“The shorthand is ‘the butterfly effect.’ A butterfly can flap its wings in Peking, and in Central Park, you get rain instead of sunshine.”Goldblum is right that chaos theory deals with unpredictability, but his description of the butterfly effect is a little misleading. “The Butterfly Effect isn’t one simple idea; it encompasses a set of mathematical discoveries that have been expressed in different ways at different times,” he said in an email. It’s easy to see how “the butterfly effect” could have come to take on multiple meanings. Clouding matters further, the term “the butterfly effect” calls to mind a 1952 short story by Ray Bradbury about a time traveler who steps on a butterfly in the prehistoric past, changing the outcome of a presidential election in 2055. It also gestured at the definition of “the butterfly effect” later employed by countless popularizers of science, from Goldblum to Gleick.

Source: Washington Post February 02, 2020 17:03 UTC