196 1 winter, edward lorenz, an American meteorologist, used a computer program to calculate his mathematical model for simulating air flow in the atmosphere. In the second calculation, he wanted to save trouble and directly start from the middle of the program and input the printed data of the last simulation result, but the calculation result was completely different from the first one.
After inspection, it was found that the reason was that the printed data was 0.506, with an accuracy of only 3 decimal places, but the correct value of the data was 0.506 127, with 6 decimal places.
1963, Lorenz published a paper "deterministic aperiodic flow" and analyzed this effect. This paper was later widely quoted. He also wrote in another journal article, "A meteorologist mentioned that if this theory is proved to be correct, a seagull flapping its wings can change the weather forever."
In his later speeches and papers, he used more poetic butterflies. The most common explanation for this effect is that "a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can cause a tornado in Texas a month later."
The butterfly effect is best known in weather; For example, it can be easily demonstrated in the standard weather forecast model. Climate scientists James Annan and William Connolly explained that chaos is very important in the development of weather forecasting methods; The model is sensitive to initial conditions.
They added: "Of course, the existence of unknown butterfly flapping wings is not directly related to the weather forecast, because such a small disturbance will take a long time to develop to a large scale, and we have more uncertainties to worry about directly. Therefore, the direct impact of this phenomenon on weather forecast is often somewhat wrong. "