65 years ago, the story of the classic of American fiction Paradise Bradbury “And Thunder Rocked” was released. It described a journey into the distant past, where one of the heroes accidentally crushed a butterfly. This led to unpredictable consequences, radically changing the future. In the early 1960s, Edward Lorenz, a young assistant in the Meteorology Department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, received a number of unusual diagrams. Their shape resembled the wings of a butterfly, and a great fan of science fiction Lorenz immediately called the pattern he discovered “the butterfly effect”. Soon it became a universal concept explaining many mysterious phenomena, when minor events lead to grandiose consequences such as typhoons, large-scale epidemics or the descent of colossal glaciers from the dome of Antarctica.
Round value errors
In fact, the butterfly effect is far from a simple idea derived from a very complex mathematical chaos theory. It all started when Lorenz tried to create a set of computer programs that could predict long-term weather changes. One day he did not round off the thousandths of meteorological values such as wind strength, humidity and atmospheric pressure. Suddenly this led to a phenomenal result. It turned out that these tiny data changes completely changed the long-term forecast.
Edward Lorenz.
For a whole decade, Lorenz refined his theory, but it became famous thanks to the determination of another meteorologist. In 1972, a prestigious international conference was held, but Lorenz did not manage to present the title of the report. There was no time left at all, and this was boldly done by his colleague, giving the work a completely non-academic title "Forecasting: Will a butterfly flap in Brazil cause a tornado in Texas?" It was from this moment that heated discussions began about the Lorentz butterfly effect.
In that early work, Lorenz tried to prove that the far-reaching consequences of minor atmospheric anomalies constitute two fascinating problems. Firstly, you should not criticize weather forecasts and mock forecasters, because it turns out that it is almost impossible to create an accurate long-term weather map. Secondly, in many processes it is simply impossible to “catch a butterfly” and identify that turning point that leads to a real end result.
Generally speaking, many philosophers are very wary of the "Lorentz butterflies". after all, if small inaccuracies in some natural phenomena are of such great importance, then it can be argued that our world is somewhat completely unpredictable …
Promotional video:
The birth and death of a tornado
According to Lorenz charts, innumerable natural interconnections can not only cause a tornado with the flapping of a butterfly's wings, but also extinguish a hurricane in the bud. Thus, if a person interferes with the surrounding nature, for example, upsetting the ecological balance, then we will hardly ever know for certain what would have happened in the alternative scenario "Earth without people". And all this is because all subsequent changes are very difficult to trace and restore the sequence of events.
Even during his lifetime, Lorenz sadly noted that most of the climatologists around him perceive his original constructions exactly the opposite. The most important thought in Lorentz's theory is that we just cannot easily trace a significant event and its connection with the present. Asserting that the flapping of a butterfly's wings can cause a storm, we must immediately move on to the next question: how can we confidently assert that it was this atmospheric anomaly that caused the birth, and not the death of a crushing tornado?
It turns out that Lorentz's research provides an opportunity to look at the problem of cause-and-effect relationships in a new way, but does not contain simple answers to predict the future.
Kitchen Weather Mysteries
As a meteorologist Lorenz tried to explain with the help of the phenomenon he discovered, many of the mysteries of the "weather kitchen" According to his bold assumption. the cause of the most powerful storms that are born in the Gulf of Mexico may be a small weather anomaly in the South Atlantic.
Computer weather model created by Edward Lorenz.
After the death of the scientist in 2008, a number of Latin American weather forecasters tried to connect the butterfly effect with the amazing Pacific El Niño phenomenon. In an incomprehensible way, this periodic atmospheric anomaly somehow influences the birth of devastating tornadoes, causing billions of dollars in losses to the southern states of the United States.
At the same time, many American conspiracy theorists are simply sure that they have long been trying to bring out "weather butterflies" that can cause storms in different parts of the world at the secret training grounds of the Pentagon. In any case, this may be a real fuse for a hypothetical "climate weapon" that has been much talked about lately.
