"The Butterfly Effect"

The "butterfly effect" is a concept from chaos theory that shows how small actions can lead to big changes. The idea comes from the thought that a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil could eventually cause a tornado in Texas. This is just a metaphor, but it explains how tiny differences can lead to very different results. We often see this in weather, the stock market, and other systems that change over time. The butterfly effect means that even small things can make it hard to predict what will happen in the future, because small mistakes in the beginning can grow into big problems. The concept was introduced by meteorologist Edward Lorenz in the 1960s, who found that tiny changes in the starting conditions of a weather model could lead to very different weather forecasts. The butterfly effect teaches us that everything is connected and sometimes unpredictable.