Can the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings Reinvent the English Language? The butterfly effect was discovered by Edward Lorenz, a MIT meteorologist, in 1960. Lorenz was attempting to model future weather patterns by plugging weather data values into a primitive computer program. While continuing his work from the previous day, Lorenz rounded the numerical values to a smaller decimal place than he had the day before, and was shocked to see results varying so greatly, that there was hardly any correlation between the two predictions. Lorenz and other meteorologists began to refer to this phenomenon as the butterfly effect, and it soon gained recognition in the scientific community as being the first theory to show just how unpredictable and constantly changing our world was. This new theory was based on the idea that by slightly changing a detail of a scenario, the outcome would be completely changed from any previous or expected possibilities. …show more content…
The phrase, chaos theory, was coined by Henri Poincaré in the late 1800's. Like the butterfly effect, the chaos theory displays how the smallest fluctuations can have drastic effects in a constantly changing system. The theory gained popularity over 35 years ago, when it sent a shock-wave of excitement and new ideas spiraling through the scientific community. Chaos theory even became part of pop culture. The very popular book, and later movie adaptation, Jurassic Park, used the chaos theory to show how seemingly small changes can alter the predicted outcome of an event. Both the butterfly effect and the chaos theory are used substantially in “A Sound of Thunder” and provide the reader with a bold prediction of how impactful these theories can actually