Volume 12, Number 21
14 March 2006





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"LIFE ETC."

The Butterfly Effect

Although most of us first heard of this term as the name of a Hollywood production (the first two hits a Google search came up with concerned the film), it was invented long before the movie was shot. The term is generally ascribed to meteorologist Edward Lorenz. He said that "one flap of a seagull's wings would be enough to alter the course of the weather forever" in a paper that he gave to the New York Academy of Sciences in 1963. Ten years later, the seagull "had evolved into…a butterfly" in another of his works.*

But it would be a mistake to limit the implications of the butterfly effect or chaos theory only to the areas covered by physics or meteorology or the other natural sciences. Just as the flaps of a butterfly's wings are transmitted to a distant spot on the globe through the air, lots of human thoughts and actions are transmitted to other parts of the world through radio waves and fiberoptics. And this system of fast delivery increases the effectiveness of the "flap."

I hope you remember (or at least heard about) the destruction of the dome of the Golden Mosque, which was a sacred place for Iraqi Shiite Muslims, on February 22. Let's think about how it happened. What did the attackers need to destroy a hundred-year-old gold-covered dome? Two bombs. Two simple mechanisms, each probably not much bigger than a fist. What did the 9/11 attackers need to destroy the twin towers of the WTC? Two men with small knives and the ability to fly an airplane.

What did 9/11 lead to? Panic in North America and Europe, war in Afghanistan and Iraq, and many other complicated operations. Two men were enough to cause such a thing: even one man could have been sufficient to cause panic across a continent and the subsequent invasion of a country.

What did the attack on the Golden Mosque lead to? An immeasurable increase in sectarian tension. Serious concerns about a civil war in Iraq. And it took only two simple explosive mechanisms to heighten two sects' growing distrust of each other.

So, it's not an exaggeration to state that in the 21st century, you can cause unbelievable chains of events by using simple things. A simple piece of software can threaten the biggest banks in the world (like the computer virus Chernobyl did a few years ago). A single cigarette lit in a single office can activate all the fire alarms at Cyberpark and cause the building administrators to send emails to all the companies there about smoking in the offices.

"Laugh, and the world laughs with you. Weep, and you weep alone."* Act, and the world tries to react to the zoom-in vision it receives of what you've done. But you can never know exactly what you'll cause and how what you've done may come back to affect you. In this century of both solid and abstract explosions, it's more important than ever before to act carefully.

*http://www.cmp.caltech.edu/~mcc/chaos_new/Lorenz.html
** From the motion picture "Oldboy" (2003)

 

İsmail O. Postalcıoğlu (POLS/III)
ismail_orhan@yahoo.com

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