March 11, 2004

the butterfly effect

it was michael crichton who first introduced me to the idea of the butterfly effect. michael crichton is not my favorite author (stephen king's got the throne on that one), but, no doubt about it, he's one of the best technically proficient fiction authors i know. what do i mean by this? well, one thing that differentiates michael crichton's kind of horror from stephen king's kind of horror is that stephen king's "monsters" tend to be more supernatural in nature, while michael crichton's tend to be more technical in nature. guys out there who are fans of both would have realized this the moment they read king's the stand and crichton's the andromeda strain. both books narrate cases of widespread death. both books exploit the "contagiousness" of the disease-at-hand. both books discuss the effects of such an epidemic in a society. but king continues the next chapters by shrugging the epidemic off and focusing on the interplay between good and evil that ensues; crichton, on the other hand, continues by focusing on how the epidemic was contained. less on emotions, but more on technicality. of course, this is not the only example i can find. jurassic park's another, and michael crichton nailed my mathematical senses with this one. it was here i first learned the idea of the butterfly effect.

the butterfly effect, quite simply, refers to the astounding effects a small event can induce in a system, especially with multiple iterations. take, for instance, the butterfly example. a butterfly, so the math adage goes, flaps its wings and sends out the first ripple of effects: a spore gets caught in its wings and gets diverted somewhere, a traveller notices it and tries to capture it, etc. these events send out the second ripple of events, and this magnifies with every ripple. in the end, it can be cataclysmic in nature, such as an earthquake, or a satellite breakdown, or the death of the pope.* in mathematics, this can be related to the concept of fractals (example: snowflake). the system of angles seems stabilized at first. reiterate the fractals and slowly the system becomes unstable. it becomes hard to handle. in the end, it crashes. it burns.

those who know me would understand that this fascinated me to no end. i don't know if it aroused the mathematician in me, or just my curiosity with the unknown. perhaps both. you see, the butterfly effect is closely related to chaos theory, which borders on the line between the sureness of mathematics and the uncertainty of real life. the chaos theory simply states mathematically what we have come to know since we began thinking: you cannot predict everything. isn't it great that some branch of mathematics actually deals with the uncertainty of things? the brain of man never ceases to amaze me. really.

i have shifted from topic to topic like a butterfly fleeting on a bunch of flowers. hee. i'll stop here now. as a final note, some of you might be wondering: why the antibutterfly effect? well, see the entry on march 8. that explains a lot. to put it simply, i have found order in an otherwise chaotic life. :)

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*just a side note: this is just a mathematical illustration, of course. to know more about the butterfly effect, check out this funny yet great site. it gives a detailed account on how a butterfly in new york can cause an earthquake in china. very interesting read.

posted by kerwin ray :: 5:54 PM :: ""