butterfly effect?

Question

why do you think the following: "Can the flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil cause a tornado in Texas?" is called the butterfly effect other than that it has to do with butterflys?

Answer 1

The phrase refers to the idea that a butterfly's wings might create tiny changes in the atmosphere that ultimately cause a tornado to appear (or, for that matter, prevent a tornado from appearing). The flapping wing represents a small change in the initial condition of the system, which causes a chain of events leading to large-scale phenomena. Had the butterfly not flapped its wings, the trajectory of the system might have been vastly different.

Here's a good article on the butterfly effect...

http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-the-butterfly-effect.htm

and

http://www.greatdreams.com/buterfly.htm


:)

Answer 2

The butterfly effect is a phrase that encapsulates the more technical notion of sensitive dependence on initial conditions in chaos theory. Small variations of the initial condition of a nonlinear dynamical system may produce large variations in the long term behavior of the system. This is sometimes presented as esoteric behavior, but can be exhibited by very simple systems: for example, a ball placed at the crest of a hill might roll into any of several valleys depending on slight differences in initial position.

The phrase refers to the idea that a butterfly's wings might create tiny changes in the atmosphere that ultimately cause a tornado to appear (or, for that matter, prevent a tornado from appearing). The flapping wing represents a small change in the initial condition of the system, which causes a chain of events leading to large-scale phenomena. Had the butterfly not flapped its wings, the trajectory of the system might have been vastly different.

Recurrence, the approximate return of a system towards its initial conditions, together with sensitive dependence on initial conditions are the two main ingredients for chaotic motion. They have the practical consequence of making complex systems, such as the weather, difficult to predict past a certain time range (approximately a week in the case of weather).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect

Chaos Theory:
In mathematics and physics, chaos theory describes the behavior of certain nonlinear dynamical systems that under certain conditions exhibit dynamics that are sensitive to initial conditions (popularly referred to as the butterfly effect). As a result of this sensitivity, the behavior of chaotic systems appears to be random, because of an exponential growth of errors in the initial conditions. This happens even though these systems are deterministic in the sense that their future dynamics are well defined by their initial conditions, and there are no random elements involved. This behavior is known as deterministic chaos, or simply chaos.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory

Answer 3

...and to make you just that little bit smarter, the saying comes from the Ray Bradbury story, "A Sound of Thunder" where a time traveler goes back to hunt dinosaurs and accidently steps on a butterfly causing ripples in time that change the present.