The butterfly effect. Does it affect you?

Sinead Templeman asks some personal questions about Chaos Theory and you.  

The world around us is ever changing and the people in it are too.

We ourselves change day by day, but can we always see what it is or who it was that ignited this new point of view or the change of heart?

We have all had experiences in which small events, insignificant decisions or even a passing word seems to have had a profound and potentially life changing affect on us.

That comment at a party, said in jest that actually touched a nerve. Learning that the grumpy colleague you sit next is going through a divorce and is hurting badly. Saying yes to that dinner party instead of no, which lead to a chance meeting with a future friend for life.

We may often wonder about how things might have turned out if only we’d done this or that differently, or if I had only been more courageous, or smart or outgoing and how many things have had an impact on us that we were completely unaware of?

This way of thinking is wrapped up in the theory behind the butterfly effect, which is called Chaos Theory. This is the idea that all systems depend on each other and very small events can cause very complex changes, and the idea is known as ‘sensitive dependence on initial conditions’.

We are each of us a life system and depend on one another and the living systems around us, and can in turn affect the lives of everyone we meet, and the lives of some we don’t. How can we use this understanding of chaos theory for our benefit and for the benefit of others?

If the wings of a butterfly can, by making tiny changes in the atmosphere, alter the path of a tornado - how much more can you do? The difference between someone holding the door open for you or letting it slam back in front of you can have a profound effect on your mood for that day. The difference between someone saying thank you and saying nothing at all when you’ve tried to help can be the difference between you taking the time to help the next time around or not.

You can make a significant impact on this earth and to those that inhabit it, just you with no help from anyone else. That seems hard to do, if you aim too high or are defeated at the mere thought of it. Imagine though, that you decide that today you will go the extra mile at work, send those thank you notes you’ve mean meaning to write, call up that friend your losing touch with, open the door for the man without a smile on his face or a thank you on his lips.

Each of these actions and even smaller ones besides can have repercussions far beyond your knowing and may make a full circle around the earth so that one day you reap the benefits.

The Principles of Attraction

“Birds of a feather flock together” is an often heard cliché.Usually we use it in the context of people of a certain type of character, personality, nationality or other categorisation, who are drawn together by their common bond, and it is easy to observe that the adage holds true in everyday life.

Used in this way, it is nothing but a mundane observation. But the birds of a feather saying can also be used to illustrate a much more profound and useful principle, which we can use to great effect in our daily lives, by applying it to a different type of ‘bird’ altogether - those elusive and invisible birds that we call ‘thoughts’.

The principle is simple: thoughts have a kind of ‘magnetic’ quality - thoughts of a similar nature are drawn to each other. The more we hold a certain type of thought in our minds, be it positive or negative, the more it will draw similar thoughts into our mind, until those thoughts begin to dominate our entire outlook. When a strong pattern of similar thoughts builds up, those thoughts tend to stir up an emotional reaction too, and those emotions add momentum to our thoughts, like a rolling snowball gathering more and more size and weight.

Emotions, in turn produce a bodily reaction - we don’t just experience emotions in our minds, we feel them in our stomach, shoulders, heart, legs, arms and other parts of the body. For example, anyone who has ever given a public speech will know that the nervousness is not just felt in the head, it is experienced as ‘butterflies in the stomach’, or perhaps tension in the shoulders, or shaking in the hands and in various other parts of the body. The same applies to positive emotions such as joy, excitement and others.

Our thoughts and emotions influence the way we see things, and provide the basis for the things we say. As we talk about those things that we are thinking of, we usually find our words reflected back at us, which adds more weight to the snowball that is gradually becoming an avalanche.

For example, if we stop to talk to someone about a terrible crime that we have heard about in the news, they will typically respond with a story of their own about a similar or even worse tragic event. At the end of the conversation we will probably sigh about how terrible the world we live in is and about how things are “getting worse”. In this way we have added impetus to our thoughts by putting them into words and drawing a relevant response from others.

Ultimately, thoughts and emotions combine in a way that eventually results in outward bodily action, and gradually transform themselves into physical reality.

This whole process is summed up by a saying (of unknown origin) which I once heard at church and now carry in my wallet:

“Watch your thoughts; they become words.
Watch your words; they become actions.
Watch your actions; they become habits.
Watch your habits; they become character.
Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.”

How can we apply this in daily life? Simply, by focusing our thoughts and attention on those things we want, and not on those things which we don’t want. If we focus on what we don’t want in life, then those thoughts will do nothing but reinforce the very things we don’t want, attracting similar thoughts and giving us more of what we don’t want. If we place our emphasis on what’s wrong with the world, then that is all we will ever see, no matter what positive changes may take place.

