Butterfly Effect: History and Theory

The term "butterfly effect" itself is related to the work of Edward Lorenz, and is based in chaos theory and sensitive dependence on initial conditions.

The idea that one butterfly could eventually have a far-reaching ripple effect on subsequent historic events seems first to have appeared in a 1952 short story by Ray Bradbury about time travel (see Literature and print here) although Lorenz made the term popular.

In 1961, Lorenz was using a numerical computer model to rerun a weather prediction, when, as a shortcut on a number in the sequence, he entered the decimal .506 instead of entering the full .506127 the computer would hold. The result was a completely different weather scenario.[4] Lorenz published his findings in a 1963 paper[citation needed] for the New York Academy of Sciences noting that

"One meteorologist remarked that if the theory were correct, one flap of a seagull's wings could change the course of weather forever."