Talk:Butterfly effect

Hello all, I am not a usual participant in editing Wikipedia, but I thought I'd help citing the claim that Poincaré did in fact foresee the relation which Lorenz proved in the 60s.

“A very small unknown cause determines a considerable effect which we cannot understand.

We therefore say that the effect is due to chance. If we knew exactly the laws of nature and the

situation of the universe at the initial moment, we could predict exactly the situation of that

same universe at a succeeding moment. but even if it were the case that the natural laws had no

longer any secret for us, we could still only know the initial situation approximately. If that

enabled us to predict the succeeding situation with the same approximation, that is all we

require, and we should say that the phenomenon had been predicted, that it is governed by

laws. But it is not always so; it may happen that small differences in the initial conditions

produce very great ones in the final phenomena. A small error in the former will produce an

enormous error in the latter. Prediction becomes impossible, and we have the fortuitous

phenomenon.”

"Why do meteorologists have such a hard time in foreseeing the weather with a reasonable

degree of precision? Why do showers and storms seem to occur at random, so that many people

find it absolutely natural to pray for rain or good weather while they would praying for an

eclipse utterly ridiculous? We see that great perturbations generally occur in regions where the

atmosphere is unstable. Meteorologists are well aware of the instability of the equilibrium and

that somewhere there will be a hurricane, but where? They cannot tell, because a tenth of a

degree more or less at any point will determine a hurricane here instead of there, and there will

be devastations in areas that would have been spared. If one had known this tenth of a degree

one could have foreseen the event, but observations were neither sufficiently frequent nor

sufficiently precise, and for this reason everything seems to be due to the intervention of

hazard. "

Poincaré Science et méthode 1903

I really hope I helped!

Its not a metaphor. The butterfly is real. It does not represent a rounding alteration on the 4^th decimal place in a numerical computer model. The rounding alteration represents the butterfly. 50.69.197.6 (talk) 00:13, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

:I support this message JeighCan (talk) 00:25, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

y=2^x

Y = # of outcomes

X = # of actions

Would this simple exponential function be correct if all actions only had 2 possible actions? Even then 10 actions would create 1,024 possible outcomes. Midpour (talk) 22:22, 25 January 2025 (UTC)

I love the chaos theory bits but the intro is far too centered on dynamical systems, neglecting the use of butterfly effect more generally including in, e.g. literature and science fiction. Thoughts?

Caleb Stanford (talk) 16:29, 21 March 2025 (UTC) Caleb Stanford (talk) 16:29, 21 March 2025 (UTC)