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GLOBAL PUBLIC SCHOOL 2021
42
THE
BUTTERFLY EFFECT
Anna Elsa Mathew [ 5D ]
In one of Stephen King ’ s greatest works , called ‘ 11 / 22 / 63 ’ a man named Jake finds a portal in a diner ’ s pantry , which brings him to 1958 . After a few visits and some experiments , Jake deduces that altering history is possible . No matter how long he stays in the past , only two minutes go by in the present . He decides to live in the past until 1963 so he can stop the assassination of President John F . Kennedy , believing that this change will greatly help humanity . After years of stalking Lee Harvey Oswald , Jake manages to prevent him from shooting Kennedy . But upon return to the present , he finds that quite the opposite happens , earthquakes happen everywhere and his home is in ruins , nuclear war has destroyed half the world ,( As King wrote in an article for Marvel Spotlight , “ Not good to fool with Father Time .”) Distraught , Jake quickly goes back in time to change everything .
In addition to being a masterful work of speculative fiction , ‘ 11 / 22 / 63 ’ is a classic example of how everything in the world is connected together . The butterfly effect is the idea that small things can have non-linear impacts on a complex system . The concept is imagined with a butterfly flapping its wings and causing a hurricane .
Of course , a single act like the butterfly flapping its wings cannot cause a hurricane , however , small events can serve as catalysts that act on starting conditions , and as John Gribbin writes in his work ‘ Deep Simplicity ’ - “ Some systems are very sensitive to their starting conditions , so that a tiny difference in the initial ‘ push ’ you give them causes a big difference in where they end up , and there is feedback , so that what a system does affects its own behaviour ”. The point of the butterfly effect is not to get leverage , the idea of a small thing that has a big impact , with the implication that , like a lever , it can be manipulated to a desired end .
This misses the point of Lorenz ’ s insight . The reality is that small things in a complex system may have no effect or a massive one , and it is virtually impossible to know which will turn out to be the case ”.
The lack of one horseshoe nail could be inconsequential , or it could indirectly cause World War III . There is no way to predict which outcome will occur . Although the concept of the butterfly effect has long been debated , the identification of it as a distinct effect is credited to Edward Lorenz ( 1917 – 2008 ). Lorenz was a meteorologist and mathematician who successfully combined the two disciplines to create “ Chaos Theory ”. During the 1950s , Lorenz searched for a means of predicting the weather , as he found linear models to be ineffective . In an experiment to model a weather prediction , he entered the initial condition as 0.506 , instead of 0.506127 .
The result was surprising : a somewhat different prediction . From this , he deduced that the weather must turn on a dime . A tiny change in the initial conditions had enormous long-term implications . By1963 , he had played with his ideas enough to publish an award-winning paper entitled ‘ Deterministic Non-periodic Flow ’. He theorized that weather prediction models are inaccurate because knowing the exact starting conditions is impossible , and a tiny change can throw off the results . To make the concept understandable to non-scientific audiences , Lorenz began to use the butterfly analogy . He explained that a butterfly has the potential to create tiny changes which , while not creating a hurricane , could alter its trajectory . Many are unaware of The Butterfly Effect , but those who have heard it knows that the weather forecast could be inaccurate , because all it takes is a butterfly to flap it ’ s wings .