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Earworms ( Hooks )
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earworm
For other uses, see Earworm (disambiguation).
An earworm, sometimes known as a brainworm, is a catchy piece of music that continually repeats through a person's mind after it is no longer playing. Phrases used to describe an earworm include musical imagery repetition, involuntary musical imagery, and stuck song syndrome. The word earworm is a calque from the German Ohrwurm. The earliest known usage is in Desmond Bagley's 1978 novel Flyaway.
Researchers who have studied and written about the phenomenon include Theodor Reik, Sean Bennett, Oliver Sacks, Daniel Levitin, James Kellaris, Philip Beaman, Vicky Williamson, and, in a more theoretical perspective, Peter Szendy. The phenomenon is common and should not be confused with palinacousis, a rare medical condition caused by damage to the temporal lobe of the brain that results in auditory hallucinations.
Research and cures
According to research by James Kellaris, 98% of individuals experience earworms. Women and men experience the phenomenon equally often, but earworms tend to last longer for women and irritate them more. Kellaris produced statistics suggesting that songs with lyrics may account for 73.7% of earworms, whereas instrumental music may cause only 7.7%.
In a 2006 book by Daniel Levitin entitled This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession, he states that research has shown musicians and people with obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD) are more likely to suffer from earworm attacks. An attack usually involves a small portion of a song, a hook, equal to or less than the capacity of one's auditory short-term memory. Levitin reports that capacity as usually 15 to 30 seconds. Simple tunes are more likely to get stuck than complex pieces of music. He also mentions that in some situations, OCD medications have been known to minimize the effects. In 2010, published data in the British Journal of Psychology directly addressed the subject, and its results support earlier claims that earworms are usually 15 to 30 seconds in length.
Scientists at Western Washington University found that engaging the working memory in moderately difficult tasks on paper (such as anagrams, Sudoku puzzles, or reading a novel) was an effective way of stopping earworms and of reducing their recurrence. Another publication points out that melodic music has a tendency to demonstrate repeating rhythm which may lead to endless repetition, unless a climax can be achieved to break the cycle.
Research reported in 2015, by the School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences at the University of Reading, suggested that chewing gum could help.
Notable cases:
Jean Harris, who murdered Herman Tarnower, was obsessed by the song "Put the Blame on Mame", which she first heard in the film Gilda. She would recall this regularly for over 33 years and could hold a conversation while playing it in her mind.
In popular culture:
This article may contain excessive, poor, or irrelevant examples. Please improve the article by adding more descriptive text and removing less pertinent examples. See Wikipedia's guide to writing better articles for further suggestions. (January 2015)
Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Imp of the Perverse" (1845) has the following:
It is quite a common thing to be thus annoyed with the ringing in our ears, or rather in our memories, of the burthen of some ordinary song, or some unimpressive snatches from an opera. Nor will we be the less tormented if the song in itself be good, or the opera air meritorious.
Mark Twain's 1876 story "A Literary Nightmare" (also known as "Punch, Brothers, Punch") is about a jingle that one can get rid of only by transferring it to another person.
In Robert Graves' memoir Good-Bye to All That (1929) he recorded that as he marched to battle in September 1915, "The men were singing...comic songs... Slippery Sam, When we'eve Wound up the Watch on the Rhine, and I do like a S'nice S'mince Pie. The tune of S'nice S'mince Pie ran in my head all week and I could not get rid of it." During the battle he wrote, "We waited on the fire step...for the order to go over. My mind was a blank, except for the recurrence of S'nice S'mince Pie, S'nice S'mince S'pie. The men laughed at my singing. The acting C.S.M. said: "It's murder, sir." "Of course it's murder, you bloody fool," I agreed. "But there's nothing else for it is there?""
In Henry Kuttner's short story "Nothing but Gingerbread Left" (1943), Kuttner imagines a secret allied effort against Nazi Germany using a catchy rhyme to break the opposition's concentration.[22] English speakers were safe from the earworm, as the text did not scan in English.
In Alfred Bester's 1953 novel The Demolished Man, the protagonist uses a jingle specifically crafted to be a catchy, irritating nuisance as a tool to block mind readers from reading his mind.
In Arthur C. Clarke's 1957 science fiction short story "The Ultimate Melody", a scientist, Gilbert Lister, develops the ultimate melody – one that so compels the brain that its listener becomes completely and forever enraptured by it. As the storyteller, Harry Purvis, explains, Lister theorized that a great melody "made its impression on the mind because it fitted in with the fundamental electrical rhythms going on in the brain." Lister attempts to abstract from the hit tunes of the day to a melody that fits in so well with the electrical rhythms that it dominates them completely. He succeeds and is found in a catatonic state from which he never awakens.[23]
In Fritz Leiber's Hugo Award-nominated short story "Rump-Titty-Titty-Tum-TAH-Tee" (1959), the title describes a rhythmic drumbeat so powerful that it rapidly spreads to all areas of human culture, until a counter-rhythm is developed that acts as an antidote.[24]
In Joe Simpson's 1988 book Touching the Void, he talks about not being able to get the tune "Brown Girl in the Ring" by Boney M out of his head. The book tells of his survival, against the odds, after a mountaineering accident in the remote Siula Grande region of South America. Alone, badly injured, and in a semi-delirious state, he is confused as to whether he is imagining the music or really hearing it.[25]
In the Seinfeld episode "The Jacket" (season 2, episode 3), George Costanza (Jason Alexander) walks around singing "Master of the House" from the musical Les Misérables, telling his friend, Jerry Seinfeld, that he cannot get the song out of his head. Later, Costanza accidentally sings the song in front of their friend Elaine's hard-nosed father, Alton Benes (Lawrence Tierney), prompting Benes to quip, "Pipe down, chorus boy." At the end of the program, Benes is shown singing the song while driving home alone, having apparently "caught" the earworm from Costanza.[26][27]
In episode 20 of season 7 of SpongeBob SquarePants, entitled "Ear Worm" (2010), SpongeBob gets a song stuck in his head called "Musical Doodle".[28] The episode refers to the earworm as a physical creature that enters one's head upon listening to a catchy song.
