hika12i

Today i watched serial TV Heroes season 3 episode 2 with the title “Butterfly Effect” . And i was thinking… wait a minute.. i’ve heard this butterfly effect before. Oh.. there’s actually a movie for this Butterfly Effect. Now i remember, about a month ago i watched this movie, the story tells about a kid that have a bad childhood memory, and during those days he black out so he don’t really remember what happened. When he grow up he read the journal about his childhood, and then he can go back to the day he was black out in his journal and change the past….that will effected to the future.. But, too bad every time he changed something in his past there will be something he didn’t expected to be happened in the future.

Ok that’s the summary for the movie, i hope you get the idea. And in Heroes, Angela Petrelli said to future Peter “You don’t screw with time. It’s called the butterfly effect. You step on a butterfly today. Three years from now, a million people are wiped out.”.

So what is this butterfly effect ? I searched google and found some information at wikipedia, here’s the theory:
The phrase refers to the idea that a butterfly’s wings might create tiny changes in the atmosphere that may ultimately alter the path of a tornado or delay, accelerate or even prevent the occurrence of a tornado in a certain location. The flapping wing represents a small change in the initial condition of the system, which causes a chain of events leading to large-scale alterations of events. Had the butterfly not flapped its wings, the trajectory of the system might have been vastly different. Of course the butterfly cannot literally cause a tornado. The kinetic energy in a tornado is enormously larger than the energy in the turbulence of a butterfly. The kinetic energy of a tornado is ultimately provided by the sun and the butterfly can only influence certain details of weather events in a chaotic manner.

Recurrence, the approximate return of a system towards its initial conditions, together with sensitive dependence on initial conditions are the two main ingredients for chaotic motion. They have the practical consequence of making complex systems, such as the weather, difficult to predict past a certain time range (approximately a week in the case of weather).

And about time travel :
The term is sometimes used in popular media dealing with the idea of time travel, usually inaccurately. Most time travel depictions simply fail to address butterfly effects. According to the actual theory, if history could be “changed” at all (so that one is not invoking something like the Novikov self-consistency principle which would ensure a fixed self-consistent timeline), the mere presence of the time travelers in the past would be enough to change short-term events (such as the weather) and would also have an unpredictable impact on the distant future. Therefore, no one who travels into the past could ever return to the same version of reality he or she had come from and could have therefore not been able to travel back in time in the first place, which would create a phenomenon known as time paradox