For this homework, I decided to take a closer look at the butterfly effect. It “bugs” me the most, and I wanted to learn a little bit more about it because all I knew so far came from different movies that used these phenomenon (and the additional time-travel aspect) to create crazy stories about scientists that travel back in time and (accidentally) step off a laid out path, step on a butterfly, and then, after they came back to the present, they realize that their future (and present, and past) is changing in waves… (the movie was “A sound of thunder”, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0318081/). This really disturbs me, not because I intend to travel back in time and step on random insects, but it got me thinking about the everyday things in life that you don’t even think about, and how something very tiny and seemingly unimportant could lead to devastation in the future. (I guess it could lead to peace and prosperity, but that seems hardly anything to worry about). If you hold the door open for someone, could that somehow lead to a world war in thousands of years? And not only actions, but how do inventions affect the future? Did the “invention” of the pencil (or the wheel, buttons, ice cream, car,…) somehow cause WW II??? Or has the effect not yet happened but will, soon?
I looked at several websites to research a little more on this topic, and found interesting information on Lorenz’ wheel (the one we saw videos of in class). Turns out that when you graph the actions of this seemingly unpredictable wheel, you get a graph that is a spiral or a loop – so the behavior seen in the wheel was not as random as it appeared. Before this, there were only two kinds of order that were known: periodic behavior and steady state. The spiral/loop behavior was neither, but since it was still ”order”(it always did the same thing), he discovered a new type of order. The site goes on talking about other instances where there is some order found in seemingly disorderly situations (e.g. growth rates, cotton price fluctuations,…) (http://www.imho.com/grae/chaos/chaos.html).So my realization is that one really shouldn't worry too much about what they do and how they do it...because you never know what little thing might set of a chain of events in the future, and maybe by trying NOT to do something, you do exactly the ONE thing needed to set off that event...So I learned that the future is unpredictable, in a very unpredictable way.
Some other sites that I looked at were:
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The main principle that would affect my project is (obviously) the observer effect. Just by me asking the participants, I might have affected how they answer. Or maybe they write down answers that are not really what they think, but what they think that I want to hear. I tried to counteract that particular concern by telling them that there are no “right” or “wrong” answers.
I think the butterfly effect might also be applicable: Maybe by asking a certain person a certain question in this survey today, this could lead to some event in the future that would not have happened otherwise? Maybe the person went home, talked to someone else about the questions and how they answered, which then that person told someone else, who then got the crazy idea to invent a hover-board for us to use for traveling short distances?
External perturbations applies, also, in that the “predictions” for my survey were made not completely knowing “where things are now” and what “outside influence will impinge on the system between now, and next”. So the predictions are inherently faulty, since not all things were sufficiently taken into consideration (and I was so hoping for those hover-boards to become available soon…).
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