In Dexter's Laboratory, Season 4 Episode 13 entitled "Head Band", a contagious group of viruses force their host to sing what they are saying to the same "boy band" tune. The only way to be cured of the Boy Band Virus is for the viruses to break up and start their own solo careers.[29]
In the Married... with Children episode "Oldies But Young 'Uns" (Season 5, Episode 17; airdate March 17, 1991), Al Bundy becomes obsessed with finding out the name of a song that has become his earworm (originally he can only tell people the nondescript misheard lyric "hmm hmm him"). It turns out to be "Anna (Go to Him)" by Arthur Alexander.
E.B. White's 1933 satirical short story "The Supremacy of Uruguay" (reprinted in Timeless Stories for Today and Tomorrow) relates a fictional episode in the history of Uruguay where a powerful earworm is discovered in a popular American song: "thanks for unforgettable nights I never can replace." The Uruguayan military builds a squadron of pilotless aircraft armed with phonographs playing a highly amplified recording of the earworm, and conquers the entire world by reducing the citizens of all nations to mindless insanity. "[T]he peoples were hopelessly mad, ravaged by an ineradicable noise ... No one could hear anything except the noise in his own head."[30]
An article by ZME Science identified the following as factors of a song being catchy: longer and detailed musical phrases; higher number of pitches in the chorus hook; male vocalists; and higher male voices with noticeable vocal effort. Using these factors, it was concluded that British rock band Queen's "We Are The Champions" is the catchiest song in history.[31]
See also:
Idée fixe (psychology)
Phonological loop
Tetris effect
References
^ Jump up to: a b c Sacks, Oliver (2007). Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. First Vintage Books. pp. 41–48. ISBN 978-1-4000-3353-9.
Jump up ^ "Oxford Dictionaries: "earworm"". Oxford University Press. Retrieved July 4, 2013.
Jump up ^ Liikkanen, L. A. (2012). "Inducing involuntary musical imagery: An experimental study" (PDF). Musicae Scientiae 16 (2): 217–234. doi:10.1177/1029864912440770. edit
Jump up ^ Liikkanen, Lassi A. (2008). "Music in Everymind: Commonality of Involuntary Musical Imagery" (PDF). Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition (ICMPC 10) (Sapporo, Japan): 408–412. ISBN 978-4-9904208-0-2.
Jump up ^ "earworm", wordspy.com
Jump up ^ Desmond Bagley, Flyaway (1978), p. 41: "I fell into a blind, mindless rhythm and a chant was created in my mind what the Germans call an 'earworm' something that goes round and round in your head and you can't get rid of it. One bloody foot before the next bloody foot."
Jump up ^ Reik, Theodor (1953). The Haunting Melody: Psychoanalytic Experiences in Life and Music. New York: Grove Press.
Jump up ^ Bennett, Sean (August 30, 2002). Musical Imagery Repetition (Master). Cambridge University.
^ Jump up to: a b Levitin, Daniel (2006). This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession. New York, New York: Dutton, Penguin. ISBN 0452288525. Retrieved August 7, 2012.
Jump up ^ Kellaris, James J. (Winter 2001). "Identifying Properties of Tunes That Get 'Stuck in Your Head'". Proceedings of the Society for Consumer Psychology (Scottsdale, AZ: American Psychological Society): 66–67.
^ Jump up to: a b Beaman, C. P.; Williams, T. I. (2010). "Earworms (stuck song syndrome): Towards a natural history of intrusive thoughts". British Journal of Psychology 101 (4): 637. doi:10.1348/000712609X479636. edit
Jump up ^ Chatterjee, Rhitu (6 March 2012). "Earworms: Why songs get stuck in our heads". BBC News. Retrieved 7 March 2012.
Jump up ^ Szendy, Peter (2012). Hits. Philosophy in the Jukebox. translated by William Bishop. Fordham University Press.
Jump up ^ Moore, David R.; Fuchs, Paul Paul Albert; Rees, Adrian; Palmer, Alan; Plack, Christopher J. (January 21, 2010). The Oxford Handbook of Auditory Science: The Auditory Brain. Oxford University Press. p. 535. Retrieved July 3, 2013.
Jump up ^ Adams, Cecil (October 16, 2009), "Why do songs get stuck in your head?", The Straight Dope
Jump up ^ Hoffman, Carey (2001-04-04). "Songs That Cause The Brain To 'Itch': UC Professor Investigating Why Certain Tunes Get Stuck In Our Heads". University of Cincinnati. Retrieved 2012-08-06. Of the 1,000 respondents, the kind of music respondents said they got stuck on most recently were songs with lyrics for 73.7 percent, jingles or ads for 18.6 percent and an instrumental tune for 7.7 percent.
Jump up ^ Gray, Richard (24 March 2013). "Get that tune out of your head - scientists find how to get rid of earworms". The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved 25 March 2013.
Jump up ^ Got a song stuck in your head? Solving an anagram can help get rid of it, Daily Mail, 24 March 2013
Jump up ^ Schwanauer, Stephan M.; Levitt, David A. (1993). Machine Models of Music. MIT Press. p. 174. ISBN 978-0-262-19319-1.
Jump up ^ [1]
Jump up ^ Díaz de Chumaceiro, Cora L. (October 16, 2004). "Jean Harris' Obsessive Film Song Recall". PsyArt.
Jump up ^ "Nothing but Gingerbread Left" (BLOG), Tenser, said the Tensor, May 23, 2004
Jump up ^ Chorost, Michael, "The Ultimate Melody by Arthur C. Clarke", The Web site of aleph
Jump up ^ Pretor-Pinney, Gavin (2010), The Wavewatcher's Companion, Bloomsbury Publishing, p. 218, ISBN 978-0-7475-8976-1
Jump up ^ Simpson, Joe (1988). Touching the Void.
Jump up ^ Michael Dunne, "Seinfeld as Intertextual Comedy", Seinfeld, Master of Its Domain: Revisiting Television's Greatest Sitcom (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2010), p. 51.
