually comes from the pattern made by graphing the trajectories, which resemble butterfly wings (as shown in the article). Did I imagine this? Can anyone confirm or disprove?

[edit] Poe

Look at the story The Power of Words by Edgar Allan Poe for a fictional reference. Am I just imagining this or did Poe really talk about the butterfly effect in 1850?--85.100.240.148 21:35, 21 December 2005 (UTC)

Didn't see a butterfly in there? William M. Connolley 16:24, 23 December 2005 (UTC).

Not mentioning the butterfly, yes, but the point is the same, right? It's the words instead of the butterfly's wings here..--85.97.87.224 23:54, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

"Before the technologist walks the artist, before the artist walks the child."

I love Poe, he was a genius. But the Butterfly Effect has arguably been understood for centuries, if not longer, though of course it was not called by that name. Remember George Herbert (1593-1633): For want of a nail a shoe was lost, for want of a shoe a horse was lost, and so on to the loss of the kingdom. What is that but a succinct expression of the Butterfly Effect in an intuitive fashion? 192.139.140.243 04:26, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Animation

User Tó_campos has added a series of images of the Lorenz attractor to the Wikipedia. I like the images, but I find the GIF animation difficult to follow. Is that my browser? XaosBits 02:56, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

I also find the animation to be odd. Rather than a path animation of the sort I've seen before, it just kinda flashes between different parts of it (time segments?). Overall, I do not think the animation is helpful, at least not what I see (or apparently XaosBits too)... perhaps some particular browser version does something different... but I'm going to take it out pending discussion on this talk page. Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters 04:10, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

In fact I made the animated gif file just by using print screen in 3 images of the animation of my JAVA applet in http://to-campos.planetaclix.pt/fractal/lorenz_eng.html. Maybe I can try to do an animation with further images later to make the anomation more interesting. Tó_campos 11:51, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

I think you would find that just the 3 images side-by-side would be more helpful William M. Connolley 12:21, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the change, Tó_campos. I think the three separate images are much easier to understand. It's certainly nice to illustrate the Lorenz attractor, I just found the 3-step animation difficult to follow. I might tweak the arrangement slightly... or maybe create a custom down scaled version of them to get good anti-aliasing. Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters 18:37, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Recurrence link

Why does the link pictured as "recurrence" point to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergodic_theory, an even more technical article? I understand vaguely that the mathematics might explain recurrence, but the link was pretty confusing for me, a casual reader. Icewolf34 14:53, 14 July 2006 (UTC)

I changed it to Poincaré recurrence theorem, which has an explanation of recurrence in dynamical systems. Recurrence is often discussed in the context of invariant measures of the phase space of a dynamical systems, the topic or ergodic theory. XaosBits 04:54, 15 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] controversy

I recall reading soemthing about the Butterfly Effect meaning everything was connected. Much about hte time of the Conference in RIO when sustainabilit development came to the fore. there was a debate with soem saying it was limite dot a very smal lsituation (localized) and others saying any effecet wasmuch wider (i.e. Global) there are aspect s here like climate change, nuclear isotopes in eth atmosphere etc. However this is a controversy ewr shoudl mention.

I think it has the technical (religious / philosophical as well as physics term) name of NON-LOCALITY

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonlocality

perhaps soemeon coudl clean up - i just add the reference here. markus petz

Sorry - nonlocality has nothing (strictly) to do with the Butterfly effect. The butterfly effect boils down to "initial conditions matter". Nonlocality deals with (faster than light; hence nonlocal) interactions between quantum objects. I think you may be confusing the genuine randomness (so far as we can tell) of quantum mechanics with the apparent randomness of the butterfly effect. The latter is actually completely deterministic and predictable (so long as we know the initial conditions perfectly - which we never do). This is a common mistake as the two are often discussed together. Cheers, --Plumbago 13:44, 28 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Mathematical definition

I can't say I understand this, I guess it's because I'm lacking a little context. What does it mean to say that points x and y are both from neighbourhood N? They start off close together initially, I guess, but surely there's a definition of how close...? JulesH 14:46, 1 October 2006 (UTC)

Tis a maths concept. I've wiki'd it so you can check up if you like William M. Connolley 15:27, 1 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Possible contradiction between this article and Chaos Theory article

In the Chaos Theory article, section 1 Chaotic dynamics it is mentioned: Sensitivity to initial conditions is popularly known as the "butterfly effect", so called because of the title of a paper given by Edward Lorenz in 1972 to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C. entitled Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil set off a Tornado in Texas? The flapping wing represents a small change in the initial condition of the system, which causes a chain of events leading to large-scale phenomena. Had the butterfly not flapped its wings, the trajectory of the system might have been vastly different. (bold is my)

The facts in this paper in the History section mentioned: term "butterfly effect" itself is related to the work of Edward Lorenz, who in a 1963 paper for the New York Academy of Sciences noted that "One meteorologist remarked that if the theory were correct, one flap of a seagull's wings could change the course of weather forever." Later speeches and papers by Lorenz used the more poetic butterfly (bold is my)

Maybe the two facts are right but I think someone should clarify this. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 189.161.16.60 (talk) 03:37, 23 January 2007 (UTC).

[edit]  ????????

I have no idea what this article is talking about. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 68.146.236.11 (talk) 21:15, 19 February 2007 (UTC).