home
Sports and fitness
The flapping of a butterfly's wing evokes. What is the butterfly effect in chaos theory in simple terms from the point of view of physics? Butterfly effect - the meaning of the term, expression

The flapping of a butterfly's wing evokes. What is the butterfly effect in chaos theory in simple terms from the point of view of physics? Butterfly effect - the meaning of the term, expression

23.09.2019

65 years ago, Ray Bradbury's short story "And Thunder Came" was published. It described a journey into the distant past, where one of the characters accidentally crushed a butterfly. This led to unpredictable consequences, radically changing the future. In the early 60s of the last century, a young assistant in the department of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Edward Lorenz, received a number of unusual diagrams. Their shape resembled the wings of a butterfly, and a great fan of science fiction, Lorenz, immediately called the pattern he discovered the butterfly effect. It soon became a universal concept, explaining many mysterious phenomena, when insignificant events lead to grandiose consequences like typhoons, large-scale epidemics, or the collapse of colossal glaciers from the dome of Antarctica.

Errors of round values

In fact, the butterfly effect is far from being a simple idea that follows from a very complex mathematical theory of chaos. It all started when Lorenz tried to create a set of computer programs that could predict long-term weather changes. Once he did not round off thousandths of meteorological quantities, such as wind strength, humidity and atmospheric pressure. Unexpectedly, this led to a phenomenal result. It turned out that these tiny data changes completely changed the long-term forecast.

For a whole decade, Lorenz worked on his theory, but it became famous thanks to the determination of another meteorologist. In 1972, a prestigious international conference was held, but Lorentz did not have time to present the title of the report. There was no time at all, and this was boldly done by his colleague, giving the work a completely non-academic title “Forecasting: the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil will cause a tornado in Texas?”. It was from this moment that a heated discussion of the Lorentz butterfly effect began.

In that long-standing work, Lorentz tried to prove that the far-reaching consequences of minor atmospheric anomalies constitute two very interesting problems at once. Firstly, you should not criticize weather forecasts and mock weather forecasters, because it turns out that it is almost impossible to create an accurate long-term weather map. Secondly, in many processes it is simply impossible to "catch a butterfly" and identify the tipping point that leads to the real end result.

Generally speaking, many philosophers are very wary of Lorentz butterflies, because if small inaccuracies in some natural phenomena are of such great importance, then it can be argued that our world is completely unpredictable in some way...

The birth and death of a tornado

According to the Lorenz diagrams, an incalculable number of natural relationships can not only cause a tornado with a flap of a butterfly's wings, but also extinguish a hurricane in the bud. Thus, if a person intervenes in the surrounding nature, for example, by disturbing the ecological balance, then we are unlikely to ever know for sure what would happen in the alternative scenario “Earth without people”. And all this because all subsequent changes are very difficult to track and restore the sequence of events.

Even during his lifetime, Lorenz sadly noted that most of the climatologists around him perceive his original constructions exactly the opposite. The most important thought in Lorentz's theory is that we just cannot easily track a significant event and its connection with the present. Asserting that the flapping of a butterfly's wings can cause a storm, we must immediately move on to the next question: how can we be sure that this particular atmospheric anomaly caused the birth, and not the death, of a crushing tornado? It turns out that Lorentz's research provides an opportunity to take a fresh look at the problem of cause-and-effect relationships, but does not at all contain simple answers for predicting the future.

Mysteries of the Kitchen of the Weather

As a meteorologist, Lorenz tried to explain many mysteries of the kitchen of the weather with the help of the phenomenon he discovered. In his bold assumption, the cause of the most powerful storms that are born in the Gulf of Mexico may be a small weather anomaly in the South Atlantic.

Already after the scientist's death in 2008, a number of Latin American weather forecasters tried to connect the butterfly effect with the amazing Pacific El Niño phenomenon. In an incomprehensible way, this periodic atmospheric anomaly somehow affects the birth of devastating tornadoes that bring multibillion-dollar losses to the southern states of the United States.

At the same time, many American conspiracy theorists are simply sure that at the secret Pentagon training grounds they have long been trying to bring out "meteo butterflies" that can cause storms in various parts of the world. In any case, this could be a real fuse for the hypothetical "climate weapon" that has been talked about a lot lately.

The main parameter here is the hurricane wind as one of the areas of research in atmospheric physics. This science has been trying for many years to predict the trajectories of air vortices, but still cannot predict their strength, and hence the scale of possible destruction.

hurricane equation

For a quarter of a century, meteorologists have been working hard to create reliable computer models of bad weather. The stumbling block here is the so-called hurricane equation, which cannot be solved on the basis of classical ideas about the mechanism of its formation. One can imagine that a powerful hurricane is forming somewhere in the southeastern part of the Caribbean Sea. There, currents of warm and humid air meet with cold winds blowing from the Andes. Intensive condensation of water vapor occurs with the formation of a powerful cloud cover. However, if we try to set all the necessary parameters, we will not be able to determine the course and increase in wind strength. In particular, the calculated wind speed will always be much lower than in reality.

