Colobong, Reynel John A.

3CED-Engl
Personality Development November 19, 2023

Transcribe of the Butterfly Effect

0:04 science is dependent upon isolating system in order to study it but this is
0:10 literally impossible everything has an effect on everything else in our
0:14 universe every single particle of matter has some gravitational effect on every
0:19 other particle of matter irrespective of how much we try to isolate something the
0:24 concept of an isolated system that has zero interaction with its environment is
0:28 really just theoretical one that does not exist in reality this simple insight
0:35 virtually destroys the entire scientific enterprise because science is dependent
0:40 upon this capacity to isolate systems because if we want to say a causes B
0:44 that we need to be able to control for all other variables that is remove them
0:49 from the equation as we have stated this is not possible so how do we get around
0:53 this stumbling block as it appears that the scientific endeavor goes on without
0:57 this causing too much for a problem what we do because we can't fully isolate any
1:03 system is essentially define what our significant effects and what our
1:08 negligible effects and simply forget about the negligible effects so for
1:12 example if I'm doing research in my lab on the interaction between two particles
1:16 of matter under this premise I do not need to take into account the
1:20 gravitational effect that some planet the other side of the universe is having
1:24 on these particles because it is deemed negligible this basic premise that small
1:30 causes can only cause relatively small effects is one of the basic assumptions
1:34 and principles that gives our world some order we depend upon it almost all day
1:39 every day I feel confident in the fact hat if I forget to pay my bank
1:43 overdraft this week it is not going to bring the whole global economy into
1:47 meltdown or that a teeny little pinprick is not going to kill me we find order in
1:52 this world in the fact that the chances of these phenomena happening are so
1:56 small that they are negligible and we can thus forget about them without this
2:00 being the case in linear systems our world would be extraordinary random and
2:04 chaotic but as we've previously discussed nonlinear systems through
2:09 feedback loops can grow exponentially this means that negligible effects or
2:14 differences within nonlinear systems can selves grow in an exponential fashion
2:19 where small effects and errors are fed back into the system at each stage of
2:24 its development to compound the size of error as it grows at an exponential
2:29 fashion as was the case in the famous Edward Lorenz computer experiment where
2:35 when he fed values into the computer that he thought were exactly the same
2:38 the output results that the computer gave him were widely divergent he
2:43 eventually traced this back to small differences in the rounding errors that
2:47 made the values only very slightly different but through iteration these
2:51 very small errors would grow not in a linear fashion but exponentially making
2:56 the resulting outputs widely divergent within a relatively short period of time
3:01 and thus giving us the phenomena that is called sensitivity to initial conditions
3:08 sensitivity to initial conditions is popularly known as the butterfly effect
3:12 thought to be so cool because of the title of a talk given by Edward Lorenz
3:16 in 1972 called does the flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil set off a
3:22 tornado in Texas the flapping wing represents a small change in the initial
3:26 conditions of the system which causes a chain of events leading to some
3:31 large-scale phenomena had the butterfly not flapped its wings the future
3:36 trajectory of the system might have been very different
3:39 something to note here is that the butterfly does not directly cause the
3:44 tornado this is of course impossible the flap of the butterfly's wings simply
3:48 define some initial conditions it is then the set of chain reactions through
3:53 feedback loops that enable a small change in the initial conditions of the
3:57 system to have a significant effect on its output rendering long-term
4:00 predictions virtually impossible with respect to the unpredictable nature of
4:06 the butterfly effect you might say this well if our initial measurement is wrong
4:10 then obviously our prediction of its future state is also going to be wrong
4:14 but this is missing the point which is firstly that this inaccuracy is
4:19 growing exponentially as the system develops it is not just staying the same
4:23 and secondly that in these nonlinear systems we can never know exactly the
4:28 starting conditions as are a coup see of measurement must grow in an
4:32 exponential fashion in order to achieve just a linear growth in our horizon of
4:37 predictability chaos and the butterfly effect after being shown by the
4:43 scientific community for many decades are today accepted as scientific facts a
4:48 fundamental and inescapable part of the dynamics to nonlinear systems they show
4:53 again how when things can grow exponentially we can get extraordinary
4:58 and counter intuitive results.