Jump up ^ "The Jacket", Seinfeld Scripts. Retrieved: 4 June 2014.
Jump up ^ "Ear Worm: Musical Doodle". Nick.com. Retrieved July 18, 2012.
Jump up ^ "Dexter's Laboratory: Head Band / Stuffed Animal House / Used Ink". TV.com. Retrieved 29 May 2014.
Jump up ^ "The Supremacy of Uruguay". www.armandobronca.com. Retrieved January 17, 2014.
Jump up ^ Puiu, Tibi (October 3, 2011). "ZME Science". Retrieved September 23, 2012.
Further reading
Vadim Prokhorov (22 June 2006), "Can't get it out of my head", The Guardian
Divya Singhal (December 8, 2011), Why this Kolaveri Di: Maddening Phenomenon of Earworm
External links
Lassi A. Liikkanen, The World of Involuntary Musical Imagery Research
"Earworms in TV and pop culture". TVtropes.com.
Margulis, Elizabeth Hellmuth (January 16, 2014), "Why Songs Get Stuck in Your Head", The Atlantic
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Tetris Effect
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris_effect
Other examples
The Tetris effect can occur with other video games.[2] It has also been known to occur with non-video games, such as the illusion of curved lines after doing a jigsaw puzzle, or the involuntary mental visualisation of Rubik's Cube algorithms common amongst speedcubers.
On a perceptual level, sea legs are a kind of Tetris effect. A person newly on land after spending long periods at sea may sense illusory rocking motion, having become accustomed to the constant work of adjusting to the boat making such movements (see "Illusions of self-motion" and "Mal de debarquement"). The poem Boots by Rudyard Kipling describes the effect, resulting from repetitive visual experience during a route march:
’Tain’t—so—bad—by—day because o’ company,
But—night—brings—long—strings—o’ forty thousand million
Boots—boots—boots—boots—movin’ up an’ down again.
There’s no discharge in the war!
—Rudyard Kipling, Boots
On the mental level, computer programming has resulted in dreams about coding.[3] Mathematicians have reported dreaming of numbers or equations, for example Srinivasa Ramanujan, or Friedrich Engels who remarked "last week in a dream I gave a chap my shirt-buttons to differentiate, and he ran off with them".[4]
Place in cognition
Stickgold et al. (2000) have proposed that Tetris imagery is a separate form of memory, likely related to procedural memory. This is from their research in which they showed that people with anterograde amnesia, unable to form new declarative memories, reported dreaming of falling shapes after playing Tetris during the day, despite not being able to remember playing the game at all.[5]
A study, conducted by Lynn Okagaki and Peter Frensch in 1994, showed that participants who played Tetris for twelve 30-minute sessions (with no previous experience of the game) did much better than the control group in both the paper-pencil test version of spatial skills as well as the computerized version. The conclusions drawn from this experiments were that video games such as Tetris had a positive effect on three areas of spatial skills including mental rotation, spatial perception and spatial visualization in those who played for a prolonged period continuously.[6]
Another 2009 Oxford study suggests that playing Tetris-like video games may help prevent the development of traumatic memories. If the video game treatment is played soon after the traumatic event, the preoccupation with Tetris shapes is enough to prevent the mental recitation of traumatic images, thereby decreasing the accuracy, intensity, and frequency of traumatic reminders. "We suggest it specifically interferes with the way sensory memories are laid down in the period after trauma and thus reduces the number of flashbacks that are experienced afterwards," summarizes Dr. Emily Holmes, who led the study.[7][8]
History of the term
The earliest known reference to the term appears in Jeffrey Goldsmith's article, "This is Your Brain on Tetris", published in Wired in May 1994:
No home was sweet without a Game Boy in 1990. That year, I stayed "for a week" with a friend in Tokyo, and Tetris enslaved my brain. At night, geometric shapes fell in the darkness as I lay on loaned tatami floor space. Days, I sat on a lavender suede sofa and played Tetris furiously. During rare jaunts from the house, I visually fit cars and trees and people together. [...]
The Tetris effect is a biochemical, reductionistic metaphor, if you will, for curiosity, invention, the creative urge. To fit shapes together is to organize, to build, to make deals, to fix, to understand, to fold sheets. All of our mental activities are analogous, each as potentially addictive as the next.[9]
The term was rediscovered by Earling (1996),[1] citing a use of the term by Garth Kidd in February, 1996.[10] Kidd described "after-images of the game for up to days afterwards" and "a tendency to identify everything in the world as being made of four squares and attempt to determine 'where it fits in'". Kidd attributed the origin of the term to computer-game players from Adelaide, Australia. An early description of the general phenomenon appears in Neil Gaiman's science fiction poem "Virus"[11] (1987) in Digital Dreams.
See also:
Domino effect
Earworm
Fixation (psychology)
Highway hypnosis
Neuroplasticity
Tetromino
Video game addiction
References
^ Jump up to: a b c Earling, A. (1996, March 21–28). The Tetris Effect: Do computer games fry your brain? Philadelphia City Paper
Jump up ^ Daniel Terdiman (January 11, 2005). "Real World Doesn't Use a Joystick". Wired.
Jump up ^ "14-Year-Old Prodigy Programmer Dreams In Code". THNKR. @radical.media.
Jump up ^ Engels, Friedrich (August 10, 1881). "Marx-Engels Correspondence 1881" (Letter to Karl Marx). Retrieved July 31, 2014.
Jump up ^ Stickgold, Robert; Malia, April; Maguire, Denise; Roddenberry, David; O'Connor, Margaret (2000). "Replaying the Game: Hypnagogic Images in Normals and Amnesics". Science 290 (5490): 350–353. doi:10.1126/science.290.5490.350. PMID 11030656.
Jump up ^ Okagaki, L., Frensch,P. (1994). Effects of video game playing on measures of spatial performance: Gender effects in late adolescence. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 15(1) 33-58.
