In the early 1960s, Edward Lorenz, a meteorologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was modelling weather systems on a computer when he accidently discovered that small changes in initial conditions later produced large changes in outcomes. This surprising discovery became known as the ‘Butterfly Effect’, the “notion that a butterfly stirring the air today in Peking can transform storm systems next month in New York.”
Scientists aim to predict outcomes and then conduct experiments to confirm them. Until Lorenz’s breakthrough, scientists had largely ignored disorderly conditions, such as the turbulence in air or in flowing water, and instead used idealised systems to explain the world. Natural systems can be described – but they do not behave as neatly as idealised. The discovery of the Butterfly Effect encouraged work on Chaos Theory, which postulates that seemingly chaotic systems actually come out of orderly sets of mathematical functions.