Pop culture loves the 'butterfly effect' and gets it wrong

http://archive.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/06/08/the_meaning_of_the_butterfly/?page=full

by smacktoward • 7 years ago

72 64 7 years ago

archive.boston.com

melling3• 7 years ago

“They expose the growing chasm between what the public expects from scientific research - that is, a series of ever more precise answers about the world we live in - and the realms of uncertainty into which modern science is taking us.”

Perhaps it’s not a butterfly effect, but I like to think of the “butterfly effect” of extra money invested in research, for example, paying off in large future dividends.

For instance, if the transistor had been discovered 10 years earlier, would the world be significantly different today? Imagine hundreds of other smaller discoveries had happened sooner...

anyfoo10• 7 years ago

Of course the world would be entirely different today, but whether that results in "large future dividends" is entirely unpredictable, and the whole point of the butterfly effect.

Maybe some very talented people would have picked up a career based on transistors before they were locked into something else and humanity would have harnessed fusion power by now.

Maybe some aggressive people would have harnessed transistors for weapons earlier and humanity would be eradicated by now.

Maybe due to a strange coincidence involving a transistor salesman on a trip to Brazil and some records on his way back, we'd all be dancing Bossa Nova at New Year's Eve, in honor of a decades old tradition.

"What if", is, in reality, pointless, as everything depends on everything (at least within our Light Cone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_cone )

melling3• 7 years ago

i never said it would be predictable.

Also, I’m not trying to play what-if with the past, I’m trying to get you to think about a different future where we make an additional investmen/effort to learn more sooner.

beautifulfreak• 7 years ago

Bell Labs, where the transistor was discovered, did exactly what you suggest, so maybe the transistor did actually appear 10 years early. It's famous for letting its scientists concentrate on research without concern for commercial uses.

dcanelhas• 7 years ago

The butterfly effect movie doesn't get this concept wrong IMO, since it's all about the unpredictable results of past actions. It does however have some logical plot holes large enough to fit a tornado through.

klez• 7 years ago

Yep, the point is exactly that no matter how Ivan tried to change things for the better, unforeseen consequences would still arise, like his friend being interned or he losing his arms or the other guy becoming a boy scout instead of a psychopath.

zokier• 7 years ago

I think the point the article is trying to make is that butterfly effect does not refer to unpredictability of future, as much as how difficult it is to trace back how we got to this point. While they are two sides of the same chaos coin, it is different perspective to look backwards and understand that it is not clear which event was decisive (if any) to reach current state vs trying to predict future. Especially as we humans are prone to creating easy narratives of past, but more easily accept the futility of predicting future.

cortesoft2• 7 years ago

Yeah, I feel like pop culture in general gets that idea right (that a small change can have a large effect, and it is unpredictable).

Jurassic Park also has gets that concept correct.

I feel like pop culture uses the butterfly effect as shorthand for "don't change anything in the past because you have no idea how big a change it would cause in seemingly unrelated things"

thwarted• 7 years ago

I feel like pop culture uses the butterfly effect as shorthand for "don't change anything in the past because you have no idea how big a change it would cause in seemingly unrelated things"

This is the plot of Ray Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder".

anyfoo10• 7 years ago

The actual Butterfly Effect sometimes gets me thinking. Unlike what's popular in time travel fiction, it seems to me that even the tiniest change would cause a completely different world, with completely different people inhabiting it, about a generation or so deeper.

As a stupid example, consider the change being a tree branch falling in the Serengeti. A small animal, which would otherwise have just continued eating, scuttles away. It crosses a nearby road, causing a nearly imperceptible slowdown for a woman on here way to the airport. She arrives just a few seconds later, but it's enough for the pattern of people in the hall to change and her to not see a sandwich shop she would have seen at a glance. She arrives meeting her husband, sleeps with him just like in the original timeline--but because she's slightly more hungry, did slightly different things on the plane, and so has slightly different discussions, they sleep with each other a tiny bit earlier or later, in an ever so slightly different position, but completely enough to either not cause conception of the child they would have conceived originally, or the conception of a different child (different sperm, different combination of genetic material, and so on).