Think about what you want to see in the world. Dwell on the positive things, or if you see nothing positive in your current situation, dwell upon how you would like things to be - what positive changes you would like to experience, what results would you like to see in your life?

Our thoughts will literally determine, sooner or later, who we become. This is perhaps what is meant by the proverb, “For as he thinks in his heart, so is he.”1

Luca Radovic is…

Taken from the Holy Bible, Proverbs 23:7

Does God play dice?

“You believe in a God who plays dice, and I in complete law and order.”               

Albert Einstein, Letter to Max Born. 

By the 18th century, many scientists were convinced that they were well on the way to identifying the essential, immutable laws of nature. There was a strongly held belief that the world could be systematically recorded, studied and analyzed. Thus chaos and uncertainty would soon be banished from the world system, replaced by a mechanistic, disciplined, clockwork world - at least in theory.

 The French mathematician and physicist, Pierre-Simon de Laplace (1749-1827) made the astonishing claim that the universe was so regular and orderly that a superior intellect, if given access to the fixed positions and velocities of all particles, could predict with mathematical certainty what every particle would be doing forever after:

An intellect which at any given moment knows all the forces that animate Nature and the mutual positions of the beings that comprise it, if this intellect were vast enough to submit its data to analysis, could condense into a single formula the movement of the greatest bodies of the universe and that of the lightest atom: for such an intellect nothing could be uncertain; and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.

Laplace’s bold assertion marked a highwater mark of the idea that the universe is a strictly predictable machine governed by the eternal laws of celestial mechanics as systematized by the theories of Sir Isaac Newton. The cosmos was a giant clock.

But this explanation began to change over time. With the advent of quantum mechanics - a theory that Albert Einstein felt cast God in the role of a cosmic dice-player - the clockwork world began to seem more like a “cosmic lottery.” It is now widely held that such fundamental events as the decay of radioactive atoms are determined more by randomness than universal law. The principles behind the universe appear now more a matter of probability than predictability.

In both science and mathematics, chaos is becoming a technical term. It is the branch of science dealing with erratic activity, “noises in the system.” First developed in 1975 by mathematician James Yorke, chaos theory attempts to deal with the apparently unpredictable behavior within a system once seen as governed by mathematical rules. To its proponents, chaos theory suggests the limitations of predictability more than wild, confused behavior. One of the controlling ideas is that the behavior of a system tends to change drastically in response to slight changes in initial conditions.

But how does this work?

Ed Lorenz, a meteorologist from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, developed some of the early theoretical underpinnings while experimenting with computational models of the atmosphere. He discovered what has come to be called the Butterfly Effect. This is the notion that in meteorological models such as Lorenz’s, a butterfly fluttering its wings today in Australia can so disturb the atmosphere so as to cause a rainstorm in Great Britain tomorrow. To put it technically: The deterministic laws governing weather formation are unstable in the worst possible way. Tiny differences in input can quickly become overwhelming differences in output. Infinitely small changes at one location percolate through the system to bring about major effects elsewhere.

Chaos theory for weather-forecasting is one thing. Some think most forecasts are only as dependable as a coin toss. But there are other natural phenomena, long considered the epitome of predictability, that are now revealing themselves to be equally fickle. Jacques Laskar of the French Bureau des Longitudes in Paris, has reported that the orbits of the inner planets show signs of irregularity. “The amount of chaos is quite high: the positions of the inner planets become effectively unpredictable in just a few tens of millions of years.” (Unravelling The Mind of God, Robert Matthews).

What we now know is that the ’safe’ world of deterministic, classical mechanics is much more mysterious than either Newton or Einstein imagined. The very distinction Einstein was trying to emphasize between randomness and law is being called into question. Does God play dice with the universe after all?

British mathematician Ian Stewart responds to this question:

The cycle has come full turn - but at a higher level. For we are beginning to discover that systems obeying immutable and precise laws do not always act in predictable and regular ways. Simple laws may not produce simple behaviour. Deterministic laws can produce behaviour that appears random. Order can breed its own kind of chaos. The question is not so much whether God plays dice, but how God plays dice. (Does God Play Dice?, page xx).

Joseph Ford of the Georgia Institute of Technology amplifies the point:

“God plays dice with the universe. But they’re loaded dice. And the main objective of physics now is to find out by what rules were they loaded and how we can use them for our own ends.”

Chaos theory may be only in its infancy, but it is already leading some cosmologists to ponder anew the breathtaking complexity of our universe.