The main parameter here is hurricane wind as one of the areas of research in atmospheric physics. This science has been trying to predict the trajectories of motion of air vortices for many years, but it still cannot predict their strength, and therefore the scale of possible destruction.
Hurricane equation
For a quarter of a century, meteorologists have been working hard to create reliable computer models of bad weather. The stumbling block here is the so-called hurricane equation, which cannot be solved on the basis of classical ideas about the mechanism of its formation. You can imagine that a powerful hurricane is forming somewhere in the southeastern Caribbean. There, streams of warm and humid air meet cold winds from the Andes. Intensive condensation of water vapor occurs with the formation of a thick cloud cover. However, if we try to set all the necessary parameters, we will in no way be able to determine the course and increase in wind strength. In particular, the estimated wind speed will always be much lower than in reality.
Launching a GPS probe.
It is well known that the stronger the wind, the more waves on the water surface. Waves here act as a natural "roughness" of the water surface, against which the air currents "rub". Meanwhile, if we consider the balance between the energy input and its absorption due to friction, then it turns out that the stronger the wind, the larger this absorption will be. That is, the waves should extinguish the wind, just like in the name of the cult work of the Strugatsky brothers, but in reality this does not happen.
The hypothesis of Russian geophysicists
At the end of the last century, a group of employees of the Department of Nonlinear Geophysical Processes of the Institute of Applied Physics of the Russian Academy of Sciences from Nizhny Novgorod put forward a very unusual hypothesis. Based on the principles of Lorentz's theory, they hypothesized that the ocean surface drag paradoxically decreases as the wind increases.
Then, in 2003, an article by the American researcher Kerry Emmanuel was published in the magazine Gage, describing a similar phenomenon. In his conclusions, he relied on long-term data on wind speed inside tropical cyclones using falling GPS probes from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Hurricane Observing Center. Based on the generalization of the results of these measurements, it turned out that the coefficient of resistance of the sea surface is significantly lower than the value obtained in the calculations of conventional winds.
Russian scientists are investigating the "butterfly effect that generates hurricanes" on a unique installation "Complex of large-scale geophysical stands", consisting of a basin with a high-speed wind-wave channel. Today this complex is included in the list of installations of national importance in Russia.
Net for catching "hurricane butterflies"
The experiments of Nizhny Novgorod geophysicists gave amazing results. With the help of a high-speed video camera filming up to half a million frames per second, it was possible to record the amazing processes of the birth of "hurricane butterflies". This is how the understanding of the mechanism of the occurrence of hurricane winds in the inception of a storm arose. It became clear that at a certain stage, the air currents of the growing typhoon rush over the waves, like a hydrofoil glider or a colossal ekranoplan. At the same time, the air mass forms a "foam cushion" of solid lambs above the waves, which smooths out the excitement. In this case, the resistance to air flows over the sea surface drops sharply.
Scientists counted the droplets and realized that the most efficient mechanism for generating splashes was found, which greatly changes the picture of the occurrence of hurricanes. Previously, it was believed that splashes are formed at the rupture of floating bubbles and their amount is incommensurably less. It turned out that if we recalculate the results of the Nizhny Novgorod laboratory experiment for natural conditions, then the formation of hurricane winds becomes clear. Scientists realized that the wind is an effective mechanism for the flow of energy into the monstrous force, and came close to predicting the destructive ability of a hurricane.
However, the "Lorentz butterfly effect" was also found in sciences very far from meteorology.
Insects of financial crises
A decade ago, several enthusiasts from the virtual club of fans of financial forecasts Smartmoney began to research the market "according to Lorenz" and immediately caught the "butterfly of the financial crisis". It turns out that Sony's growing lump of logistical problems could have a critical impact on an entire network of shareholders, sellers and investors. This is how an ominous forecast appeared on the Smartmoney website: "One butterfly, in this case the Japanese butterfly, launches a whole critical process in the global chain of partners." Unfortunately, nobody listened to the unusual opinion of "economic amateurs". And the 2008 crisis broke out …