What is the Edward effect?

Butterfly effect means that in a dynamic system, small changes in initial conditions can drive a long-term huge chain reaction of the whole system. This is a chaotic phenomenon. A butterfly flapping its wings gently in the tropics may cause a hurricane in a distant country.

Edward lorenz, an American meteorologist, analyzed this influence in the paper 1963 submitted to the New York Academy of Sciences. "A meteorologist mentioned that if this theory is proved to be correct, a seagull flapping its wings is enough to change the weather forever." In his later speeches and papers, he used more poetic butterflies. The most common explanation for this effect is: "A butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can trigger a tornado in Texas a month later."

The source of this sentence is that meteorologists have made a computer program that can simulate climate change and display it with images. Finally, he found that the image was chaotic, much like the spread wings of a butterfly. So he explained this figure vividly in the way of "butterflies flapping their wings", so there was the above statement.

Butterfly effect is usually used in weather, stock market and other complex systems that are difficult to predict in a certain period of time. This effect shows that the result of the development of things is extremely sensitive to the initial conditions, and the smallest deviation of the initial conditions will cause great differences in the results.

Butterfly effect is used in sociology to explain a bad micro-mechanism, which will bring great harm to society if it is not guided and adjusted in time, and is dubbed as "tornado" or "storm"; A good micro-mechanism, as long as it is guided correctly, will have a sensational effect after a period of efforts, or it will be called a "revolution."

The butterfly effect often appears in chaos. Also known as nonlinear.

Nonlinear, commonly known as "butterfly effect".

Let's talk about the discovery of Lorenz, a meteorologist at MIT. In order to forecast the weather, he used a computer to solve the 13 equations that simulated the earth's atmosphere, in order to improve the accuracy of long-term weather forecast by using the high-speed operation of the computer. In an experiment of 1963, in order to examine the results more carefully, he took out an intermediate solution of 0.506, improved the accuracy to 0.505438+027 and sent it back. He went to the cafe for a cup of coffee, and when he came back, he was surprised: the difference was not big, but the result was a hundred thousand miles away! After checking again, I found that there was nothing wrong with the computer. Lorenz found that because the error will increase exponentially, in this case, a small error has caused great consequences as it goes on. He then decided that it was "extremely unstable to the initial value", that is, "chaos", that is, the so-called "butterfly effect". The flapping of Asian butterflies would make a tornado worse than strong winds appear in America in a few months!

This discovery is so serious that scientists don't understand it, and several scientific journals also refuse to publish his articles, thinking that it is "against common sense": if similar initial values are substituted into some equations, the results should be similar, how can they be far apart!

Linearity refers to the proportion and linear relationship between quantity and quantity, representing regular smooth motion in space and time; Nonlinear refers to the non-proportional and nonlinear relationship, which is characterized by irregular movement and mutation. For example, how many times is the eyesight of two eyes more than that of one eye? It's easy to think it's twice, but it's actually 6- 10! This is nonlinearity: 1+ 1 is not equal to 2.

The generation of laser is nonlinear! When the applied voltage is small, the laser is like an ordinary electric lamp, and the light scatters in all directions; When the applied voltage reaches a certain value, a new phenomenon will suddenly appear: the excited atoms seem to hear the command of "align to the right" and emit monochromatic light in the same phase and direction, that is, laser.

The characteristic of nonlinearity is that it spans all professions and permeates all fields, which can be said to be "everywhere".

For example, there is chaos in celestial motion; The oscillation of electricity, light and sound waves will suddenly fall into chaos; The geomagnetic field changed direction 16 times in 4 million years, also because of chaos. Even human beings are inherently nonlinear: contrary to traditional thinking, the EEG and heartbeat of healthy people are not regular, but chaotic, and chaos is the expression of vitality. Chaotic systems respond faster to external stimuli than non-chaotic systems.

It can be seen that nonlinearity is around us and can't be hidden.