Introduction:
I'm currently reading James Gleick's best-selling book in 1987, Chaos: Making A New Science, and chaos theory has become an increasingly popular metaphor in management literature, regarded as the "new science" of administration. While Gleick did not invent the idea of chaos, nor did he contribute to its scientific principles, he did help lift it from obscurity in the pages of scientific journals and put it into the mainstream.
Butterfly Effect:
A meteorologist, named Edward Lorenz, proved the butterfly effect in 1961. The amount of difference in the starting points of the two curves is so small that it is comparable to a butterfly flapping its wings.
The flapping of a single butterfly's wing today produces a tiny change in the state of the atmosphere. Over a period of time, what the atmosphere actually does diverges from what it would have done. So, in a month's time, a tornado that would have devastated the Indonesian coast doesn't happen. Or maybe one that wasn't going to happen, does.
The Butterfly Effect acquired a technical name: sensitive dependence on initial conditions. And sensitive dependence on initial conditions was not an altogether new notion. It had a place in folklore:
"For want of a nail, the shoe was lost;
For want of a shoe, the horse was lost;
For want of a horse, the rider was lost;
For want of a rider, the battle was lost;
For want of a battle, the kingdom was lost!"
In science as in life, it is well known that a chain of events can have a point of crisis that could magnify small changes. But chaos meant that such points were everywhere. They were pervasive. In systems like the weather, sensitive dependence on initial conditions was an inescapable consequence of the way small scales intertwined with large.
I'm currently reading James Gleick's best-selling book in 1987, Chaos: Making A New Science, and chaos theory has become an increasingly popular metaphor in management literature, regarded as the "new science" of administration. While Gleick did not invent the idea of chaos, nor did he contribute to its scientific principles, he did help lift it from obscurity in the pages of scientific journals and put it into the mainstream.
Butterfly Effect:
A meteorologist, named Edward Lorenz, proved the butterfly effect in 1961. The amount of difference in the starting points of the two curves is so small that it is comparable to a butterfly flapping its wings.
The flapping of a single butterfly's wing today produces a tiny change in the state of the atmosphere. Over a period of time, what the atmosphere actually does diverges from what it would have done. So, in a month's time, a tornado that would have devastated the Indonesian coast doesn't happen. Or maybe one that wasn't going to happen, does.
The Butterfly Effect acquired a technical name: sensitive dependence on initial conditions. And sensitive dependence on initial conditions was not an altogether new notion. It had a place in folklore:
"For want of a nail, the shoe was lost;
For want of a shoe, the horse was lost;
For want of a horse, the rider was lost;
For want of a rider, the battle was lost;
For want of a battle, the kingdom was lost!"
In science as in life, it is well known that a chain of events can have a point of crisis that could magnify small changes. But chaos meant that such points were everywhere. They were pervasive. In systems like the weather, sensitive dependence on initial conditions was an inescapable consequence of the way small scales intertwined with large.
....to be continued
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