The REAL "Butterfly Effect"

[Paragon]

http://slate.msn.com/id/2094327/

...The movie starts with a quote about chaos theory, as if that would explain anything. The gist of the "butterfly effect" seems to be: If you change one little thing, a lot of unexpected stuff might happen. (Like, say, if you're a sitcom actor who starts dating a well-preserved actress almost twice your age, everyone will suddenly think you're A-list material.)

:D

[Occulus]

1. When speaking of time travel

the 'butterfly effect' (the idea that a butterfly flapping its wings in Africa can cause a hurricane which ravages the Gulf of Mexico, not the movie itself) is very plausible. The problem is, none of us save the person who is doing the traveling would ever know the difference.

Traveling through time and altering events is very much like trying to fix a piece of badly-laid wallpaper. As soon as you push one bubble down, another pops up in its place. (my thanks to Douglas Adams)

The intersting part is that events would fix themselves. Let's suppose that Person A travels through time and alters something that affects the fundamentals of the English language. Person B is in his 'present'; Person A is in Person B's past.

Person A affects the past of Person B, in this case B's language, and in so doing, affects Person B's present. Now, Person B would never know that any changes had taken place, as all past events would resolve into one continuous stream of cause-effect relationships, regardless of the changes made. Thus, Person B would have no knowledge that Person A altered his language, because his 'new' past would be just as valid to him as his 'old' past, going so far as to supplant it, even though Person B would thereafter not remember his 'true' past (the chain of events that was in place before the prior alterations occurred).

I don't think there's such a thing as a 'causality violation', as events would align themselves to fit their own causes. Therefore, no person would ever know that their own past had been changed- but the person doing the changes would retain the knowledge of both timelines.

There was an Outer Limits (new version) episode that concerned this. A female researcher discovered that, if she were to sacrifice an unborn child to the research, she could use that child's lack of involvement in events to travel through time. The child was never and is not involved in the causality chain, and so is able (with the help of machinery) to facilitate time travel.

She went insane because she remembered too many pasts for an identical period of time. She quite literally lost knowledge of what, for her, was the 'true' path of events.

[Fight_n_back]

2. Actually

time happens all at once so the only way to go "back" in time woud really be to go "across" time like changing lanes on a freeway. If you changed events the effect would only be on the new universe you created by doing so, not on the one you originated from.

So if you went back in time and killed your own grandfather, the "time" or universe you came from would not be affected, only the new universe you created by travelling to a parallel time and place.

Or something...its a Heisenberg thing.

[Dogmudgeon]

3. The Sound of Thunder

The Sound of Thunder was a Ray Bradbury sound about a time-travel safari company that gave a hunter a chance to go back to the Mesozoic, kill a Tyrannosaurus, take a picture, and come back. They very carefully arranged things so that the kill wouldn't affect history.

The story involves a character who goes on his hunt, but messes up badly, killing a butterfly in the process. When he comes back home, the entire world has been changed.

The sub-plot is that when the hunter leaves the present, there was a nasty election taking place that matched a pro-democracy candidate against a neo-fascist. When he came back, you can imagine what happens.

This was a minor spoiler. I won't give the major spoiler away. So go and read the story. I think it's even on the Net.

--bkl

[SheilaT]

4. It has always seemed to me

that the "butterfly" effect, as expressed in the quite impressive Ray Bradbury story, and as expressed in weather -- the idea that the flapping of a butterfly's wings can eventually create a hurricane on the other side of the world, to be silly. For the first, I think the time stream would recover from the loss of one butterfly, for the other it's just too counterintuitive.

But the movie "The Butterfly Effect" is the best movie so far of 2004. In this case he went back and changed crucial events, or said something to someone at a time and in a way it would have a profound effect on everything that would come after. There was clearly a great deal of thought put into the screenplay and to how the changes would play out each time.

I hope many more people see it.

[Loonman]

5. I though "chaos theory" is no longer valid

Passing fad.


Sometimes highly ordered things do descend into chaos, but a pattern can still be discerned.

[papau]

6. Why "no longer valid"

:-)

any links to those that claim that? "a pattern can still be discerned" is the problem since all series will have embeded streches that look like a pattern.