Jump up ^ Holmes EA, James EL, Coode-Bate T, Deeprose C, (2009). Bell, Vaughan, ed. "Can Playing the Computer Game "Tetris" Reduce the Build-Up of Flashbacks for Trauma? A Proposal from Cognitive Science". PLoS ONE 4 (1): e4153. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0004153. PMC 2607539. PMID 19127289
Jump up ^ "Tetris 'helps to reduce trauma'". BBC News. January 7, 2009.
Jump up ^ Goldsmith, Jeffrey (May 1994). "This is Your Brain on Tetris". Wired Issue 2.05. Retrieved 20 December 2012.
Jump up ^ Kidd, G. (1996). Possible future risk of virtual reality. The RISKS Digest: Forum on Risks to the Public in Computers and Related Systems 17(78)
Jump up ^ Virus
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The "Domino Effect"
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domino_effect
A domino effect or chain reaction is the cumulative effect produced when one event sets off a chain of similar events.[1] The term is best known as a mechanical effect, and is used as an analogy to a falling row of dominoes. It typically refers to a linked sequence of events where the time between successive events is relatively small. It can be used literally (an observed series of actual collisions) or metaphorically (causal linkages within systems such as global finance or politics).
See also:
Rube Goldberg machine: A "Rube Goldberg machine" is a contraption, invention, device or apparatus that is deliberately over-engineered or overdone to perform a very simple task in a very complicated fashion, usually including a chain reaction. The expression is named after American cartoonist and inventor Rube Goldberg (1883–1970).
Over the years, the expression has expanded to mean any confusing or complicated system. For example, news headlines include "Is Rep. Bill Thomas the Rube Goldberg of Legislative Reform?" and "Retirement 'insurance' as a Rube Goldberg machine".
Relevant physical theory:
Butterfly effect
Cascading failure
Causality
Chain reaction
Snowball effect
Mathematical theory:
Mathematical induction
Political theory:
Domino theory
References
Jump up ^ "domino effect". The Free Dictionary. Farlex, Inc. Retrieved 29 September 2014.
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Domino effect.
Impact Mechanics, W. J. Stronge, Cambridge University Press, 2004, ISBN 0-521-60289-0, ISBN 978-0-521-60289-1
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The Butterfly Effect
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect
In chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state. The name of the effect, coined by Edward Lorenz, is derived from the metaphorical example of the details of a hurricane (exact time of formation, exact path taken) being influenced by minor perturbations such as the flapping of the wings of a distant butterfly several weeks earlier. Lorenz discovered the effect when he observed that runs of his weather model with initial condition data that was rounded in a seemingly inconsequential manner would fail to reproduce the results of runs with the unrounded initial condition data. A very small change in initial conditions had created a significantly different outcome.
The butterfly effect is exhibited by very simple systems. For example, the randomness of the outcomes of throwing dice depends on this characteristic to amplify small differences in initial conditions—the precise direction, thrust, and orientation of the throw—into significantly different dice paths and outcomes, which makes it virtually impossible to throw dice exactly the same way twice.
History
Chaos theory and the sensitive dependence on initial conditions were described in the literature in a particular case of the three-body problem by Henri Poincaré in 1890.[1] He later proposed that such phenomena could be common, for example, in meteorology.[2]
In 1898,[1] Jacques Hadamard noted general divergence of trajectories in spaces of negative curvature. Pierre Duhem discussed the possible general significance of this in 1908.[1] The idea that one butterfly could eventually have a far-reaching ripple effect on subsequent historic events made its earliest known appearance in "A Sound of Thunder", a 1952 short story by Ray Bradbury about time travel (see Literature and print here).
In 1961, Lorenz was running a numerical computer model to redo a weather prediction from the middle of the previous run as a shortcut. He entered the initial condition 0.506 from the printout instead of entering the full precision 0.506127 value. The result was a completely different weather scenario.[3] In 1963 Lorenz published a theoretical study of this effect in a highly cited, seminal paper called Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow.[4][5] (The calculations were performed on a Royal McBee LGP-30 computer.[6][7]) Elsewhere he stated
One meteorologist remarked that if the theory were correct, one flap of a sea gull's wings would be enough to alter the course of the weather forever. The controversy has not yet been settled, but the most recent evidence seems to favor the sea gulls.[7]
Following suggestions from colleagues, in later speeches and papers Lorenz used the more poetic butterfly. According to Lorenz, when he failed to provide a title for a talk he was to present at the 139th meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1972, Philip Merilees concocted Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas? as a title.[8] Although a butterfly flapping its wings has remained constant in the expression of this concept, the location of the butterfly, the consequences, and the location of the consequences have varied widely.[9]
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 another location. The butterfly does not power or directly create the tornado. The term is not intended to imply—as is often misconstrued—that the flap of the butterfly's wings causes the tornado. The flap of the wings is a part of the initial conditions; one set of conditions leads to a tornado while the other set of conditions doesn't. The flapping wing represents a small change in the initial condition of the system, which cascades to large-scale alterations of events (compare: domino effect). Had the butterfly not flapped its wings, the trajectory of the system might have been vastly different—it's possible that the set of conditions without the butterfly flapping its wings is the set that leads to a tornado.
The butterfly effect presents an obvious challenge to prediction, since initial conditions for a system such as the weather can never be known to complete accuracy. This problem motivated the development of ensemble forecasting, in which a number of forecasts are made from perturbed initial conditions.[10]
Some scientists have since argued that the weather system is not as sensitive to initial condition as previously believed.[11] David Orrell argues that the major contributor to weather forecast error is model error, with sensitivity to initial conditions playing a relatively small role.[12][13] Stephen Wolfram also notes that the Lorenz equations are highly simplified and do not contain terms that represent viscous effects; he believes that these terms would tend to damp out small perturbations.[14]
Theory and mathematical definition[edit]
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) since it is impossible to measure the starting atmospheric conditions completely accurately.
A dynamical system displays sensitive dependence on initial conditions if points arbitrarily close together separate over time at an exponential rate. The definition is not topological, but essentially metrical.
