Regarding Butterfly Effect

[Agentt]

I am not very certain how seriously butterfly effect is taken by the scientific community, but this question popped in my mind yesterday,

Considering Butterfly effect, how does me pulling one end of a long rope not cause a tornado to form at another end of that rope?

 

[Garolymar]

I think you're taking the metaphor too literally, sort of similar to the one I heard where a butterfly's wings cause a hurricane in asia or whatever. I think the Butterfly effect is more so that small actions and choices eventually can lead to significantly larger consequences. The butterfly's wing flap is more a representation of small human actions like treating the planet like a garbage dump and then reaping the consequences of climate change.

 

[LilRora]

This is basically like a domino or snowball effect. A tiny, seemingly insignificant action can have massive consequences after some time.

The thing is, however, that there are also many stabilizing factors in nature. The reason why pulling a long rope doesn't cause a tornado is not because it cannot - it absolutely could in very specific conditions - but it needs time to snowball and the world is a huge, constantly evolving, adjusting, and self-correcting entity largely reliant on entropy. A small action dissipates in the surroundings and ends up insignificant over longer periods of time.

The drastic effects of the butterfly effect, refer more to solids than fluids since they tend to deform permanently - for example, you happened to slip and hit a loose rock in the mountains, which caused it to dislodge two weeks later instead of two months later, triggering a massive rock slide. With fluids, this doesn't happen, because if you fall into water, time will very quickly return it to a stable state.

Most commonly, however, the butterfly effect is used with metastable and unstable systems. If we know that a system is metastable, any tiny change to it, no matter how small, will destabilize it and eventually cause drastic shifts in the system. The three-body problem is a perfect example of this.

Another very common example, this one in books rather than science, are human actions. They are much easier and more intuitive to manage than abstract concepts, and can be simplified to chains of events.

 

[Placeholder]

Agentt, skim the wikipedia article, then read it carefully:

Butterfly effect - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

Aside from the double pendulum demo there, one classic system where you see this effect is a simple math model of a top-fed waterwheel with leaking buckets that can overshoot and run the wrong way. (Alternatively, a simple bottom heated convection cell between two glass plates.) If you run it, then set it up with very similar but different initial conditions and run it again, the system will be spinning the opposite way half the time. Like what Lorentz observed.

The atmosphere is made up of these convection cells.

 

[Agentt]

Agentt, skim the wikipedia article, then read it carefully:

Butterfly effect - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

Aside from the double pendulum demo there, one classic system where you see this effect is a simple math model of a top-fed waterwheel with leaking buckets that can overshoot and run the wrong way. (Alternatively, a simple bottom heated convection cell between two glass plates.) If you run it, then set it up with very similar but different initial conditions and run it again, the system will be spinning the opposite way half the time. Like what Lorentz observed.

The atmosphere is made up of these convection cells.

I feel like that explains my question well, right? Like why do I need complicated things like a double pendulum to see the effects, why can't something simple like tugging on a piece of rope not cause similar chaotic moments?

 

[_oinkchan]

I am not very certain how seriously butterfly effect is taken by the scientific community, but this question popped in my mind yesterday,

Considering Butterfly effect, how does me pulling one end of a long rope not cause a tornado to form at another end of that rope?

Everything is a butterfly effect. You eat lunch filled with lot of garlic? Your girl comes to kiss you but vomits… then she breaks up with you disgusted by you. Now you are lonely and because you are ugly… you can't even get another one. So very deprived of human copulation. Now to cope, you lock yourself in a room with a screen in front, doomscrolling. Butterfly effect.

 

[Placeholder]

> Like why do I need complicated things like a double pendulum to see the effects, why can't something simple like tugging on a piece of rope not cause similar chaotic moments?

A double pendulum is described by four numbers - angular position of each segment, anglular velocity (turning speed) of each segment. It is very simple. Any simpler would be a 1d pendulum, which does not demonstrate the effects.

Tugging a rope around in vacuum - many many numbers. If we pretend there are only 100 segments and the rope is constrained to flop between two vertical walls - 200 numbers right there.

Tugging a rope around in Earth's atmosphere - vastly more numbers.

 

[Deleted member 84247]

You pull the rope and roll a d20. Turns out you rolled a natural 1.

The moment you pulled the rope, a gorilla stepped on it, causing them to fall halfway down a cliff and hit a rock. That rock tumbled the rest of the way down the mountain until it fell through the roof of a nuclear laboratory. It crushed the scientist mid-experiment, and he dropped the nuclear product he was carrying.

Boom, the whole mountain blew up, and now there's a nuclear holocaust. If only, you didn't pull that rope!

 

[RepresentingCaution]

It's like a chain reaction, except you can't see all the elements in that chain reaction because life is ridiculously complex. You'll never know if that rope you pulled caused a tornado or not because it won't happen on the other end of that rope. It will happen (or not) after several years and countless other things happening during that span of time.

 

[John_Owl]

it's not a matter of "will" so much as "can". I step on an ant. That ant would've otherwise be eaten by a bird. Because the bird didn't eat it, it starved mid flight and landed on a windshield, causing a car to swerve into another, killing the person in the oncoming car. Did me stepping on the ant cause the person to die?

This is the butterfly effect. The odds of that exact line of events happening are so small as to be neglible. But it is, in theory, possible (except that a bird that close to death likely wouldn't have the strength to take flight, but still, ignore that. I'm tired).

The point is, something CAN result in a larger event, not that it WILL always. We have literally millions of butterflies in my area alone in summer. So why isn't japan pounded by constant, non-stop hurricanes all summer long? Because the chain of events is practically one-in-infinity - that is to say, so small that it'll likely never happen exactly as it needs to even once in the entire time that butterflies exist.

 

[ShrimpShady]

As I understand it, the butterfly effect is just a pop-science way of conveying that small changes within a system can cause a chain reaction, resulting in drastic unforeseen outcomes. The whole "if a butterfly flaps its wings" thing is simply an analogy meant to make the math nerds sound cooler. It's not saying such a thing could happen. It's also not saying that these small changes must result in big, unexpected outcomes.

My mother decided to pursue her education in an English-speaking country and I grew up learning to speak the language. As a result, the English-speaking portions of the internet opened up to me and I'm here right now, commenting on your thread. Maybe doing this could result in a tornado sweeping through my house, but I doubt it.