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Of course, you remember the tornado problem. Anything full of wonder isn’t easy to forget. It’s easy to create chaos, but difficult to restore order; it hasn’t been restored since the Big Bang that created this universe. Albert Einstein said: "God does not play dice." God does play dice. Not only does He play dice, He throws it at the least expected of all places, but can the flap of a butterfly’s wings cause a tornado in another continent? Lorenz (not of Arabia), I said, would be your guide on this chaotic journey. Two of you seem to have had no trouble at all in finding him. He is indeed the one that gave the theory of chaos. Chaos isn’t such a difficult thing to understand, afterall, if you proceed in a very orderly way. Rakesh Satija writes from Phillaur, Punjab: "The butterfly problem can be explained by another problem. There’s a rugby match going on between the All Blacks and the Springboks. When John Lumo of the All Blacks kicks a ball high up in the air and the ball is oriented so that the points are up and down, it is falling and headed right for the 30-yard line. The ball is not spinning. The opposition, the Springboks, decide that it is too dangerous to catch the ball and let it fall. Which way will it bounce? It depends. If the downward point of the ball is just a little bit to one side, it will tend to bounce away from that side, say, towards the goal of the home team. However, if the point is just a little bit to the other side, it will bounce towards the other goal. If the point is still just a little to the side, it will bounce towards one of the two benches. A tiny difference in the position or the movement of the air around the ball that influence its orientation on the way down could hugely influence where the ball ends up. Even a light breeze might make a difference of 30 yards in where it ends up. The butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon rainforest might affect things many days later, many miles away, and can create a tornado in Arabia. Sidharth Khanna of Grade XI writes from Sacred Heart Convert Senior Secondary School, Sarabha Nagar, Ludhiana: "Edward Lorenz, who accidentally discovered the order behind chaos, was the first one to pose the rhetoric question: "In Brazil, if a butterfly flaps its wings, can it set off a chain of events that ends with a tornado in Texas?" Chaos theory states that the most unpredictable and seemingly inconsequential events, such as a butterfly flapping its wings, can have a reverberating and unpredictable impact on the most seemingly unconnected systems, such as hemispheric weather patterns. The tornado was caused by what has come
to be known as the "Butterfly Effect". (Write at The Tribune
or aditya@tribunemail.com) |