If M is the state space for the map f^t, then f^t displays sensitive dependence to initial conditions if for any x in M and any δ > 0, there are y in M, with distance d(. , .) such that 0 < d(x, y) < \delta and such that
d(f^\tau(x), f^\tau(y)) > \mathrm{e}^{a\tau} \, d(x,y)
for some positive parameter a. The definition does not require that all points from a neighborhood separate from the base point x, but it requires one positive Lyapunov exponent.
The simplest mathematical framework exhibiting sensitive dependence on initial conditions is provided by a particular parametrization of the logistic map:
x_{n+1} = 4 x_n (1-x_n) , \quad 0\leq x_0\leq 1,
which, unlike most chaotic maps, has a closed-form solution:
x_{n}=\sin^{2}(2^{n} \theta \pi)
where the initial condition parameter \theta is given by \theta = \tfrac{1}{\pi}\sin^{-1}(x_0^{1/2}). For rational \theta, after a finite number of iterations x_n maps into a periodic sequence. But almost all \theta are irrational, and, for irrational \theta, x_n never repeats itself – it is non-periodic. This solution equation clearly demonstrates the two key features of chaos – stretching and folding: the factor 2n shows the exponential growth of stretching, which results in sensitive dependence on initial conditions (the butterfly effect), while the squared sine function keeps x_n folded within the range [0, 1].
Examples
The butterfly effect is most familiar in terms of weather; it can easily be demonstrated in standard weather prediction models, for example.[15]
The potential for sensitive dependence on initial conditions (the butterfly effect) has been studied in a number of cases in semiclassical and quantum physics including atoms in strong fields and the anisotropic Kepler problem.[16][17] Some authors have argued that extreme (exponential) dependence on initial conditions is not expected in pure quantum treatments;[18][19] however, the sensitive dependence on initial conditions demonstrated in classical motion is included in the semiclassical treatments developed by Martin Gutzwiller[20] and Delos and co-workers.[21]
Other authors suggest that the butterfly effect can be observed in quantum systems. Karkuszewski et al. consider the time evolution of quantum systems which have slightly different Hamiltonians. They investigate the level of sensitivity of quantum systems to small changes in their given Hamiltonians.[22] Poulin et al. presented a quantum algorithm to measure fidelity decay, which "measures the rate at which identical initial states diverge when subjected to slightly different dynamics". They consider fidelity decay to be "the closest quantum analog to the (purely classical) butterfly effect".[23] Whereas the classical butterfly effect considers the effect of a small change in the position and/or velocity of an object in a given Hamiltonian system, the quantum butterfly effect considers the effect of a small change in the Hamiltonian system with a given initial position and velocity.[24][25] This quantum butterfly effect has been demonstrated experimentally.[26] Quantum and semiclassical treatments of system sensitivity to initial conditions are known as quantum chaos.[18][24]
See also:
Actuality and potentiality
Avalanche effect
Behavioral cusp
Butterfly effect in popular culture
Cascading failure
Causality
Chain reaction
Clapotis
Determinism
Domino effect
Dynamical systems
Fractal
Great Stirrup Controversy
Innovation butterfly
Kessler syndrome
Law of unintended consequences
Point of divergence
Positive feedback
Representativeness heuristic
Ripple effect
Snowball effect
Traffic congestion
Tropical cyclogenesis
References
^ Jump up to: a b c Some Historical Notes: History of Chaos Theory
Jump up ^ Steves, Bonnie; Maciejewski, AJ (September 2001). The Restless Universe Applications of Gravitational N-Body Dynamics to Planetary Stellar and Galactic Systems. USA: CRC Press. ISBN 0750308222. Retrieved January 6, 2014.
Jump up ^ Gleick, James (1987). Chaos: Making a New Science. Viking. p. 16. ISBN 0-8133-4085-3.
Jump up ^ Lorenz, Edward N. (March 1963). "Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow". Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences 20 (2): 130–141. Bibcode:1963JAtS...20..130L. doi:10.1175/1520-0469(1963)020<0130:DNF>2.0.CO;2. ISSN 1520-0469. Retrieved 3 June 2010.
Jump up ^ Google Scholar citation record
Jump up ^ "Part19". Cs.ualberta.ca. 1960-11-22. Retrieved 2014-06-08.
^ Jump up to: a b Lorenz, Edward N. (1963). "The Predictability of Hydrodynamic Flow" (PDF). Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences 25 (4): 409–432. Retrieved 1 September 2014.
Jump up ^ Lorenz: "Predictability", AAAS 139th meeting, 1972 Retrieved May 22, 2015
Jump up ^ "The Butterfly Effects: Variations on a Meme". AP42 ...and everything. Retrieved 3 August 2011.
Jump up ^ Woods, Austin (2005). Medium-range weather prediction: The European approach; The story of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. New York: Springer. p. 118. ISBN 978-0387269283.
Jump up ^ Orrell, David; Smith, Leonard; Barkmeijer, Jan; Palmer, Tim (2001). "Model error in weather forecasting". Nonlinear Proc. Geoph. 9: 357–371.
Jump up ^ Orrell, David (2002). "Role of the metric in forecast error growth: How chaotic is the weather?". Tellus 54A: 350–362. doi:10.3402/tellusa.v54i4.12159.
Jump up ^ Orrell, David (2012). Truth or Beauty: Science and the Quest for Order. New Haven: Yale University Press. p. 208. ISBN 978-0300186611.
Jump up ^ Wolfram, Stephen (2002). A New Kind of Science. Wolfram Media. p. 998. ISBN 978-1579550080.
Jump up ^ "Chaos and Climate". RealClimate. Retrieved 2014-06-08.
Jump up ^ Heller, E. J.; Tomsovic, S. (July 1993). "Postmodern Quantum Mechanics". Physics Today.
Jump up ^ Gutzwiller, Martin C. (1990). Chaos in Classical and Quantum Mechanics. New York: Springer-Verlag. ISBN 0-387-97173-4.
^ Jump up to: a b Rudnick, Ze'ev (January 2008). "What is...Quantum Chaos" (PDF). Notices of the American Mathematical Society.
