Does the Butterfly Effect have merit? Can miniscule changes in the past lead to enormous changes in the future?
There is a story circulating the internet than Hitler was saved from drowning as a child. It doesn't matter that the story is fabricated, obviously if he has drowned as a child the last 80 years would have happened much differently in almost all of the world.
>>7953009
Yes but its far more likely that your butterfly effect will either benefit or inconvenience people in minor ways than it will cause a disaster or the next holocaust.
>>7953009
The Butterfly Effect is a meme summary of chaos theory, which is severely misrepresented in the media but basically explains the behaviour of systems where a slight change in the initial conditions results in completely different outcomes. The simplest example of this is a double pendulum, as seen in pic related. The two pendulums here start out in almost exactly the same position and follow roughly the same path to start with, but the slight difference in their starting positions eventually manifests itself in wildly different motions.
People are however often too eager to apply this to the real world, forgetting certain 'buffer' effects and the fact that many events precipitate out of the zeitgeist of the moment. For example, WWI ostensibly started with the assassination of Franz Ferdinand by Serbian nationalists, leading to a cascade of mutual aggression pacts bringing the European nations into war with each other. Really though, political tensions had been high for a long time and the nations were all looking for any excuse to go to war with each other. In this case, the war was more or less inevitable and it was simply the assassination that set it off. The socio-econo-political aftermath of WWI is what laid the groundwork for WWII, which in turn laid the groundwork for the rest of the century. Thus, even if Hitler had never become Chancellor another populist leader may have ridden in on the back of the latent German nationalism and the story would have played out more or less the same, just with different actors. Or perhaps it really was only that one man who was able to precipitate the events that occurred - more extensive analysis might be able to determine one way or the other, but without a time machine and rights to alter history to check the hypothesis it's all just conjecture.
That's why the world is both easy and difficult to predict, it's a chaotic system but with 'buffers' of overarching trends.
>>7953067
If anything the butterfly effect and chaos theory are both memes but the butterfly effect is said by layman and chaos theory is said by pseudo intellectuals so you really can't pose either of these statements without incurring one end of the meme spectrum.
>>7953093
t. Dumbass who doesn't understand dynamical systems
>>7953103
Excuse me but nothing is said is anything that warrants an attack. I merely said that chaos theory and butterfly effect are both memes used by either layman or pseudo intellectuals. I personally know someone who accredits almost everything that happens to them as "The Chaos Theory" and many college students blame things on the Chaos Theory frequently. Its pseudo intellectual at worst, respectable theory at best.
>>7953093
That's like saying String Theory is a meme or Relativity is a meme. It just shows you are unfamiliar with these legitimate scientific subjects and thus refer to them as memes, displaying the same ignorance as people who pretend to understand them and then use them incorrectly.
>>7953132
well they are memes. They can be spouted by pseudo intellectuals who read about them on wikipedia.
