A Butterfly in Beijing

Taken from Eurekas and Euphorias: The Oxford Book of Scientific Anecdotes, by Walter Gratzer
The phenomenon of chaosthe emergence of patterns out of randomnesshas in recent years touched almost every area of science. Irregularities in physical and biological (indeed, even in economic) processes were always regarded as defying theoretical analysis and were accordingly shunned by theoreticians. Turbulence in fluid flow was one practical problem, which had troubled both engineers and physiologists, and physicists had long been irked by the seemingly random transitions between steady and sporadic flow of water from a dribbling tap. The ideas behind chaos theory had been hazily prefigured in earlier years, but the beginnings of the subject can properly be dated to 1961, and the place, MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Edward Lorenz was a meteorologist, trained as a mathematician; his interest was long-range weather forecasting, and he had recognized early on that any system of equations aimed at simulating the change with time of a weather pattern would become tractable only with the advent of the high-speed computer. Lorenz had acquired one of the first commercially available machines and he had written a crude program for the change in a weather pattern, based on 12 equations. His computer disgorged an endless series of successive weather maps. Lorenz supposed, as did everyone else, that the evolution of weather would be deterministicthat the state of the weather at any instant would uniquely determine its state at any later time; so the accuracy of a forecast would depend only on the precision with which the state at the start could be defined. Lorenz's computer generated forecasts in the form of a numerical read-out, which could then be converted into graphical form. The revelation came one day when Lorenz decided to look more closely at one part of the output, and so, to save time, he re-started the computation at some point in the middle of the previous run. Then he went for coffee. On his return Lorenz was surprised to see that the forecast from his program had deviated substantially from the previous result. But then he recalled a difference between the two experiments. He h ad given the machine its starting values with less precision the second time than the first: instead of 0.506127, for instance, for one of the features that defined the weather he had punched in 0.506. But the difference was only one part in 5,000, far less than Lorenz could conceive might affect the outcome. One part in 5,000 would amount to no more than an infinitesimal puff of air. Lorenz might well have assumed that his computer was behaving erratically. Instead, he pursued his observation and found that the mathematical phenomenon was real: however small the difference between the starting values, the predictions would diverge until, after a while, all similarity between them had vanished. Here is how James Gleick puts it in his book on chaos: But for reasons of mathematical intuition that his colleagues would begin to understand only later, Lorenz felt a jolt: something was philosophically out of joint. The practical import could be staggering. Although the equations were gross parodies of the earth's weather, he had a faith that they captured the essence of the real atmosphere. That first day he decided that long-range weather forecasting must be doomed. 'I realized', Lorenz concluded, 'that any physical system that behaved non-periodically would be unpredictable.' His conclusion held up when, years later, a vastly more powerful computer was programmed to model the weather with not 12 but no less than half a million equations. So was born the butterfly effect: the beat of a butterfly's wing in Beijing would be enough to change the weather in New York a month later. Edward Lorenz did not stop at that, however. He discovered much simpler systems of equations that generated divergence, in accordance with what became known as the 'sensitive-dependence-on-initial-conditions effect'. His intuition told him that the deviations in the results seen in repeated cycles of computation should recur, that a pattern of change should emerge, and so indeed it proved. The fluctuating magnitudes of a variable, when plotted out in a three-dimensional graph, would distribute themselves around a focus, which became known as 'the Lorenz attractor'. Such pictures have now entered into the repertoire of graphic designers. This, then, was how the phenomenon of chaos came to light, but Lorenz published his results in meteorological journals, which scientists in other disciplines did not read, and it took years for the importance of his observations to permeate into the many areas in which they are now a commonplace. These include flow of liquids in tides, waves and pipes (not least arteries and veins), the beating of the heart, the fluctuations of animal populations, and many more. Gleick quotes the words of a physicist: Relativity eliminated the Newtonian illusion of absolute space and time; quantum theory eliminated the Newtonian dream of a controllable measurement process; and chaos eliminates the Laplacian fantasy of deterministic probability. This is a much more profound truth than the observation of the psychiatrist, Ernest Jones, that mans psyche had sustained only three grievous blows, delivered by Galileo, by Darwin and by Freud.

See James Gleicks outstanding book, Chaos Making a New Science (Viking, New York, 1987; Heinemann, London, 1988).