Jump up ^ Berry, Michael (1989). "Quantum chaology, not quantum chaos". Physica Scripta 40 (3): 335. Bibcode:1989PhyS...40..335B. doi:10.1088/0031-8949/40/3/013.
Jump up ^ Gutzwiller, Martin C. (1971). "Periodic Orbits and Classical Quantization Conditions". Journal of Mathematical Physics 12 (3): 343. Bibcode:1971JMP....12..343G. doi:10.1063/1.1665596.
Jump up ^ Gao, J. & Delos, J. B. (1992). "Closed-orbit theory of oscillations in atomic photoabsorption cross sections in a strong electric field. II. Derivation of formulas". Phys. Rev. A 46 (3): 1455–1467. Bibcode:1992PhRvA..46.1455G. doi:10.1103/PhysRevA.46.1455.
Jump up ^ Karkuszewski, Zbyszek P.; Jarzynski, Christopher; Zurek, Wojciech H. (2002). "Quantum Chaotic Environments, the Butterfly Effect, and Decoherence". Physical Review Letters 89 (17): 170405. arXiv:quant-ph/0111002. Bibcode:2002PhRvL..89q0405K. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.89.170405.
Jump up ^ Poulin, David; Blume-Kohout, Robin; Laflamme, Raymond & Ollivier, Harold (2004). "Exponential Speedup with a Single Bit of Quantum Information: Measuring the Average Fidelity Decay". Physical Review Letters 92 (17): 177906. arXiv:quant-ph/0310038. Bibcode:2004PhRvL..92q7906P. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.92.177906. PMID 15169196.
^ Jump up to: a b Poulin, David. "A Rough Guide to Quantum Chaos" (PDF).
Jump up ^ Peres, A. (1995). Quantum Theory: Concepts and Methods. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic.
Jump up ^ Lee, Jae-Seung & Khitrin, A. K. (2004). "Quantum amplifier: Measurement with entangled spins". Journal of Chemical Physics 121 (9): 3949. Bibcode:2004JChPh.121.3949L. doi:10.1063/1.1788661.
Further reading
James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science, New York: Viking, 1987. 368 pp.
Devaney, Robert L. (2003). Introduction to Chaotic Dynamical Systems. Westview Press. ISBN 0670811785.
Hilborn, Robert C. (2004). "Sea gulls, butterflies, and grasshoppers: A brief history of the butterfly effect in nonlinear dynamics". American Journal of Physics 72 (4): 425–427. Bibcode:2004AmJPh..72..425H. doi:10.1119/1.1636492.
External links
The meaning of the butterfly: Why pop culture loves the 'butterfly effect,' and gets it totally wrong, Peter Dizikes, Boston Globe, June 8, 2008
New England Complex Systems Institute - Concepts: Butterfly Effect
The Chaos Hypertextbook. An introductory primer on chaos and fractals
ChaosBook.org. Advanced graduate textbook on chaos (no fractals)
Weisstein, Eric W., "Butterfly Effect", MathWorld.
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Butterfly effect in popular culture
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect_in_popular_culture
The butterfly effect is the phenomenon whereby a minor change in circumstances can cause a large change in outcome.
Films
In arguably the earliest illustration of the butterfly effect in a story on film, an angel in It's a Wonderful Life (1946) shows George Bailey how rewriting history so that George was never born would detrimentally affect the lives of everyone in his hometown. In a subtle butterfly effect, snow falls in one version of reality but not the other.[1][2]
The complex plot of the 1985 film Brazil by Terry Gilliam is set into motion when a bug gets caught in machinery, changing the arrest order of "Archibald Tuttle" into the innocent "Archibald Buttle."
In the Polish film Blind Chance directed by Krzysztof Kieślowski, three parallel outcomes are shown depending on how the protagonist Witek deals with the obstacles on his way to catching a train, and whether he catches it. The film was made in 1981 but only released in 1987, due to suppression by the Polish authorities.
A 1989 episode of "The Ray Bradbury Theater" adapts the story very closely. The episode is named "The Sound of Thunder" after his short story of the same name, which itself predated the "butterfly effect" phrase.
The 1998 British movie Sliding Doors (influenced by Blind Chance) runs two parallel stories of the same woman, Helen (Gwyneth Paltrow). In one universe, Helen manages to catch a London Underground train home on time, and in the other she misses it. This small event influenced her life dramatically.
The French film Le Battement d'ailes du papillon (2000), translated as Happenstance in the English release, makes direct references to the butterfly effect in title, dialogue, and theme.
In 12B, a 2001 Tamil Film, Butterfly Effect is the theme of the story - missing or not missing a bus on a specific moment defines the whole of a man's subsequent life.
In many cases, minor and seemingly inconsequential actions in the past are extrapolated over time and can have radical effects on the present time of the main characters. In the movie The Butterfly Effect (2004), Evan Treborn (Ashton Kutcher), when reading from his adolescent journals, is able to essentially "redo" parts of his past. As he continues to do this, he realizes that even though his intentions are good, the actions he takes always have unintended consequences. Despite its title, however, this movie does not seriously explore the implications of the butterfly effect; only the lives of the principal characters seem to change from one scenario to another. The greater world around them is mostly unaffected. Furthermore, the changes made in the past of the principal character are far from minor and in that sense the title of the film is a misnomer. An element of the butterfly effect in general terms is that differences in start conditions for different scenario outcomes are virtually undetectable, and consequences are not related to cause in a directly apparent way.
On the other hand, the movie Run Lola Run (Lola rennt in German - 1998), represents the butterfly effect more clearly. Minor and almost sub-conscious actions in everyday life can be seen to have gross and widespread effects upon the future. For example, the fact that Lola bumps into someone instead of passing by may lead to a painful death after suffering paralysis. As such, seemingly inconsequential actions can be seen to have drastic long-term results.
The second film in the Back to the Future trilogy also vividly illustrates the cascading and broad effects of what seemed a minor change in the course of events: because the loathsome Biff Tannen accidentally gets his hands on a sports almanac from 2015, he is able to grow rich and corrupt Marty McFly's home town. When McFly (Michael J. Fox) returns to 1985, he finds it utterly degraded from what used to be.
