Ever have a day when everything went wrong? You predicted you would have a normal day, but your alarm clock didn’t ring. Already running late, you couldn’t find your briefcase or backpack. Staggering out the door, your car won’t start. Later, you find out you missed a surprise meeting or maybe a quiz. It’s not you, it’s the whole prediction game…

#1 – Observer effect; #2 – Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle; #3 – Quantum tunneling (last time); #4 – Butterfly effect (this time); #5 – External perturbations (next time); #6 – Why care? Existentialism; #7 -Why care? Time value of money

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Spoil Sport of Prediction #4: the Butterfly Effect

A butterfly flapping its wings will create a small atmospheric disturbance. That disturbance will propagate unpredictably. Months, perhaps years later, a hurricane may track in your direction – because of those tiny flaps.

Models of certain atmospheric cycles are indeed known to depend unpredictably on seemingly trivial present events. Special water wheels have been built to illustrate this process. See video clips of some of them: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhOBibeW5J0;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VumQmC2jJbU&NR=1;

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-355587954903008142.

In the words of Butterfly Effect discoverer Edward N. Lorenz, “When our results concerning the instability of nonperiodic flow are applied to the atmosphere, which is ostensibly nonperiodic, they indicate that prediction of the sufficiently distant future is impossible by any method, unless the present conditions are known exactly. In view of the inevitable inaccuracy and incompleteness of weather observations, precise very-long-range forecasting would seem to be non-existent.”

As goes weather prediction, so goes prediction questions in other areas. Such questions may plausibly include, “How long Homo sapiens be the dominant species on planet Earth?” “How will the average human lifespan change, and when?” And many others from personal to planet-wide, and from politics to science and technology. And weather, of course, and maybe climate too.

But suppose you could control the Butterfly Effect? You’re still not in charge of the prediction game…because of external perturbations – discussed next time.