Chaos and order are the two poles in between which we live our lives and where everything and anything that ever has been, is and will be unfolds. There is good news and bad news. The bad news is that things are so chaotic that miniscule difference in the initial conditions could have turned out staggeringly different accumulated through time. That means that future is completely unknowable due to the impossibility to have perfect knowledge of every single factor of any system no matter what it is – be it a human, stock market, weather formation or universe. The number of decimal points should be infinite for every single measurement to even try to come to a certain prediction. Pretty big, right. But the good news is that, regardless of not being able to know the future of any given thing with absolute certainty, we can anticipate the general unfolding of multitudes of chaotic states put together. Why? Because butterfly effect, that’s why.

Although the original name of the paper by Edward Lorenz, who appropriately stumbled upon it by accident, was “Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?” this is not what the butterfly stands for. It’s just memorable quip and a stellar streak of science PR. The butterfly effect is commonly understood as a claim that seemingly completely irrelevant events and actions can through time and interactions be amplified to a point where they cause major changes. As Mr. Newton did his thing we stepped into a world of science and determinism where if we knew the data we could calculate and predict movements, trajectories and all sorts of stuff that served us very well. If we know the initial starting points or values you can calculate the systems future because they’re closed predictable loops that repeat themselves in regular intervals. They provide security in the known and what can be known. But even Newton was baffled when it came to interactions of more than two objects, as he wrote to friends that this made his head ache and kept him awake at night. You’ve got to love the dedication to ones calling but you’ve got to excuse him as well for not finding the solution because here is where deterministic chaos steps onto the scene. Why deterministic? Because chaos doesn’t not mean random, just unpredictable and patterns emerge even within the most chaotic things.

Flash forward to the already mentioned Mr. Lorenz and his butterfly. Edward Lorentz was a meteorologist who was trying to create a weather prediction based on 12 data points in the 1960s. He wanted to rerun some numbers again but entered the numbers from the print out. Well it was the 60’s and the printers were basic so his rounded up six decimals the computer was working with to three at the printout. These were the one Lorenz put in again and noticed that a difference in values which was less than one part in a thousand got him radically diverging results predicting a completely different weather pattern. How could this be with an almost insignificant difference? Turns out this was the glimpse of chaos’s MO and it is called sensitive dependence on initial conditions, meaning you can have a system with immeasurably small initial difference that produces remarkably different results. It gets even weirder. The math explaining the system is completely simple but it feeds on itself where each new state becomes the new starting point. The system never ever revisits the exact same conditions twice and it moves to amplify the initial miniscule difference to unforeseen magnitude. It is deterministic aka not random because there are rules but the places where rules are going to take us in the simulation are completely unpredictable. We can never recreate the initial conditions to infinite decimal points, never ever. Go watch some double pendulum experiments; they are a perfect visual example of chaos theory. Even our solar system and life itself is not a predictable clockwork thing we thought it was because it is impossible to perfectly know the exact state of each and every particle in it with absolute certainty in real time.

The further we try to look into the past or future the more unpredictable things get. Were you to have infinite number of states that start all scattered and let them run their course they would eventually still remain chaotic but would group together as an (bear with us) infinite curve (not a loop, loops are predictable closed deterministic systems) in a finite space concentrated around what is now called the Lorentz attractor. These paths never cross, the conditions of all systems never overlap or repeat but 3D space simulations of chaotic system eventually form something resembling the wings of a butterfly and therefore the name butterfly effect and its appropriate quirky question in the title of Lorenz’s paper. A single state is unpredictable, but a set of states is. One of the principles of chaos theory – self organization – is the main reasons life evolved out of inanimate matter by feedback loops of organization, mutation, conservation and repetition.

Everything is chaos and all came from chaos, but chaos is not random and it exhibits order by its own hand. Design emerges naturally from chaotic unknowns and keeps on evolving to a purpose and through mechanisms we’re cannot fully grasp. Life doesn’t need an intelligent designer, chaos just needs enough time to run the simulation until the inanimate self organizes to a sufficient enough specializations to facilitate life.