It is well known that the stronger the wind, the more waves on the surface of the water. The waves here act as a natural "roughness" of the water surface, against which the air currents rub. Meanwhile, if we consider the balance between the energy supply and its absorption due to friction, then it turns out that the stronger the wind, the larger this absorption will be. That is, the waves should extinguish the wind, just like in the title of the cult work of the Strugatsky brothers, but in reality this does not happen.

Hypothesis of Russian geophysicists

At the end of the last century, a group of employees of the Department of Nonlinear Geophysical Processes of the Institute of Applied Physics of the Russian Academy of Sciences from Nizhny Novgorod expressed a very unusual hypothesis. Based on the principles of Lorentz's theory, they suggested that the resistance of the ocean surface paradoxically drops when the wind increases.

Then, in 2003, an article by the American researcher Kerry Emmanuel, describing a similar phenomenon, was published in the journal Nature. In his conclusions, he relied on long-term data on wind speeds inside tropical cyclones using falling GPS probes from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Hurricane Observing Center. Based on the generalization of the results of these measurements, it turned out that the drag coefficient of the sea surface is much lower than the value obtained in the calculations of ordinary winds.

Russian scientists are studying -butterflies that generate hurricanes" at the unique "Complex of Large-Scale Geophysical Stands" installation, which consists of a pool with a high-speed wind-wave channel. Today, this complex is included in the list of installations of national importance in Russia.

Net for catching "hurricane butterflies"

The experiments of Nizhny Novgorod geophysicists gave amazing results. Using a high-speed video camera that shoots up to half a million frames per second, it was possible to capture the amazing processes of the birth of hurricane butterflies. Thus, an understanding of the mechanism of the occurrence of hurricane winds in the embryo of a storm arose. It became clear that at a certain stage, the air currents of a growing typhoon rush over the waves, like a hydrofoil glider or a colossal ekranoplan. In this case, the mass of air forms above the waves - a foam pillow - from solid lambs, which smooths out the excitement. At the same time, the resistance to air flows over the sea surface drops sharply.

Scientists counted the drops and realized that they had found the most effective mechanism for generating splashes, which greatly changes the pattern of hurricanes. Previously, it was believed that splashes are formed when pop-up bubbles burst and their number is incommensurably smaller. It turned out that if we recalculate the results of the Nizhny Novgorod laboratory experiment for natural conditions, then the formation of hurricane winds becomes clear. Scientists have understood what is an effective mechanism for the supply of energy to the monstrous force of the wind, and came close to predicting the destructive ability of a hurricane.

However, “Lorenz butterflies” were also found in sciences very far from meteorology.

Butterfly Effect

Butterfly Effect- a term in the natural sciences, denoting the property of some chaotic systems. A small impact on the system can have large and unpredictable consequences somewhere else at another time.

History of the term

Deterministic-chaotic systems are sensitive to small influences. In a chaotic world, it is difficult to predict what variations will occur at a given time and place, errors and uncertainty build up exponentially over time. Lorenz Edward Norton called this phenomenon the "butterfly effect": a butterfly flapping its wings in Iowa can cause an avalanche of effects that can culminate in the rainy season in Indonesia ("the butterfly effect" also evokes an allusion to R. Bradbury's 1952 short story "And thunder struck", where the death of a butterfly in the distant past changes the world of a very distant future. You can also see an allusion to the fairy tale of the Brothers Grimm "Louse and Flea", where the burn of the main character eventually leads to a global flood).

“Small differences in the initial conditions give rise to huge differences in the final phenomenon ... Prediction becomes impossible” (A. Poincaré, after: Horgan, 2001).

The origin of this concept

Now there is a phrase that has a global character, and it sounds like this: "The flapping of a butterfly's wings in Singapore can lead to a strong tornado in North Carolina." These words are familiar to almost every person, and, it would seem, they are as old as the world. But in fact, they were first uttered by a mathematician and meteorologist named Edward Lorenz. The scientist was one of the founders of chaos theory, and he also actively studied what the butterfly effect is within the framework of this mathematical apparatus. The fact is that deterministically chaotic systems are very shaky and unstable. Even the slightest leap in one place entails a storm of change in another. Lorentz described such instability and sensitivity not only from the point of view of science, but also in a language understandable to everyone, using a metaphor. That is why the phenomenon of the "butterfly effect" is so called and is simple and accessible even for a child.

Chaos theory

Our ancestors believed that the human environment is something stable, a kind of substance that always lives according to clear laws and norms. However, the notorious Lorentz discovered a new model of being, called dynamic or deterministic chaos. In the category of systems that are, so to speak, in a chaotic mode of operation, he attributed literally everything that surrounds us - the atmosphere, water masses, tectonic plates and even the human body.

