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Bullet Summary – How Chaos Theory Makes the Future Unpredictable
Introduction
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The butterfly effect suggests that small changes can have massive consequences.
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Examples:
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Proverb: A missing nail leads to the fall of a kingdom.
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Literature: A Sound of Thunder (trampling a butterfly alters an election).
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Physics: A housefly’s wing flap influences global air currents.
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Lorenz and the Birth of Chaos Theory
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In the 1960s, Edward Lorenz ran weather simulations on early computers.
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He found that tiny differences in initial conditions (e.g., 0.21431 vs. 0.21423) led to drastically different outcomes.
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This unpredictability classified weather as a chaotic system.
The Challenge to Predictability
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Chaos theory threatens physics’ goal of accurate predictions.
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Physicists have since developed ways to measure and quantify chaos.
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Chaotic behavior is found in:
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Weather
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Heartbeats
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Animal populations
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New Insights and Discoveries
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Hidden history: In 2017, Daniel Rothman found that researchers Ellen Fetter and Margaret Hamilton played a key role in Lorenz’s discovery.
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3 Body Problem (2024 TV show): Features chaos in space, inspired by Henri Poincaré’s three-body problem (late 1800s).
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Machine Learning (2018): AI can predict chaotic systems 8× further than humans.
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“Next-Level” Chaos: Some chaotic systems are undecidable, meaning even perfect knowledge of initial conditions can’t guarantee predictions.
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