What is the Butterfly Effect?

The butterfly effect is a term used in Chaos Theory to
describe how tiny variations can affect giant systems, and complex systems, like weather
patterns. The term butterfly effect was applied in Chaos Theory to suggest that the wing
movements of a butterfly might have significant repercussions on wind strength and
movements throughout the weather systems of the world, and theoretically, could cause
tornadoes halfway around the world.

What the butterfly
effect seems to posit, is that the prediction of the behavior of any large system is
virtually impossible unless one could account for all tiny factors, which might have a
minute effect on the system. Thus large systems like weather remain impossible to
predict because there are too many unknown variables to
count.

The term "butterfly effect" is attributed to Edward
Norton Lorenz, a mathematician and meteorologist, who was one of the first proponents of
Chaos Theory. Though he had been working on the theory for some ten years, with the
principal question as to whether a seagulls’ wing movements changes the weather, he
changed to the more poetic butterfly in 1973.