Here is a short article I wrote for New Scientist that
appeared in the
Scientists were probably the last people to find out about
chaos. Everyone knows our lives are all chaotic and unpredictable in the long
run. The mother of a friend of mine once took a taxi, met the driver, and wound
up marrying him. If she had taken a different taxi, my friend would never have
existed. I often say that the most successful people are those who are good at
plan B. Our predictions must be flexible. Franklin wrote the famous lines “For the want of a nail, the shoe was lost;
for the want of a shoe the horse was lost; and for the want of a horse the
rider was lost, being overtaken and slain by the enemy, all for the want of
care about a horseshoe nail." Others carried this story further so that
losing the rider and his message lead to the loss of a battle, then a war, and
finally a kingdom, all for the want of a horseshoe’s nail. There is common
science fiction theme of time travelers making small pivotal perturbations in
the past that result in crucial changes in the present. In Ray Bradbury’s 1952 short story, “A Sound
of Thunder”, a time traveler goes back millions of years and accidentally steps
on a butterfly, significantly changing the present day world.
Chaos is an area of science and mathematics that describes
situations in which small changes can cascade into larger and larger long-term
effects. Few recognized until the last
30 years that scientific environments in which precise rules govern change can
be quite unpredictable in the long run. It is not the complexity of our lives
that cause chaos as much as the instability of our lives. Meteorologist Edward
Lorenz, one of the founders of chaos theory, suggested in 1960 that the
flap of a butterfly wing in
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