The Butterfly Effect

“Change one thing, change everything” was the catch line of the intriguing movie titled The Butterfly Effect. Can the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas? If you believe the movie, it can. Change one little thing in the past, and it can cause cataclysmic changes in the present.

Moving away from the space-time continuum to more naturalistic flights of fancy, the Butterfly Effect is the meteorological idea that the flapping of a butterfly's wing will create a disturbance that, in the chaotic motion of the atmosphere, will become amplified eventually to change the large scale atmospheric motion, so that the long term behavior becomes impossible to forecast.
The Butterfly Effect, or the more technically accurate term "sensitive dependence on initial conditions", is the essence of the chaos theory. The term first came up in Lorenz’s 1963 paper to the New York Academy of Sciences. Lorenz remarked that if the chaos theory were correct, “…one flap of a seagull's wings would be enough to alter the course of the weather forever.”

Over the course of the next year, the seagull had been transformed to the more romantic and aesthetic butterfly, but that’s a different story altogether…