Everything is a Remix

[Metryq]

The so-called "butterfly effect" is a popular notion in time travel stories, but I always considered it a lot of mathematical hogwash. The universe is never as clean and symmetrical as a mathematical equation.

One might argue that there have been "key" people in history or technology, but like math, this is a fallacy of our symbolic way of thinking. If Columbus hadn't sailed when he did, there were plenty of contemporaries who would have. As Spock hypothesized in the popular Star Trek episode "The City on the Edge of Forever," time may be like a river with currents, eddies, and backwash. Robert Heinlein expressed it somewhat differently in The Door Into Summer, a novel about a robotics engineer who ends up time traveling: "When it is time to railroad, you railroad." The character was saying that "breakthroughs" in technology cannot happen without former art, and that is the theme of a fascinating Web series called

Everything is a Remix​

"If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants."
—Sir Isaac Newton

 

[PTeppic]

The so-called "butterfly effect" is a popular notion in time travel stories, but I always considered it a lot of mathematical hogwash. The universe is never as clean and symmetrical as a mathematical equation.

One might argue that there have been "key" people in history or technology, but like math, this is a fallacy of our symbolic way of thinking. If Columbus hadn't sailed when he did, there were plenty of contemporaries who would have.

This appears to be a non-sequitur. The butterfly effect is not restricted to time-travel but is a generic assessment of cause/effect interactions. In the second paragraph, the people only became key because of what they did. As suggested, if they "personally" hadn't done it they would not have been "key" but their replacements would have. The person doing the key event became the key person, not because of who they inherently were. Except in some specific cases, for failing to do something in a major way (or repeatedly, etc.).

 

[Dave]

The butterfly effect is not restricted to time-travel but is a generic assessment of cause/effect interactions.

I believe, but stand to be corrected, that the term originates from climatology - that even in a system as complex as the atmosphere, the beat of the wings of a butterfly could cause a breeze that would alter a micro-climate, and could go on eventually to produce a tropical cyclone. Control of the weather is something that people looking into the future always thought would happen very soon, and yet even accurate predictions still elude us because of its complexity. Yet, something as inconsequential can still have some effect.

But I agree about the basic premise. There was a BBC series in the 1970's with James Burke called Connections which showed that every invention could not have happened without a series of inventions proceeding it, and really that once those earlier connected stages were put in place, the invention was actually 'ripe' to be picked. You can see this in action actually. One example is the invention of the electric light bulb, with many people independently producing working lamps at practically the same time. Often, it was only a case of who got to the patent office first and who you knew there.

 

[J Riff]

Key people, more intelligent, creative people, in human society, were traditionally surrounded and, if possible, cut up into a nice profitable pie for thuggier types, who are just smart enough to realize they are stupid, and had better go with the 'key' persons' ideas. It's, uh.... a custom. It's their 'way'.
In an ideal situation, the key person can be actually erased, and someone else's name tacked up there for history to admire.
That was the old way. More recently, a guy like Tesla, too smart - is virtually done in by his so-called friends and family, and an entrepeneurial type like Edison hustles up a fortune using a tiny part of what Tesla was capable of.
Note too that Tesla had advanced morals, ideas for how his ideas should be used. He was surrounded and beaten down. His own family sold him out.
Will something like this happen today in re: say, the issue of Aliens, new tech etcetc.?
Yea, if they can get away with it.
That's my view of humans, as represented by the antlike, communistic swarms of hyperactive aggressive people who surround anything of value and try to ride free.
Grave robbers look down on these types.
This IS my happy, positive side. )

 

[dask]

This ain't nothin' a sound of thunder couldn't fix.

 

[Metryq]

This ain't nothin' a sound of thunder couldn't fix.

The short story was bad, the movie was even worse. "The butterfly effect" is based on the idea that events in time are like a bullet fired from a gun: the tiniest deviation from bullseye when the bullet is fired results in a greater off-set the farther away the target is. If causality were that fragile, how could the dino safari company even put a floating catwalk through the landscape without changing things? And if things are "changed," that is a logical paradox. Oh, I've heard the quantum mechanical work-arounds (invoking quantum mechanics is a license to do anything), which is a dualist explanation both mandating and ignoring causality at the same time. In the movie version, the exact same dinosaur is "hunted" over and over and over again, which was the least of A Sound of Thunder's problems.

 

[RJM Corbet]

This ain't nothin' a sound of thunder couldn't fix.

Ray Bradbury. Same thing: go back in time, bend a blade of grass, and you can't 'return to the future' because the butterfly effect has led to you never being born ...