Surely you have ever heard or seen the movie of the butterfly effect. This effect comes through a Chinese proverb that says the following: "the flapping of a butterfly's wings can be felt on the other side of the world." This means that even the smallest detail can lead to other totally divergent consequences. Anything we do can have a considerable long-term effect over time. This can be extrapolated both at the level of nature and at the level of human actions and our personal actions.
In this article we are going to tell you what the butterfly effect is and what its main characteristics are.
What is the butterfly effect
The butterfly effect is linked to chaos theory. This theory says that the fluttering of the insect in Hong Kong can unleash a whole storm in New York. It is a non-deterministic system with small changes that can lead to totally divergent consequences. Initially, it begins with a small disturbance. Through an amplification process, this small disturbance can generate a considerable effect in the medium and short term.
The disorderly movement of the stars, the movement of plankton in the seas, the delay of airplanes, the synchronization of neurons, etc. All these chaotic or dynamic non-linear systems can trigger some divergent effects in the short or medium term. The theory of chaos and the butterfly effect explains that something as complex as the universe is totally unpredictable. The universe is a flexible chaotic system. Chaos theory explains how the atmosphere by the conditions of the Weather prevent predictions when reliable weather is beyond 3 days.
The butterfly effect is usefully used to address studies on social phenomena that are difficult to solve in terms of linear cause and effect relationships. It can be said that little things can have a considerable effect over time. If we take it on a personal level, we can see that the inclusion of numerous habits in our life can trigger other consequences.
Areas of the butterfly effect
The butterfly effect can be applied in many areas. It can serve as the main basis in various literary works or be part of relevant theories and more controversial and popular scientific paradigms such as chaos theory. And it is that the butterfly effect keeps a symbolism that can be applied to different realities.
Since a given action or situation can lead to a series of successive situations or actions that end up causing a considerable effect that it does not seem to correspond with the situation of the element that started it. Given that if only the initial cause and the final consequence are analyzed, it may not have too much correlation between them. However, the initial small action is the one that began to trigger other smaller effects but that have had a cumulative effect over time. This is how effect after effect has reached the final consequence.
The concept of the butterfly effect began with the experiences of meteorologist Edward Lorenz. This meteorologist genus the term butterfly effect in 1973 due to the impossibility of being able to make completely reliable long-term meteorological predictions. This is due to the fact that the action of various variables that are capable of modifying atmospheric behavior accumulate in the climate.
When we are talking about an atmospheric system and the possibility of precipitation, many variables must be analyzed. Variables that have a value that depends on other variables in question. For example, the temperature in a region will depend on the inclination with which the sun's rays arrive from space. This, in turn, depends on the moment in the translational movement that our planet is with respect to the orbit of the sun. Therefore, temperatures not only depend on what we have mentioned but on other variables such as the action of the wind, the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, relative humidity, etc.
Since each variable in turn has a direct or indirect dependence on other variables, a kind of chaos is formed that is very difficult to predict after a certain time.
Chaos theory
All this explains to us that chaos theory is present in the butterfly effect. And this indicates to us that the alterations that apparently can be simple of innocuous of a variable a concrete action, can get to generate massive effects. The first variable or the first action is the one that it triggers the process that causes the rest of the variables to propagate the effects until reaching the final consequence. This procedure is acquiring more and more strength.
Such is this chaos that is the origin of the popular saying that the flapping of a butterfly in Hong Kong can cause a hurricane in New York. This means that the slightest alteration in the same process can lead to very different and even totally unexpected results. The butterfly effect is often seen as a metaphor or analogy that is used as one of the pillars of chaos theory. Chaos theory was also originated by Edward Lorenz. According to this meteorologist in the universe there are systems highly sensitive to the presence of variations. All these variations can present very diverse but limited results, in a chaotic and unpredictable way.
The main model of chaos theory propose that in the face of two identical worlds or situations in which there is only one and almost insignificant variable that differentiates it from each other, over time and progress, other differences may arise that will cause the worlds are increasingly different from each other. That is, we are going to put an easy example. We put two planet earth with all the same conditions since it was created, but one we put a little more than average temperature. Although it is a small variable, the fact that one planet has a few degrees higher than the other's average temperature could condition that, over the thousands of years, life can develop in another way.
I hope that with this information you can learn more about the butterfly effect of its characteristics.