Do you belive in the butterfly effect?

[Homer55]

The Theory that if a butterfly flaps its wings in the uk it can cause it to snow in Japan, do you belive it?

[dawkins]

Hi Homer

The Buterfly effect is an analogy for Chaos Theory. The gist of it is that a small event can trigger a series of events that produce an unpredictable outcome. Chaos is a real phenonemon and has many applications in the real world. "THe Butterfly Effect" is an analogy based on Lorentz' statistical discovery of chaos.

http://library.thinkquest.org/3120/main_conten t.html

[dawkins]

oh i forgot to say that yes the butterfly effect is theoretically true. Weather systems are not random but are chaotic in that small changes to initial conditions drastically effect later weather conditions.

Dawkins

[mibn2cweus]

. . . only if it sneezes

[Peter Pedant]

yeah the thing about chaos is that there is no sense of nearness about the solutions

Lorenz first found this and noted it when he approximated some equations for weather

He was in a hurry once and put in shorter numbers and got completely different weather models - whereas one would expect a model which is roughly similar

but he sort of realised a bit what was going on, previously people had said o it doesnt work and given up.

original paper in a totally obscure journal, j atmos sci or something, does anyone know if there is a copy on the internet ?

[RATTER15]

Hogwash!!!!