In the middle of the last twentieth century, of course, this became a huge sensation, which was accepted by many with skepticism, but soon, thanks to this discovery, scientists for the first time were able to connect mathematics, physics, biology and other fields of knowledge. An important aspect is also that Lorentz explained what the butterfly effect is in chaos theory. If the entire biological organism called the Earth, its bowels, inhabitants and atmosphere live and interact in a chaotic manner, then the slightest fluctuations can cause global changes.

How does science fiction border on reality?

The book theorems of the Greek sages, the physical laws that were discovered in the Middle Ages, today are faced with facts that completely refuted them. Within the framework of sciences such as quantum physics and mechanics, it has been proven that parallel lines can intersect at infinity, time can go both forward and backward, and the teleportation of particles over long distances is a very real phenomenon. Such experiments have somewhat turned our idea of what the butterfly effect is, adding new, seemingly paranormal aspects to this phenomenon. If a particle can travel into the past, it may behave differently there than it did last time, causing a time paradox. In other words, this is the butterfly effect, due to which the particle is in the past, and its actions entail a complete change in the present, and as a result, the future.

Human life and its structure

As you may have guessed, the above phenomenon also takes place in the daily life of each of us. What is the butterfly effect in everyday life was shown in the 2004 film of the same name. The protagonist of the picture literally changed reality, incarnating himself as a little one. On the screen, it was clearly shown how just one phrase of the child completely changed his future, as well as the future of his friends and relatives. A similar example was also shown in the film "Mr. Nobody".

The choices we make in this moment are not only changing our lives. It completely changes the picture of the future. For a clear example, we can take the choice of profession. A certain Mr. X decides to become a doctor. While studying at a medical school, he does not pull. Nevertheless, with all his might, this person receives a doctor's diploma and holds an appropriate position in a certain clinic. It is probably not worth saying how many lives will be put at risk in this situation. However, Mr. X could stop his studies in his second or third year and transfer to the university where he would be taught what he really has a soul for. As the saying goes,

Explanation of the concept of the butterfly effect and examples from life.

Chaos theory is a field that connects mathematics and physics. The concept is based on the fact that the behavior and development of complex systems are significantly affected by initial conditions and minor changes. Even small adjustments can make a big difference in the result.

The butterfly effect is a small thing that can make a big difference in the course of events. Simply put, even a small flap of a butterfly's wings can move a tornado and give it direction. Therefore, every little thing in a huge system matters.

Many physicists, even before the advent of chaos theory and its explanation, paid attention to the fact that even minor changes can lead to huge consequences. They noticed that if numbers are not rounded or rounded off, the numbers are significantly different from each other. Therefore, they cannot be neglected.
The term became popular in 2004 after a number of newspaper publications. Later, a film was released that somewhat distorted the concepts of the butterfly effect. The heroes of the film returned to the past and changed events, which led to a change in the future. In fact, even if nothing changes, the future cannot be the same due to the excessive complexity of the system.
Another fundamental property of chaos is the exponential accumulation of errors. According to quantum mechanics, the initial conditions are always uncertain, and according to chaos theory, these uncertainties will grow rapidly and exceed the allowable limits of predictability.
The second conclusion of chaos theory is that the reliability of forecasts decreases rapidly over time. This conclusion is a significant limitation for the applicability of fundamental analysis, which, as a rule, operates precisely with long-term categories.

The name was coined by the famous meteorologist and physicist Edward Lawrence. Although initially in 1952 the story of the writer Bradbury was published. It was in this story that the writer described that the crushed butterfly influenced the presidential election. And instead of a normal candidate, the voters chose a fascist. Thus, Lawrence scientifically explained this effect.
He believed that the flapping of a butterfly's wings in Brazil could cause a devastating tornado in America.
Although a little later the scientist himself denied his theory. If it were true, then the flapping of a seagull's wings could completely change the weather and all forecasts would be useless.

Life itself is chaotic, and even small changes can lead to dire consequences. There are many examples of this.

Examples of the butterfly effect in real life:

Demolition of the Berlin Wall. This happened due to the press secretary's misinterpretation of the new law. The document indicated that some East Germans could occasionally visit western Berlin. But the law was not clearly spelled out subtleties. Therefore, they decided that the law applies to all Germans and at one time a mass of people decided to cross the border. As the border guards were discouraged, discontent among the masses grew. A huge number of people simply took down the wall to cross the border.
The Second World War. The history is truly remarkable. In 1918, a British soldier failed to kill a wounded German, and about 20 years later, this German caused the Second World War. If the military had shot Hitler then, there might not have been a war.
The rise of terrorism. It all started with a murdered dog, which was fed by a city council member with glass food. The little boy who was the owner of the dog told everyone in the neighborhood about the death of the dog and the culprit. Thus, a member of the city council did not get into Congress. After this incident, the boy became interested in politics and, as an adult, got into Congress. He became the organizer of American aid for the Afghans. Thus, the Mujahideen won the war, giving rise to the Taliban and Al-Qaeda organizations. It became the starting point for terrorist attacks.