There is a symbol that is constantly repeated in the imagination of people of science. It is an incandescent point in the night of the Los Alamos desert; the ember of Oppenheimer's cigarette, dressed in a suit and tie, with his hat pulled down to his eyebrows, walking with his head down while he searches for the lost key that one bad day opened the gates of hell.
His eyes are two quantum kaleidoscopes that emit turbulence every time the mushroom cloud appears in his memory. The person in charge of filming the delivery of the gift over Hiroshima was young Harold Agnew, his apprentice, who had flown as a scientific observer on the bombing mission. Over time, Agnew would become the director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he would study not only the behavior of subatomic particles, but the behavior of a young man with curly hair who took long walks in the desert, always at night and crestfallen; Maybe he was looking for the key that Oppenheimer couldn't find. Who knows.
The young man with curls was none other than Mitchell Feigenbaum, an explorer of chaos who, on one of those walks, ended classical science. Because in order to date the origin of the cosmos, it was necessary to abandon Newton's laws, which are deterministic and teach us that the future behavior of matter can be predicted. Feigenbaum looked for the impossibility of certain predictions over time; The behavior of matter depends on various variables that do not always allow for precise prediction. Because nature is complex and the only way to describe it is with mathematics, with numbers instead of letters, knowing that science can only be exact if we make room for the unpredictable.
Hence, stepping on a butterfly can have serious consequences, as occurs in Ray Bradbury's story titled The noise of thunder, dated 1952, a fictional story that precedes the work of mathematician and meteorologist Edward Lorenz by almost 10 years, when in 1961 Lorenz discovered the butterfly effect. What until now had been fiction became a scientific reality.
It all happened when Lorenz was typing into his computer a system to predict the weather. He was entering a series of values, quantities to measure wind direction, humidity and atmospheric pressure, as well as temperature, obtaining a series of results that – surprise – varied when he entered the data again. The weather forecast was no longer the same, but different from the first one. It was because the second time, the computer program did not round the figures, so that a few tenths, apparently insignificant, caused big changes. Put another way: The flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil can unleash a tornado in Texas.
So, roughly, the “Chaos Theory” and its “Butterfly Effect” were born. With this, physics opened a new door whose keys were found by Mitchell Feigenbaum on one of his walks through the Los Alamos desert. The history of Chaos Theory is fascinating. For all this, it is worth recommending a book that presents chaos and unpredictability in a didactic way. Is about Chaos, by James Gleick (Criticism) where the American journalist and scientific popularizer illustrates how this theory has been related to different disciplines, from physics to biology and mathematics, as well as economics and stock values; Gleick explains all of this without losing sight of the ember of Oppenheimer's cigarette, a point of light on the night of the Los Alamos desert.
The stone ax It is a section where Montero Glezwith a desire for prose, exercises its particular siege on scientific reality to demonstrate that science and art are complementary forms of knowledge.
You can follow SUBJECT in Facebook, x and instagramor sign up here to receive our weekly newsletter.
#stepping #butterfly #consequences