Butterfly effect

A plot of Lorenz's strange attractor for values ρ=28, σ = 10, β = 8/3. The butterfly effect or sensitive
dependence on initial conditions is the property of adynamical system that, starting from any of various
arbitrarily close alternative initial conditions on the attractor, the iterated points will become arbitrarily
spread out from each other.

Experimental demonstration of the butterfly effect with different recordings of the same double
pendulum. In each recording, the pendulum starts with almost the same initial condition. Over time the
differences in the dynamics grow from almost unnoticeable to drastic ones.
In chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small
change in one state of adeterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state.[1]
The term, closely associated with the work of Edward Lorenz, is derived from the metaphorical example of
the details of a tornado (the exact time of formation, the exact path taken) being influenced by minor
perturbations such as the flapping of the wings of a distant butterfly several weeks earlier. Lorenz
discovered the effect when he observed that runs of his weather model with initial condition data that was
rounded in a seemingly inconsequential manner would fail to reproduce the results of runs with the
unrounded initial condition data. A very small change in initial conditions had created a significantly different
outcome.[2]
The idea that small causes may have large effects in general and in weather specifically was earlier
recognized by French mathematician and engineer Henri Poincaré and American mathematician and
philosopher Norbert Wiener. Edward Lorenz's work placed the concept of instability of the
Earth's atmosphere onto a quantitative base and linked the concept of instability to the properties of large
classes of dynamic systems which are undergoing nonlinear dynamics and deterministic chaos.[3]