Butterflies, Tornadoes, and Time Travel (APS News Online, June 2004).

Very few people are afraid of butterfliesbut maybe more should be. The movie The Butterfly Effect (which
opened in theaters nationwide on January 23) may not include any nefarious insects, but it is based in part on
a concept from chaos theory that suggests that something as subtle as the flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil
could trigger a tornado in Texas.
The term "butterfly effect" was coined by
meteorologist Edward Lorenz, who discovered in
the 1960's that tiny, butterflyscale changes to the
starting point of his computer weather models
resulted in anything from sunny skies to violent
stormswith no way to predict in advance what the
outcome might be.
In the movie The Butterfly Effect, actor Ashton
Kutchner plays a man who has found a way to travel
back in time to his youth. Each time he returns to his
childhood, he makes minuscule changes that
radically alter his life in the present, inevitably
leading to (you guessed it) terrifying results.
Human time travel is a purely fictional concept, but
"If you're willing to suspend your disbelief long enough to accept the possibility of time travel," says
Shinbrot should knowhis PhD dissertation at the University of Maryland was based on groundbreaking
Scriptwriters, it seems, have found that the butterfly effect is a useful tool for establishing dramatic tension.
For scientists like Shinbrot, it can be a useful tool for manipulating chaotic systems. In fact, Shinbrot's
"NASA currently directs trajectories of spacecraft using the butterfly effect," says Shinbrot. "The first
As for the adventures Kutchner faces in The Butterfly Effect, says Shinbrot, "If he had a better model for the
according to Rutgers biophysicist Troy Shinbrot, the
idea that small changes can lead to dramatically
different outcomes is firmly rooted in the physics of
chaos theory, at least for some systems.

Shinbrot, "then, yes, the movie sounds like it has a reasonably plausible premise, from a physics point of
view."
butterfly effect experiments.
dissertation was part of an effort to learn how to make small adjustments to a chaotic system to choose the
system's outcome.
example that I know of was the International Cometary Explorer. They used the fact that the butterfly effect
applies to trajectories in the solar system. With tiny amounts of hydrazine fuel, they created little puffs that
steered the spacecraft halfway across the solar system to meet up with comet Giacobini-Zinner That's how
they achieved the first ever scientific cometary encounter." In order to make use of the butterfly effect,
NASA scientists must study highly accurate models of satellites in the solar system.
system that is his life, perhaps he could have chosen better outcomes. But then the movie wouldn't be very
interesting."