And now it's obvious. The child is essentially a completely different person, with completely different thoughts, actions, being not exactly where the original child would habe been throughout its life at practically all moments (even if they go to the same school, they're unlikely to stand in the same spot in the hallway at all times). Blocking other people's view, or slowing them down, or causing them to go somewhere else. Causing many many "tree branches" of its own, many of which result in people meeting or not meeting other people, or having different offspring regardless, and so on.

Now, consider that this was just looking at one consequence of the falling tree branch. There are many more. The point is, it can be the tiniest things that ripple through time to entirely change who is populating earth a few decades later.

In media, even when the change is "prevent World War II", today's world almost always gets portrayed with the same characters and same personalities, that somehow still all met. I don't blame the writers, though, it certainly makes for a more entertaining story.

hanoz2• 7 years ago

Absolutely, the butterfly effect renders all back in time plots fatally flawed. Never mind killing Hitler's grandfather or making sure your parents still meet, your very appearance in an earlier world, even for an instant, would guarantee that before long you and everyone else who would otherwise have been born afterwards would certainly never exist.

EGreg• 7 years ago

Not in Gargoyles

ModernMech• 7 years ago

I saw a drama based on Steven King's 11/22/63. A guy goes back in time to save JFK from assassination. Spoiler: he saves JFK in the past and when he finds his way to the future the world is destroyed. Oops.

vidarh• 7 years ago

This presumes a variant of time travel that allows changes to make a difference. A many world interpretation would just mean branches (and you'd only see your changes if you manage to find a way to navigate to them); a fully deterministic model would imply you can't change anything and your time travel always had happened exactly the way it would happen, and whatever you think you achieved was consistent with history (wasn't really Hitlers grandfather after all for example); a strongly convergent model would see the effects mostly have relatively minor effects, and when they tip over and have bigger effects, those bigger effects still end up cancelling out over time.

We both don't know how time travel would work if it is possible, and don't know well enough what the odds are of any small change affecting large long time change.

E.g maybe if Hitler didn't come along, someone else would have.

And in fact, exploring those effects is often a major part of back in time plots.

Moorcocks 'Behold the man' for example have someone travel back in time to meet Jesus only to realise that the real Jesus was a mentally disabled man and that since he is the only one that knows the image of present day Jesus, the time traveler himself must always have been the person history knows as Jesus, presenting a deterministic idea of time, where paradoxes would be impossible, because time is in that world in effect just one more spatial dimension our perception moves across.

There are many such models that would allow for some time travel plots to be plausible all the time we have no idea how it actually works.

Of course all of them will probably look quite ridiculous and quaint if we ever figure out the real thing.

baddox• 7 years ago

How could we estimate how resilient the timeline is to small changes? If no small animal had been in the vicinity of the falling tree, perhaps that event would be much more insulated from humans.

anyfoo10• 7 years ago

I think it's a good question. Let's assume there is absolutely no animal nearby (tree branch makes a sound, slightly changing any animal's behavior, chain reaction...), and let's further assume that the tiny air currents generated in this scenario do not only not cause a tornado as in the original butterfly effect (which, frankly, is not very likely), but are "buffered" enough that they don't create any change perceptible to any human at all.

Then, overall, the makeup of the world is still different. Will this really never cause anyone to get a speck of dust in their eye that they otherwise wouldn't, flinching, preventing them from having the though "oh I have to buy milk" that they were about to have?

I don't know... maybe it's just that some changes are indeed so tiny and remote that it takes them a long long time to have an effect, but once an obvious effect is present, I guess we're back to everything changing again?

yarg2• 7 years ago

The timeline should actually be hugely resilient to changes at smaller scales.

Consider the world in terms of large numbers of probability distributions.

When you combine distributions it's the variance and not the deviation that you add together.

I.e.: at larger scales the distribution of probabilistic variables tends toward the mean.

All that's left at smaller scales is quantum white noise.

breuleux• 7 years ago

Think of it this way: if you take a single particle in the world changing course, when it eventually collides with another, it will be with a different particle that it would originally have collided with. Once that happens, two particles now have a different course. Eventually, it'll be four, then eight, and so on, until pretty much every particle's course is shifted. This global shift is almost certain to happen eventually, and relatively quickly.

