History of butterfly effect

In this new year, after nearly two writing this column, I offer a very personal reflection that has to do (or maybe not) with science and history. We are experiencing a serious global crisis from which nobody is sure how to leave.. Macroeconomic figures are analyzed and plans are designed to stabilize the system, but nothing works if you do not take into account the main factor behind all of a crisis: the human factor, a factor at the same time stabilizing and destabilizing.

Butterfly Effect

In physics there are systems that are extremely sensitive to initial conditions. However well known variables will influence its development, no matter how sophisticated they become instruments that measure, there will always be a minimum uncertainty influence crucial in the further development of the system. One result will be minimal capable of great consequences. This effect is known popularly, as the “butterfly effect”. So exaggerated, but very graphic, explained that the simple flight of a butterfly in Africa, can lead, in time, a hurricane in China. The first such systems to be studied back in the sixties, was the time weather.

Butterfly effect and history

From the first moment that I learned about this peculiar kind of physical systems, I recalled the very future of the story. We know thousands of small stories that influenced, decisively, in the further development of very important events. Any of these causes tiny, andalusia developed differently, would have changed the destiny of any country or the world. History has passed over thousands of years, full of millions of events more or less meaning, intertwined in a random or not. In many ways, could be considered as a “very sensitive to initial conditions, a nonlinear system and with plenty of feedback. Fortunately, the handlers who try, try and change the destiny of nations, it is difficult, may take into account all the variables necessary to achieve their purpose. In the very short term may be correct that his calculations, but the medium and long term were right. Small miscalculation, as events unfold, they have greater influence on the results until you get to disfiguring. The performances were well encounter in principle with the same problems with the multiplier effect of small errors on the system. More now that the effect of globalization transforms the world into a more sensitive and volatile.