Chaos Theory | The Butterfly Effect (ft. Jabrils)

have you ever wondered why we suck at predicting the weather as much as we like to blame the weatherman it's not his fault the answer takes us back to the 1960s to a strange wearing noise coming out of a little office at MIT that wearing noise was coming from Edward Lawrence's computer Edward Lorenz was an American meteorologist it said he had the worn face of a Yankee farmer and bright eyes that make him seem like he was laughing even when he wasn't he had created a weather simulator on his computer the Royal McBee he was the god of this mini universe for you to control the laws of nature with a click of his finger hey Jay you're talking about simulators you know I wrote a simulator - yeah Jabril I'm kind of in the middle of something right now okay all right anyway one day after he'd finished a simulation he wanted to run a repeat so he entered the exact same numbers he'd used into the Royal McBee and then went down the hall to get a coffee he came back to what would latest start a scientific revolution naturally he was expecting his repeat simulation to look exactly like the first one but it didn't the two weathers couldn't be more different but he used the exact same numbers at first Lorenz thought the computer was broken but then it dawned on him the Royal McBee use numbers rounded to six decimals but he drownded them to just three a difference of a fraction of a fraction had made all the difference this is pretty different to how we think about things for example if you throw a ball at a certain speed and direction you can usually predict where it's going to go that's because if you throw it more or less in the same way it'll do more or less the same thing there are always tiny differences like maybe it's windier that day or the ball has some dud on it but these tiny differences don't affect how the ball acts in a significant way the famous scientist once put it away fully on a planet in some distant galaxy won't affect a billiard ball here on earth but he was wrong sometimes tiny differences can have huge effects so much so that the system is left totally unrecognizable this is commonly known as the butterfly effect and has often been summed up in the sentence a butterfly flapping its wings in Texas can cause a hurricane in Tokyo for Sydney or New York you get the picture it fits into a theory called chaos theory and systems that behave this way are called chaotic systems now chaotic systems are often said to behave randomly but this isn't true they're not random they're just unpredictable as James Gleick put it chaos is order masquerading as randomness to show you what I mean let's look at a simpler chaotic system this is a cool double pendulum fidgets spinner I found online it's a simple device much simpler than the weather it follows Newton's laws in a pretty straightforward way theoretically we should be able to predict where it'll be at any point in time if we know all the forces acting on it but we can't it's so sensitive to tiny influences like a speck of dust or a slight breeze or a leaf falling on a planet in some distant galaxy but the smallest errors in measurement mean a huge difference to the overall posit follows sure if we were able to measure every speck of dust every force to 100% accuracy and every atom in the universe then yeah we'd be able to predict the path of this little guy but practically we can't this is very different from a non chaotic system like a regular fidgets spinner here small inaccuracies in measurement lead to small inaccuracies in prediction an unaccounted-for speck of dust won't make much difference to the way it behaves it's like how we don't know all the crazy stuff that's going on on the moon right now but we don't need to to know that there'll be a lunar eclipse at 8:21 p.m. one 27th of this year but we have no idea whether it'll rain or shine and now you know why so next time you hear someone swear at the weatherman you can rush to his defense and say hey man the weather is a chaotic system so back off okay there are too many air particles and to beat butterflies to make a meaningful prediction beyond a week or two the sensitivity to initial conditions is just too high but chaos isn't just limited to the weather and fidgets spinners it affects you every day of your life if only I had a good way to explain it Jade Jade don't worry I was born to take care of this part the holiest one here is because I wrote that simulator remember so I wrote this simulator help visualize and demonstrate this whole sensitivity to initial conditions reblock physicists and their jargon I tell ya so in order to understand my sim you must first think about the butterfly effect in context of your own life the simples clarissa around as she lives her life and she has 365 days to declare a major for University at the start of the sim she is unsure what she wants to major in and it's the people that she hangs out and interacts with that will influence what major she decides to Clair at the end of the 365 days this could be you or maybe at one point this was you okay so back to initial conditions if we run the sim with a clearly defined set of initial conditions and use what's called a pseudo-random number generators seed clarissa will live the same exact life every single time so now we run simulator get our results and it shows that Clarissa decided to declare marketing as her major due to a sequence of events in her life but now to demonstrate the sensitivity to initial conditions let's go back to day one and slightly change something let's say that Clarissa and her mom got into a fight over something that caused them to have a weaker relationship and what they had in the first simulation if we were to rerun the simulation again using the same pseudo-random number generator seed and change only the bond between Clarissa and her mother making it a bit weaker you'll observe this something completely unexpected happens because of it some you do to looking at the previous graph might think that she declared astrophysics I mean I don't look how close it came to being number one but oh no no no no out of nowhere clarissa in the second simulation decided Claire biology of all things not being as close to our mother completely changed the sequence of events in her life even though she met a lot of the same people so as you can see initial conditions are every disclaimer obviously this is just a simulation in real life is a lot more complicated than this but hopefully it demonstrates the idea behind the butterfly effect and the impact that seemingly small events can have on our lives thanks Jabril so on the bright side if you don't know what the hell's going on in your life don't feel bad it's all your fault it's just the nature of chaos thanks for watching guys I hope you liked this video if you did you should check out the video we did over on Jibril's channel it's more about how we simulated the butterfly effect it's pretty cool umm so you should definitely check that out if this is your first time here welcome don't forget to subscribe and say hi to me in the comments [Music]

Channel: Up and Atom

Views: 49,565

Rating: 4.9578605 out of 5

Keywords: chaos theory, butterfly effect, chaos, butterfly effect movie, chaotic, up and atom, chaos chaos, physics, science, Jabrils, butterfly, chaos math, mathematics, computer science, software developer, san diego, software engineering, lorenz, dynamics, java, lorenz attractor, randomness, sefd, sefd sci, pseudo random number generator, SEFD science, c++, explainer, dynamical systems, software engineer, machine learning, software, stem, oscillations, current events, tensorflow

Id: JrJNBlS6Okc

Length: 7min 20sec (440 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 06 2018