We heard all speak about the butterfly
effect. Why the butterfly effect valued! Wouldn’t this be a collateral effect of the reheating (which prevents a good cooling of the brains)?
In this article we will try to draw a scientific assumption from the great popularization of the alleged effect.
From or comes the Papillion effect?
The term would come from the title of a conference given in 1972 by Lorenz, a meteorologist considered as one of the inventor of the theory of chaos. The title of this conference, a metaphor for some (but the rumor directs rather towards a joke intended to awake the listeners…) was “Prediction: can the beat of wings of a butterfly in Brazil cause a tornado in Texas?” (Predictability: Does the Flap of has Butterfly’ S Wings in Brazil Set off has Tornado in Texas)
According to some this title really would not have been even decided by Lorenz himself but by the organizer of the conference and when Lorenz would have realized some, it would have been to rectify it too late. At all events, during this conference, Lorenz himself east appears itself it employed to minimize the range of this statement (that a particular beat of the wings of a particular butterfly can cause phenomena weather) since:
– the same butterfly beat wings all the day
– other butterflies did as much of it
– other animals, to even start with us, moved much more air than a simple butterfly, etc
Is the Papillion effect scientific, is it really exists ?
The subject of the conference of Lorenz was to in addition show a particular application of the “principle of the sensitivity to the initial conditions”, well-known in physics (but also in the everyday life: to rise left foot). In fact, in the particular case explored by Lorenz – that it named the attractable strange ones – the behavior of a mathematical equation (with the parameters of which a small variation is applied at the beginning) though numerically distinct, are in practice remarkably similar and parallel (this fact is quite visible on the images suggested by the page of English wikipedia
Thereafter, it was confirmed that the scientific analysis of the unforeseeable evolution of the weather systems, which prevents the vision of their short-term evolution (8 days), rather allotted this fact to a behavior inherent in these systems, and not with the ignorance of the initial conditions. Moreover it is easy to see that such systems, like other chaotic systems, in fact are characterized by the emergence of a stability in the medium and long term (month – years) and not of an increasingly large chaos (the blue curve and the yellow curve on the image are remarkably similar, even if they differ for always…). It is what makes it possible besides to describe climates: the events weather in a given place follow one another in a random way and with an unforeseeable amplitude but their statistical compilation less one rather stable resultant, the local climate does not give any, which is well studied a posteriori with the traditional statistical tools. The real existence of this local climate is also corroborated by the particular character of the vegetation, which behaves like a kind of integrator biological.
In any event, the good direction says to us that before exploring so really a beat of wing in Rio could cause a tornado in Texas, it would have been necessary to study if a beat of wing in Texas could already have this result!
Why the writers and the journalists did speak so much about the butterfly effect?
Many books and films exploited the idea of the sensitivity to the initial conditions in their intrigue, generally in conjunction with a voyage in time, and that before the great popularization of the butterfly effect by the journalists. At one time of the history told in these books or films, a character modifies voluntarily (with intentions good or bad) or involuntarily, one or more parameters, often pain-killer with the departure, but often carrying out to died of an animal or a person…
An alternative is to prevent the meeting of two people (It goes without saying that the event to be avoided at all costs in a company of this kind is to meet oneself or its own parents, that whose films refulgent obviously). Of return to his time in general, the hero finds the world modified in an incredible way, which makes it possible to decorate the history of many events which would be differently difficult to justify in the scenario…
Pages of Wikipedia custom give the list of all films, novels or other data bases which exploited an alternative of the effect butterfly (the English site quotes besides works which are not taken again on the page in French (to pass from the one to the other it is enough to click on the bond of the languages on the left).
Still let us note that these modifications of the past generating an upheaval of the future do not have anything weather and do not relate to either a shift of place: the action and the effect have a unity of place and it is finally theatre bus thanks to the voyage in time, one respects a unit of time in practice.
These literary processes really do not correspond so that one waits of a butterfly effect: a contemporary modification or almost with its consequences (but it is true that the starting paradigm does not say at the end of how long the beat of wing gives the hurricane…) but distant from its starting point. However I will use in the continuation of this article this new meaning, even if one can regard it only as one analogy with the true butterfly effect.
In its very comic article but also documented very well of 1995: “hunting for the effect butterfly, Nicolas Witkowski quoted by wikipedia) studied the possible origin of the choice of the butterfly (which would have been a gull a long time). Noticing how in one news of Bradbury going back to 1948, it was already a butterfly which the traveler in time had killed without realizing it or it has already spoken about cyclone, it discovers that the curves generated by the attractive strange ones – look at the image again – of Lorenz resembled Butterflies… it would be better to say, with half-butterflies!
Witkowski still pleasantly counts (without claiming to be exhaustive) the various geographical alternatives (it detects a arachnophobia and a American tendency in our effect), climatic (one passes by all the range of the storms, the hurricanes, the cyclones without forgetting the snowstorms and the tidal waves, one will see that one can further go…) and more rarely biological (the animal is sometimes a dragonfly). Finally it is indignant -American tendency to center the cause, the butterfly in fact, out of the United States but the damage, on the contrary, in the motherland!
A new paradigm
Oddly, and contrary to its starting observations and so that its article shows beginning with the end, Witkowski ends up finding that the various researchers of the butterfly effect did not show as well originality as that! It deplores that the beautiful effect is used without understanding and adaptation, including in the universe of the neurons or the human individuals…
On the other hand, the article of Wikipedia in its paragraph: New Paradigm, implies that the rise of popularity of the butterfly effect would be due to its use as social metaphor.
We propose the third interpretation here:
The fact that the butterfly effect became so popular, its re-use in many fields, in extreme cases of artistic, in social sciences as well as in hard sciences (at least in the articles which refers to it) obviously come out from an attractive effect of amplification: a setting in abysm whose Witkowski does not appear to have realized:
Whatever was the true event founder of the history, the anecdote, it was hawked constantly like an urban legend and what is remarkable, it is that its dissemination, a intellectual storm in the head of the journalists and popularizes, occurred itself according to the physical model considered (but here in the mental world): the beat of language of a writer or an organizer of conference was transformed into large wind stream!