In the 2000 movie Frequency, a son, John Sullivan (James Caviezel), has an opportunity to prevent the death of his father, Frank Sullivan (Dennis Quaid), through a miracle of nature in which they were both able to communicate across time 30 years using the same ham radio, transmitting the signal via a freak occurrence of the Northern Lights. This one action, however, had several undesirable consequences, including the murder of his mother by a vicious killer known as the Nightingale who was supposed to have never been caught. In the original timeline, when the killer is lying unconscious in the hospital, he dies from a reaction of two medicines, Benazepril and Benadryl that were mistakenly administered intravenously into his system. In the alternate timeline, Frank visits his wife, a nurse named Julia, at the hospital immediately after surviving the fire in which he was supposed to die. As they are talking, she sees the wrong medication being administered to the killer. She prevents this from happening, and the killer survives to murder not only her, but six more people; all nurses. Also, this film illustrates a theoretical side effect of the butterfly effect, where John is able to remember the original future time, as well as other alternate futures that were created each time his father changed something in the past.
In the 1990 movie Havana with Robert Redford and Lena Olin, Redford even makes a direct reference to: "And a butterfly can flutter its wings over a flower in China and cause a hurricane in the Caribbean. I believe it. They can even calculate the odds. It just isn't likely and it takes so long." He's referring to the probability of the two of their characters ever getting together. Redford's character was a gambler in late 50's Cuba and Olin was spotted earlier in the movie looking at books on the Theory of Numbers and Probability in the apartment of Redford's character.
In another 1990 movie Mr. Destiny, James Belushi plays Larry, a man who blames all of his life's problems on the fact that he struck out during a key moment of a high school baseball game. Michael Caine plays the title role of Mr. Destiny and allows Larry to live the life he would have had if his high school at-bat resulted in a game-winning home run instead of a game-losing strike three. Larry discovers that he is no longer married to Ellen, the woman he loves, played by Linda Hamilton but is now married to the glamorous Cindy Jo, played by Rene Russo. In this case, that one baseball hit in high school made Larry rich and powerful.
In the 1993 movie, Jurassic Park, Jeff Goldblum's character Dr. Malcolm attempts to explain chaos theory to Laura Dern's character, Dr. Sattler, specifically using the butterfly effect as an example.
In the 2005 movie A Sound of Thunder (borrowing the title from the Ray Bradbury story mentioned in the next section), an accidental killing of a butterfly literally triggers time waves that change the present bit by bit.
In a 2008 Tamil movie, "Dasavatharam" the hero Govind (Kamal Haasan) states butterfly effect or Chaos theory by comparing event happened in the 12th century had an adverse effect over Tsunami on December 26, 2004.
The 2009 Japanese film Fish Story directed by Yoshihiro Nakamura depicts how a mistake made by an inexperienced translator helps humankind survive more than 50 years after the original mistake itself is made.
In the 2010 film Hot Tub Time Machine, the butterfly effect is mentioned when Jacob explains that stepping on an insect in the past may, for instance, result in the internet ceasing to exist in the future.
The concept is referred to specifically - when describing how Nemo Nobody's parents met - and generally throughout the film Mr. Nobody (2009). In the plot, multiple stories are told consecutively with the differences being the result of choices made by the main character, Nemo Nobody.
Two episodes of Ugly Betty viz. "The Butterfly Effect Part 1" and "The Butterfly Effect Part 2".
In About Time the protagonist goes back a few years to his personal past, and when coming back to his home he finds that his beloved baby girl had been replaced by an unfamiliar baby boy. The protagonist's father tells him that he must never travel to a time before his children were conceived, because anything he did there might effect which of his countless sperm would fertlize the ovum, and then he would have a different child.
12 Monkeys of 1995 and inspired by it cognominal TV series of 2015 tell us about the time travel from a future post apocaliptic world into the present with the aim to prevent human race extinction. Even though heroes claim the it to be impossible to change the events that have already happened, somehow we see things change once affected in the 'past'.
Literature and print
Charles Fort, wrote about the interconnectedness of nature and the butterfly effect before the term was coined in his books New Lands (1932) and Wild Talents (1941). In "New Lands" he makes reference to a migration of birds in New York that could cause a storm in China.
In the 1952 short story by Ray Bradbury, "A Sound of Thunder", the killing of a butterfly during the time of dinosaurs causes the future to change in subtle but meaningful ways: e.g., the spelling of English and the outcome of a political election.[3]
The butterfly effect was invoked by fictional chaotician Ian Malcolm in both the novel Jurassic Park and subsequent film adaptation. He used it to explain the inherent instability of (among other things) an amusement park with dinosaurs as the attraction.
In Terry Pratchett's Interesting Times, the magical "Quantum Weather Butterfly", whose wings have finite area but infinite length, has the ability to manipulate weather patterns. These microclimates, which the butterfly uses to attract mates and fend off predators, play an important role in the resolution of the plot.
In the 1632 series of time-travel science fiction by Eric Flint and David Weber et al., speculation about the butterfly effect that happens when the West Virginia town of Grantville is instantaneously dropped into 1632 Germany. The speculation is that the events which drive the genetic makeup of a human are so sensitive to chance that every human born in the world changed by the "Ring of Fire" event would be genetically different from what they otherwise would have been within a very small period of time, depending on the distance from Germany, but in all cases within a year. Specifically, thousands of sperm vying for entry into an egg would be very sensitive to very small differences in position or timing that would assuredly result in a different sperm winning out, and a different person (a brother or sister, but no closer related than that) being born. The speculation centers especially on the birth of Baruch de Spinoza in Amsterdam a few months following the Ring event.
The (practical) applications are explored in Greg Egan's Permutation City. The premise is that if the details of the chaotic system can be determined with sufficient accuracy, then the butterfly effect could be used to leverage small actions into much larger desired consequences. E.g., deliberately flap the butterfly in just the place and time so as to end a drought, or prevent a hurricane from forming.
