The Butterfly Effect.

If I had to sum up The Butterfly Effect in one sentence it would go something like this. The flap of a butterfly's wings in the Amazons can set off a tornado in Texas.

Though that is an oversimplification of the topic, that is how it goes. Mind you, it's not the butterfly's wings that are setting off this storm. It simply means that any action done by you in the past can have severe consequences in the future.

The Butterfly Effect has been illustrated well in a short story by Ray Bradbury called 'The Sound of Thunder.' A group of people who want to travel back in time pay 10,000 $ to an agency that has developed time travel. Their motive is to travel back to the times of dinosaurs to try and hunt a T-Rex. To achieve this, they have to travel back to the Mesozoic Era, which was about 260 million years ago. They have been strictly warned about the rules of time travel and what precautions to take once they get there. The rules include not touching anything, and not leaving any traces that would suggest that they were ever there. The T-Rex that they were going to hunt was going to be crushed under a tree and was going to die inevitably, so the agency picked that particular animal. One of the members of the crew, let us call him Jack does not feel good and waits for them near the ship, you can say. When all of them get back and their hunt is successful, they get back to their timeline, which is the present. Everyone was sure to be very careful about the rules. But once they get back, they notice something.

The words in their time are written differently. There is a strange odor in the room, not very prominent, but it is there. Everyone checks every part of their body to make sure that any of the rules are not violated. That is when Jack checks the sole of his shoe and finds a beautiful, but dead, butterfly along with some mud. Jack sits down and places his hands over his eyes. For a while everything is silent but when Jack opens his eyes, all that is heard is A Sound of Thunder.

Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions, also called the Butterfly Effect tells us that small changes in any situation can have huge implications down the road. The idea of the Butterfly Effect was first brought about by Edward Lorenz who was an American Mathematician. In the 1950s, Lorenz was running an experiment and had to run the number 0.506127 in the experiment. But he rounded the number to 0.506, reducing the significant numbers from 6 to 3. He left the room to get a cup of coffee and found drastic changes in the result of the experiment. It was as if the numbers had been changed entirely.

Chaos Theory is a branch of mathematics that studies such phenomena. It describes the qualities of the point at which stability moves to instability or order moves to disorder. the growth of events, the amplification that we saw earlier in the example of time travel, is called Deterministic Chaos. For example, a slight change in the revolution of the planet Venus could cause Mars to collide with the Earth. Just an example but you get the idea.

Let us consider this. In our daily scientific lives, people with the appropriate resources can predict the orbital period of a planet from another star system 10 million years from now, but we cannot predict what our weather will be in the next month. That is because we cannot know how every particle will interact with every other particle in the clouds. So that opens up the possibilities of rain, sunny days, and everything in between. We cannot be sure.

On 9th August 1945, a B-29 took off from the island of Tinian and dropped the atomic bombs Little Boy and Fat Man on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. What most people don't know though, is that Nagasaki was not the original target. The primary targets were Hiroshima and a town called Kokura which is about 157 kilometers away from Nagasaki. After dropping the little boy on Hiroshima, the pilots were set to drop Fat Man on Kokura, which was a significantly bigger bomb that would have caused much more casualties and destruction. But when they reached Kokura they were met with a problem. The sky was not clear. Due to this, they could not have accuracy as to where they would drop the bomb. Hence the target was changed from Kokura to Nagasaki. 130,000 people were saved due to the unpredictability of the weather. Due to the interaction of particles, we cannot even see.

The world is a very big place. All of us have our individual lives and we are, well, the 'Main Characters' of our own stories. Everything we do is our responsibility. Because those actions only affect us, right? Not quite. However big the world might be, it is not random. The world is a giant web and we are all part of the web. Each action makes a shift in the web setting off a chain of events that would have never been set off before. With each action, we are opening up a new possibility. A new future. This does not necessarily mean a whole new future for you or anyone else, it means that something else that was not there before now is because of that one particular action that you did or decision that you made.

It is an infinitely complex pattern that will emerge over time, in ways we brush off very easily. Does this mean that every action of ours is very serious and can cause tornadoes or cause economic lapses? No. Imagine a Jenga tower. You can pull off one of the blocks and the tower stays intact, but when you take off another block, the one that was supporting the important and strong bits of the tower, the tower falls. Such is what happens. Any of your actions can result in the butterfly effect taking place but which one, you can only know after the effects have been seen.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, a Russian Submarine was in American Waters and the Americans detected this and sent them depth charges asking them to surface. The crew members inside the submarine, however, thought that they were missiles, and everyone agreed that they should deliver nukes onto the island as a response. One of the members, however, Vasili Arkipov refused. For firing the nukes, everyone on board needed to agree, and this decision by Arkipov resulted in preventing World War 3. One chemical reaction in his brain saved the lives of people that he would never possibly even meet in his life.

World War 1 was also started by a similar situation but it did not involve a submarine or missile, it included a bored wife. I will summarize that story and not get too much into the details. Sophie Chotek was married to Archduke Franz Ferdinand who was heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Though he loved his wife dearly, he refused to take her to any royal events, which resulted in her being bored of sitting home all day. One day Ferdinand decided to take her to the Austro-Hungarian military capacity in Bosnia. The Butterfly Effect was now set into motion. When they reached Sarajevo, the Archduke and his wife were shot dead by a Serbian Nationalist in their open-top car. The killing sparked outrage, with Austria demanding an unconditional apology from Serbia. Although Serbia condemned the killing, they refused to apologize as they did not have anything to do with the act. Austria declared war on Serbia for refusing to apologize. Russia immediately jumped to its ally's defense and declared war on Austria. Soon, Germany France, and Britain too got involved and things did not end well, as we all know. One could argue that had Sophie not been bored, all of this could have been avoided. Just a thought.

We need not worry about our actions having deadly results in the future because we are not capable of understanding the web of the world. All we can do is take accountability for our actions and well, try to be kind.