concept
Butterfly Effect
Tiny changes in initial conditions can lead to wildly different outcomes.
Origin
From meteorologist Edward Lorenz's 1972 talk, 'Does the flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?' He had stumbled on chaotic systems while running weather simulations and noticed that rounding inputs at the sixth decimal produced totally different forecasts. The metaphor outlived its science.
Modern usage
Used loosely in time-travel fiction, business retrospectives, and everyday counterfactuals ('if I hadn't missed that trainโฆ'). Often misused โ most systems are not chaotic.
Tags
chaos
causality
complexity