Could the tiniest ripple in time alter the future of our universe? Can the fluttering of a butterfly’s wings really cause a hurricane? Professor and political scientist Brian Klaas dives into the deep waters of chaos theory.
From the myth of total control to the limits of predictability,
traces how the butterfly effect challenges the illusion of individual agency.Timestamps
0:00 Do we have complete control?
0:20 The origin of The Butterfly Effect
2:22 The delusion of individualism
2:42 Laplace’s Demon
3:42 Predicting the future
Transcript
The below is a true verbatim transcript taken directly from the video. It captures the conversation exactly as it happened.
Do we have complete control?
So when you think about this, this interconnection of all these tiny causes and effects which add up to the way the world unfolds, it becomes impossible to imagine that we have complete control.
This delusion of individualism, where we're sort of in charge of things we don't control, things. We can't control things because the world is uncontrollable.
The origin of The Butterfly Effect
So how can we better understand the butterfly effect?
So the origin story of chaos theory goes back to the 1960s with a man who was studying meteorology named Edward Norton Lorenz. He decided to use a very simple computer model to try to forecast the weather. It had something like 12 variables. And, you know, it was it was a simplified version. It wasn't going to be perfect, but he was doing a simulation and he decided, I'll do a shortcut.
I'll go back halfway into the simulation and I'll take the values that were spit out by the computer, and I'll stick them back in.
And of course, everything will turn out exactly the same because it's the same model, same data, should be exactly the same.
Now, when he reran the simulation, everything in the weather patterns was super different. It was extremely, extremely different. And he was completely confused by this. He double checked the data entry. It was all right. So he had no explanation for this. What he realized eventually was that when the computer would print out the data, it would truncate the values to three decimal points. So if it was, you know, 12.345678, it would just go to 12.345. And as a result of these tiny, infinitesimal, changes that he would have, everything in the computer model shifted and this is the origin story of what we know as the butterfly effect, the idea that a butterfly flapping its wings can create a hurricane many days later. It's also the reason why we can't forecast the weather very far into the future, because any data being even a tiny, tiny bit wrong will create a profoundly different outcome over the span of some stretch of time.
Now, this helps us understand why physics is showing us that the nature of change is contingent on small events. Because if the tiny little rounding error on a gust of wind or a temperature can lead to a hurricane or a blue sky, then of course that's also true for us because we are made of physical matter.
We're not some magical being that's separate from the rest of nature.
The delusion of individualism
And so when you think about this, this interconnection of all these tiny causes and effects which add up to the way the world unfolds, it becomes impossible to imagine that we have complete control.
This delusion of individualism, where we're sort of in charge of things we don't control, things. We can't control things because the world is uncontrollable.
Laplace’s Demon
Now, in the past, there was an idea called Laplace's Demon, which grappled with this concept, and it was an outgrowth of the sort of Newtonian mechanics of physics which are extraordinarily effective at predicting how things will unfold in the sort of normal world of, say, throwing a ball, right?
Before Newton, you would throw a ball and you wouldn't be able to really know where it was going to end up, because there's sort of these mysterious forces and none of them are understood, and none of them are therefore tenable.
And Newton's genius was to develop these clockwork models where the equations were extremely effective at predicting the future based on a few key ideas like momentum and wind speed and all these sorts of things which you can measure and compute.
Now this gives rise to the idea of Laplace's demon, where the thought experiment goes a bit like this. Let's imagine that we have this perfect intellect, a perfect intellect that can understand everything, so it knows the exact location of every single atom of an armadillo in Paraguay, or a person in Beijing. Whatever it is, they know everything.
Predicting the future
And the idea behind this is that if that intellect could accurately measure everything in the universe, then it would be able to see the future as clearly as it saw the past.
In other words, there would be no mystery about the world because we live in a clockwork universe. Now, there's a few reasons why this is not the case.
One of them is because it is impossible for an intellect to know everything about every atom in the universe. It's simply never going to happen. So we're never going to be able to predict the future this way. And chaos theory shows the limitations of our ability to forecast, which we often get things wrong, although we're rarely uncertain when we make predictions.
Now, the other side of this is that quantum mechanics has thrown a bit of a wrench in this, because quantum mechanics shows that matter behaves at very strange ways at the atomic and subatomic level, in ways that are potentially even completely random. And therefore there's a challenge to what is called determinism. This idea that the sort of unfolding of events follows this clockwork model from the presumed indeterminism that many people interpret as the evidence from quantum mechanics.
So when you think about the nature of change, physics tells us that chaos theory means that there are limitations to what we can know and what we can predict, and that small changes can have enormous consequences over the long stretches of time and chaos theory in human terms. Again, to return to the story of my own existence.
A mass murder leads to this conversation. This is chaos theory. A small change in the past leads to a profound shift in what occurs in the future. And my existence is one of those shifts that came from it.
So physics helps us understand that there is no way to forecast the future accurately. And the world of Laplace's demon is a pipe dream that will always prove elusive.
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