Talk:Butterfly effect

Henri Poincaré Prediction on Metereology's relation w/ Chaos Theory

Hello all, I am not a usual participant in editing Wikipedia, but I thought I'd help citing the claim that Poincaré did in fact foresee the relation which Lorenz proved in the 60s.

“A very small unknown cause determines a considerable effect which we cannot understand. We therefore say that the effect is due to chance. If we knew exactly the laws of nature and the situation of the universe at the initial moment, we could predict exactly the situation of that same universe at a succeeding moment. but even if it were the case that the natural laws had no longer any secret for us, we could still only know the initial situation approximately. If that enabled us to predict the succeeding situation with the same approximation, that is all we require, and we should say that the phenomenon had been predicted, that it is governed by laws. But it is not always so; it may happen that small differences in the initial conditions produce very great ones in the final phenomena. A small error in the former will produce an enormous error in the latter. Prediction becomes impossible, and we have the fortuitous phenomenon.”

"Why do meteorologists have such a hard time in foreseeing the weather with a reasonable degree of precision? Why do showers and storms seem to occur at random, so that many people find it absolutely natural to pray for rain or good weather while they would praying for an eclipse utterly ridiculous? We see that great perturbations generally occur in regions where the atmosphere is unstable. Meteorologists are well aware of the instability of the equilibrium and that somewhere there will be a hurricane, but where? They cannot tell, because a tenth of a degree more or less at any point will determine a hurricane here instead of there, and there will be devastations in areas that would have been spared. If one had known this tenth of a degree one could have foreseen the event, but observations were neither sufficiently frequent nor sufficiently precise, and for this reason everything seems to be due to the intervention of hazard. "

Poincaré Science et méthode 1903

I really hope I helped!

Overly focused on chaos theory

I love the chaos theory bits but the intro is far too centered on dynamical systems, neglecting the use of butterfly effect more generally including in, e.g. literature and science fiction. Thoughts? Caleb Stanford (talk) 16:29, 21 March 2025 (UTC) Caleb Stanford (talk) 16:29, 21 March 2025 (UTC)

COI editing by Bwshen

User:Bwshen, who is blocked, seems to have engaged in COI editing on this page, by citing sources for which he was an author. Bwshen is likely Bo-Wen Shen, who is an author of many sources cited on this page, and I imagine that many of these citations were added by Bwshen, though I haven't checked them all. I'm not too knowledgeable about chaos theory myself, so it would help if somebody else could help decide if all of these sources merit inclusion in this article. It's possible that they do, but there should be independent verification of this. The same issue arises on Lorenz system and Chaos theory. Truthnope (talk) 09:59, 1 November 2025 (UTC)

I've argued with him about that section - and possibly more about this page, I forget - but anyway since you point it out, I've removed it William M. Connolley (talk) 16:49, 1 November 2025 (UTC)