At a macroscopic scale, though, that won't look like much at all. Air currents, temperature, and so on don't really depend on what specific microstate the atmosphere is in. It's like shifting every object in a room at random by a tenth of a millimeter, for all intents and purposes it doesn't change anything. Usually. From time to time, some microscopic details can snowball into macroscopic effects. Well, pretty much any small change anywhere in the world is going to shuffle all of these, everywhere in the world, a few years down the road.

This means that, perhaps counter-intuitively, the more time passes, the more likely a small change is to have an effect. First it will shift everything a tenth of a millimeter, but eventually one of these shifts will snowball into a one-millimeter shift... which will propagate everywhere, setting the stage for a ten-millimeter shift, and so on. You'd be unlikely to notice, though, because the proximal cause for a big change will almost always be a medium-sized change, not a tiny one. Furthermore, it could take a very long time for the effects to really ramp up: large scale natural processes are very robust. Still, if a process has any kind of sensitivity to noise, it's just a matter of time before it shifts.

drewrv• 7 years ago

The short story "Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom" has an interesting take on this theme, where the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is true, and a device lets people communicate with parallel realities. They start off with a difference of one quantum measurement but slowly diverge.

GistNoesis2• 7 years ago

Sure the world will be completely different, but in high likelihood it will be very similar.

To take your examples, the kid born might be completely different, but will likely receive a somewhat similar education that it would have so he won't be too different.

Wars that might have been avoided on one occasion might just have been delayed, (WW1 ferdinand assassination comes to mind).

In chaos theory, the space of possibilities is usually split up in different regions called basins that each converge towards around its own attractor point. But usually a small change isn't enough to make you change of basin. It only matter when you are close to the boundary, on the edge of chaos.

It's kind like re-rolling when playing D&D, you can get luckier and win the fight instead of losing it, but if you are not well prepared it won't matter in the long run.

At scale, the law of large numbers average effects out. In science-fiction the theme of order vs chaos is often evoked, because it's one of the most powerful tool for the underdog hero to turn the situation around. By definition the hero must choose the more risky side and chaotic situation that will give him his only chance to get out on top.

anyfoo10• 7 years ago

How can the world be "very similar" if it consists of an entirely different set of people within a relatively short time? Think about it, if not a single one of the politicians, inventors, scientists, or really any plain regular person would have existed. If any tiny change does not stay in complete isolation (which I don't think is physically possible), eventually the world will be entirely different. Even language will completely diverge.

cortesoft2• 7 years ago

It depends on what theory of time travel we are talking about. If we have the multiverse theory, then you are just creating a new split in the possible timelines.

Other theories would say that your time travel has already been taken into account in the timeline, so anything you are doing to change the future will actually cause it to happen as it has already happened.

gregmac• 7 years ago

You could extend this further: what if we could "rewind" time, then just let things play back again. Would everything be exactly the same as it is now?

Would "random" particle interactions happen in the same way (making them decidedly not random)? Would the same branch fall at the same time, landing in the same place? Would every coin flip be the same? Would every single decision every human makes be the same?

anyfoo10• 7 years ago

Since rewinding time is entirely theoretical, and assuming physicalism, I guess that entirely depends on whether, in your thought experiment, you allow quantum interactions (those which are posited to be truly random) to play out the same way or not. If yes, yes, if not, not. 8)

seventhtiger• 7 years ago

I've had the same thought before. In response to the question "if you go back to being a child knowing what you know now, what would you do?"

Being the eldest I thought I would immediately cry for my unborn siblings who are now just an unrealized possibility.

scarejunba• 7 years ago

Well, go ahead and try it out. Have you and a friend leave slightly differently from your homes in San Francisco to go see another friend in San Jose. You leave ~ 10 mins from each other and you'll arrive ~ 10 mins from each other. You'll encounter similar traffic.

Go ahead and test the way your world works. The short term doesn't matter. It gets beaten by the weight of other stuff.

foxyv• 7 years ago

Choas is kinda funny. When you have systems of a large number of non-linear things they tend to average out. A time traveler could be as little as a single particle and still re-shuffle the entire deck so to speak. But it's still the same deck of cards.

In the end you're still in nearly identical initial conditions. While the individuals will change, the whole of society will be extremely similar due to statistical mechanics. Susie being slightly more aggressive will be balanced out by Johnny being slightly less aggressive, etc... You may cause a new extrema event though like Johnny inventing a cheap nuclear bomb, or you may prevent one.

