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The butterfly effect is the idea that some small and trivial event, like a butterfly flapping its wings can influence weather across the world, can have a much larger impact. While the concept has been around for a long time, and not just from a 2004 movie, the butterfly effect has become a social media trend, according to the HowStuffWorks website.
On TikTok, and other social media, the term is being applied after the effect of something that has happened, like meeting the love of your life when you are now planning your dream wedding, according to Betches. It’s very easy to make something more magical than just a coincidence but these attributions to the butterfly effect are popping up everywhere.
The Butterfly Effect and Chaos
There is real science behind the butterfly effect, stressed HowStuffWorks. The term was actually coined by Edward Lorenz, a meteorology professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1960s. He was studying weather patterns and devised a model that showed if you compare two starting points of weather that are near each other, when they drift apart one area can remain calm and another could end up with a severe weather event.
The point he made was that long-range weather forecasting was impossible because there were too many variables that cannot be tracked. He coined the term butterfly effect to describe it. This discovery was the foundation of a branch of mathematics called chaos theory, reported National Geographic.
This concept according to an extent, and that chaos, as Lorenz put it, is always present but difficult to discern,” Bo-Wen Shen, an associate professor of mathematics and statistics at San Diego State University told National Geographic, disrupted science by showing that modeling the future is only predictable to a small extend and that chaos is always present.
Real Life Uses
Since the butterfly effect defined chaos, it can now be used scientifically in chaotic systems like weather predictions, population growth of individual species, and even traffic flow patterns. This is through the understanding that small changes don’t always cause significant outcomes.
“Imagine a vast river flowing towards the ocean. The overall current of the river influences the movements of smaller eddies and swirls. Even though these smaller features might appear chaotic and unpredictable on their own, the larger-scale context provides a framework for understanding their behavior,” Shen said.
The butterfly effect model and chaos theory have impacted physics, biology, economics and almost every aspect of society where the future depends on the present. It shows that small changes can have unpredictable and unintended consequences for real life.
This is so much more then getting a new job because you walked a different route to work or finding your LOYL because of a new dress. But since the butterfly effect is so unpredictable, it could be just a coincidence, or it could be caused by the flapping of distant butterfly wings.
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