Does the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?

American mathematician and meteorologist, Edward Lorenz has a theory (interestingly called Chaos theory)saying they can, and do so more often than our model of the world would care to admit.

Ironically, Lorenz discovered this while trying to build a model to predict weather.

Butterfly effect in essence says that seemingly small insignificant causes can have massively significant effects.

One way to look at this would be say that everything (no matter how trivial) matters or that nothing does!

Here’s Morgan Housel explaining how he, his mother and the United States of America as we know it all owe their very existence to this phenomenon (43 mins 12 seconds onwards). The interview is great overall too!

If I observe my own life I can trace it back to the Big Bang. I don’t have a sense of how to go beyond that!

Did you know of Butterfly Effect and its role in life? Are there any helpful resources to learn more about this extraordinary phenomenon?

Below are some good ones that I came across.

A Ted Talk by Vrinda Gupta

This Farman Street Blog

For the scientifically inclined, here’s a video from Vertasium