The meaning of the butterfly

The Boston Globe ^ | June 8, 2008 | Peter Dizikes

[forkinsocket]

Why pop culture loves the 'butterfly effect,' and gets it totally wrong

SOME SCIENTISTS SEE their work make headlines. But MIT meteorologist Edward Lorenz watched his work become a catch phrase. Lorenz, who died in April, created one of the most beguiling and evocative notions ever to leap from the lab into popular culture: the "butterfly effect," the concept that small events can have large, widespread consequences. The name stems from Lorenz's suggestion that a massive storm might have its roots in the faraway flapping of a tiny butterfly's wings.

Translated into mass culture, the butterfly effect has become a metaphor for the existence of seemingly insignificant moments that alter history and shape destinies. Typically unrecognized at first, they create threads of cause and effect that appear obvious in retrospect, changing the course of a human life or rippling through the global economy.

In the 2004 movie "The Butterfly Effect" - we watched it so you don't have to - Ashton Kutcher travels back in time, altering his troubled childhood in order to influence the present, though with dismal results. In 1990's "Havana," Robert Redford, a math-wise gambler, tells Lena Olin, "A butterfly can flutter its wings over a flower in China and cause a hurricane in the Caribbean. They can even calculate the odds."

Such borrowings of Lorenz's idea might seem authoritative to unsuspecting viewers, but they share one major problem: They get his insight precisely backwards. The larger meaning of the butterfly effect is not that we can readily track such connections, but that we can't. To claim a butterfly's wings can cause a storm, after all, is to raise the question: How can we definitively say what caused any storm, if it could be something as slight as a butterfly?

[forkinsocket]

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[Berlin_Freeper]

“A butterfly can flutter its wings over a flower in China and cause a hurricane in the Caribbean. They can even calculate the odds.”

Can you imagine what Hillary has done??

[mysterio]

A butterfly can flutter its wings over a flower in China and cause a hurricane

[tcostell]

Overusing another popular catch phrase, the dimwit media keeps talking about how we're about to pass some "tipping point" with regard to global warming, but nature doesn't work that way. Weather is a non-linear mean reverting system, there are no tipping points.

But go try and tell them that.

[airforceF4]

It’s a metaphor. As in literature, not science.