Have you ever wondered why we suck at predicting the weather?, As much as we like to blame the weatherman it's not his fault, the answer takes us back to the 1960s to a strange weird noise coming out of a little office at MIT, that weird noise was coming from Edward Lorenz's computer.

Edward Lorenz was an American meteorologist, it said he had the worn face of a Yankee farmer and bright eyes that make him seem like he was laughing even when he wasn't. He had created a weather simulator on his computer the Royal McBee he was the god of this mini-universe for you to control the laws of nature with a click of his finger.

One day after he finished a simulation, he wanted to run a repeat so he entered the exact same numbers he used into the Royal McBee and then went down the hole to get a coffee. He came back to what would latest start a scientific revolution. naturally, he was expecting his repeat simulation to look exactly like the first one but it didn't, the two weathers couldn't be more different but he used the exact same numbers.

At first, he thought that the computer was broken but then it dawned on him the Royal McBee used numbers rounded to six decimals but he rounded them to just to three a difference of a fraction of a fraction had made all the difference.

Cool history no?

This is pretty different to how we think about things, Let face this example.

if we throw a ball at a certain speed and direction, you can usually predict where it's going to go, That's because if we throw it more or less, in the same way, it'll do more or less the same thing. There are always tiny differences like maybe it's windier that day or the ball has some dude on it but these tiny differences don't affect how the ball acts.

As a famous scientist, one day said:

"A leaf falling in some distant galaxy won't affect a billiard ball here on earth"
A famous scientist

But I think he was wrong, why? Because sometimes tiny differences can have huge effects so much so that the system is left totally unrecognizable. This is commonly known as the butterfly effect and has often been summed up in the sentence:

"A butterfly flapping its wings in Texas can cause a hurricane in Tokyo"

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it fits in a theory called: CHAOS THEORY.

What is the chaos theory?

Chaos theory talk about systems that behave randomly but this isn't true they're not random they're just unpredictable as James Gleick said once:

Chaos is order masquerading as randomness.

To show you what I'm talking about let's see this:

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Above is a cool double pendulum fidget spinner, it's a really simple device, much simpler than the weather, it follows Newton's laws in a pretty straightforward way. theoretically, we should be able to predict where it'll be at any point in time if we know all the forces acting on it but we can't it's so sensitive to tiny influences like a speck of dust or a slight breeze or a leaf falling on a planet in some distant galaxy (LOL).

Smallest errors in measurement mean a huge difference with overall posit follows surely if we were able to measure every speck of dust every force to 100% accuracy and every atom in the universe then you know we'd be able to predict the path of this little toy but practically we can't.

This is very different from a non-chaotic system like a regular fidget spinner

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CC0 1.0

a regular fidgets spinner inaccuracies in measurement lead to small inaccuracies in prediction an unaccounted-for speck of dust won't make much difference to the way it behaves.

In conclusion

So, next time when we hear someone swear at the weatherman you can rush to his defense and say hey man! the weather is a chaotic system so back off okay! there are too many air particles and butterflies to make a meaningful prediction beyond a week or two. The sensitivity to initial conditions is just too high.

Chaos isn't just limited to the weather or fidget spinners it affects you every day of your life.

How does the butterfly effect fits into the chaos theory?

What is the chaos theory?

In conclusion

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