The Butterfly and the Metaphor

Butterflies are beautiful and their cascading impact, like the influence of all seemingly inconsequential things, can be awesome

Photo by Krzysztof Niewolny on Unsplash

The butterfly effect is a phenomenon which encapsulates aspects of Chaos Theory.

The insight was uncovered by a meteorologist named Edward Lorenz while he was studying the genesis of storms and other powerful climate events like hurricanes. The ‘butterfly effect’ states that something as small as a single flap of a butterfly can cause a big change in the weather of a place somewhere else.

This concept has become famous and is used as a metaphor in many fields that are based on complex systems. It is used to express the fact that there is no linear direct cause and effect relationship that can be used to build simple predictive models. Reality is too complicated to be reduced to a simple causality.