A good time traveler would be able to sit outside time and probe reality using tiny changes until they get the outcome they want. But at that point you are so powerful I can't imagine anyone would care. Maybe that's why we didn't all kill ourselves yet. Some time traveler poking at the timeline.

DoreenMichele• 7 years ago

I generally think of time travel fiction as a means to explore and develop "what if" type thinking for purposes of enhanced decision making. So I tend to cut them some slack for their myriad shortcomings. I find them useful for developing pragmatic mental models.

I liked The Butterfly Effect. I also like A sound of thunder wherein the death of a moth alters the future.

oarabbus_• 7 years ago

I don't understand this article at all.

A SmartMoney.com market analysis from 2007 cites Lorenz, then suggests that hypothetical problems at Sony could affect a string of shippers, retailers, and investors: "One butterfly, in this case a Japanese butterfly, sets off the entire chain." Even applied to society, rather than nature, such claims merit skepticism.

What's wrong with that? Is he blissfully unaware of, for example, the Maersk hack and how it "butterfly effected" the entire chain?

quelltext• 7 years ago

The author's point is that anytime the butterfly effect is used in this way (identifying the singular cause of a chain) it insinuates that we can always pinpoint such a butterfly if we look very hard or that there is one single such butterfly causing the chain of effect in the first place. However Lorenz (at least per the author) tried to make the exact opposite point. Among many many variables if one slightly changes (e.g. flap or no flap of a butterfly's wings somewhere) it can affect a lot, but we don't know which one.

I don't know it's wrong per say to use it as most people do but I see the author'a point. It's often (falsely) used when there is a chain of ovents and we know which thing caused that chain.

danielparks• 7 years ago

This issue is that we can draw a causal line back to a single event, e.g. the hack.

Their definition (presumably the original definition) of the butterfly effect requires that it be untraceable. If you make a tiny change to initial conditions, you can’t accurately predict the outcome without a complete model.

cairo_x• 7 years ago

Billions of events happen regardless of billions and billions of previous events having happened.

roel_v2• 7 years ago

What caught my eye in this article was this sentence:

"This is a founding idea of chaos theory, whose advocates sometimes say Lorenz helped dispel the Newtonian idea of a wholly predictable universe."

Maybe someone more well-versed in physics than myself can comment: is it really so that 'metaphysical determinism' (so to say) is specific to Newtonian physics, and so, that it's no longer the state of the art in our understanding of nature? In other words, is there no room for Laplace's demon beyond classical mechanics? That would take the concept of the nature of 'randomness' beyond what I so far understood it to be.

rwallace• 7 years ago

Metaphysical determinism still works in relativity. It also still works in quantum mechanics if you accept the many-worlds interpretation.

That's quite orthogonal to the question of practical predictability. What chaos theory shows is that, regardless of which model of microscopic physics we are talking about, there are important aspects of the future that cannot be predicted to high precision from within the universe.

jhrmnn• 7 years ago

No, it doesn't work in quantum mechanics. Even under many-worlds, the result of a measurement is fundamentally indeterminable until it is realized. In many-worlds parlance—which "world" you end up in is indeterminable.

jmaa• 7 years ago

The word "predictable" implies "deterministic", but they are not identical. The universe can be governed by strong deterministic laws, while being too complex to simulate and thus predict.

This poses some difficult questions for science, given that most science up to now has been about predicting something, trying it and checking whether theory and practice matches.

roel_v2• 7 years ago

Right, but I took the comment in the OP to mean that non-Newtonian physics makes things 'non-deterministic', even is we leave aside the practicality of simulating the universe at the molecular (or smaller?) level.

bayesian_horse• 7 years ago

Good news for the butterfly: Nobody affected by the storm will know WHICH butterfly caused it.

Also there is a detail I don't understand: Lorenz talked about the pressure differential underneath a butterfly's wing, being used in a large-scale weather simulation. But given the computing resources and thus the limited resolution of such simulations at the time, I wonder how big that butterfly must have been.

rimliu• 7 years ago

My favorite time-travel version is still The Technicolor Time Machine by Harry Harrison. It does away with this by having a single timeline. And if you go to the past, it means you were already there "originally".

Pop culture loves the 'butterfly effect' and gets it wrong

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