A variant is introduced in the 1993 short story "The Mosquito's Choice" by Henry Cowper, describing two alternate history timelines diverging radically due solely to a choice made by a mosquito. On a hot summer evening during the First World War, a French artillery officer is making calculations for the offensive on the German positions due to be launched the next day, while his orderly is preparing coffee. The mosquito, hovering inside the tent, needs to choose which of the sweating men - from its point of view, equally tempting sources of nourishment - it would bite. In one timeline it had bitten the officer - making him lose concentration and transpose figures in his calculations, and leading to the next day's artillery bombardment falling off target. This resulted in the history we know. In the divergent timeline the mosquito had bitten the orderly while the officer made the correct calculations - with the result that on the following day a French artillery shell came down directly on Corporal Adolf Hitler and blew him to bits. This resulted in a history where the Nazi Party remained an insignificant splinter group in Munich, while Germany underwent a restoration of the Kaiser in 1934 and won the Second World War in 1944 due to a nuclear bomb developed by Einstein and other Jewish scientists.
Still another variant on the theme of a seemingly trivial change having drastic results is explored in Cathleen Ward's story "Boy or Girl". The entire future of the world depends on whether or not an unimportant lower middle class New Yorker would make a completely trivial short phone call to a friend on an evening in 2003. His making the call would delay by some three minutes the moment of the friend getting into bed, making love to his wife and impregnating her - and would effect which of the friend's multitude of sperm cells would fuse with the wife's egg cell. As a result, there are two diverging timelines with (as the title implies) a male baby being born in one timeline and a female one in the other. In both timelines, the child is an exceptionally gifted mathematical genius. In the timeline where it is a boy, he is very early recognized, encouraged and effortlessly gains academic prominence, developing a complacent and conformist personality. In the 2030s he becomes the willing servant of a harsh religious-nationalist dictatorship seizing power over North America, and helps develop a terrible super-weapon for the regime - with the ultimate result of a cataclysmic war sweeping the globe, destroying all of humanity except for a few enclaves of survivors thrown back into the stone Age. Conversely, in the timeline where the genius is a girl, she is denied recognition and has to wage a bitter struggle against a hostile male environment, developing a rebellious and highly independent character. In the 2030s she joins the underground, and plays a crucial role in overthrowing the dictatorial regime and instituting a libertarian utopia.
The Southern Victory series of novels by Harry Turtledove explores what might have happened if Robert E. Lee's Special Order 191 had not been intercepted by Union soldiers. Rather it sets off a series of events where the South wins the American Civil War and splits North America into two separate world powers.
Interactive media
Andrew Hussie constantly demonstrates this in his webcomic "Homestuck", in which he shows many points diverging from a single point based around certain characters who manipulate time. A perfect example of this is when the character Dave Strider travels back in time repeatedly in trying to save his friend John Egbert from dying, with subtle shifts along the way.
The webcomic Kevin and Kell refers to Bradbury in the March 10, 1998 strip, which has Coney eating a butterfly while the family is in the Stone Age. A caption reads "When they return to 1998, they'll discover that a writer named Ray Bradbury never existed".
In the videogame Second Sight, main character John Vattic is able to change the present by having flashbacks to six months earlier, where he does things differently, affecting the future; only he remembers the alternate futures.
In the videogame Resident Evil 2, there's an interesting variation of the butterfly effect. Based on whether or not you choose Claire or Leon to start a new game, the story drastically changes. The alternate scenarios are shown to be caused by whether or not Leon's police cruiser crashes head first into a pole (choosing Claire's scenario first) or the car spins around and crashes back end first (choosing Leon's scenario first). This drastically alters the story, including what happens to several of the supporting characters and who faces specific boss enemies.
In the Facebook game Marvel: Avengers Alliance, the hero Bishop goes back in time to kill Sin before she becomes Skadi, in order to easily win the current battle against the Worthy, however, this lead to a grim future which the HYDRA teamed up with the Sentinels, leading to the extermination of the mutantkind, but this future is prevented by Cable. The same issue also lead Kang to fight an alternative version of himself.
The company behind the video game Eve Online, CCP used the Butterfly Effect in one of their advertisements.
The sports blog The Dubious Goals Committee run a feature called The Butterfly Effect, which details how sporting landscapes could have changed based on a single moment in history.
The installation El día de la langosta (The day of the locust) by Mexican artist Susana Rodríguez explores the concept of a small human action leading on to large effects, drawing on the concepts of chaos theory and the butterfly effect.[4]
The webcomic xkcd published an interactive comic strip on April Fools' Day 2014 entitled Lorenz. The webcomic could go down dozens of different paths according to small choices made by the reader in various panels. The title text for the strip directly alluded to the butterfly effect, reading, "Every choice, no matter how small, begins a new story."
Television
In Star Trek; The Next Generation, Season 3 Episode 15, "Yesterday's Enteprise," the Enterprise D encounters the Enterprise C, whose departure from what is considered a historically insignificant battle has changed all history and placed the entire Federation in jeopardy. In Season 6 Episode 15, "Tapestry," Q shows Picard the long-term, large ramifications to his life caused by one rash action in his youth. In Season 7 Episode 11, "Parallels," Worf goes goes through a rift in space-time and begins shifting between different personal and political realities shaped by small choices.
In The Simpsons Halloween episode, "Time and Punishment", Homer repeatedly travels back to the time of dinosaurs with a time machine (à la Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder"). Each time there, Homer's actions (involving intentional and unintentional violence) drastically alter the current universe: some of the changes include a totalitarian society with Ned Flanders as world dictator, a universe where his family is rich and classy and it rains donuts, and a seemingly normal universe with the exception of humans having long reptilian tongues.
In the Family Guy episode "Meet the Quagmires", Peter, with the help of Death, repeatedly travels back to the 80's to live up his teenage years and cancel a date with Lois. This leads to her marrying Quagmire and Peter marrying Molly Ringwald, while Chevy Chase is host of The Tonight Show, and Al Gore is president of the United States; when things seem normal again, it turns out Roger from American Dad! is living with them.
In a 2004 television episode of comedy sitcom Scrubs called "My Butterfly", the episode is shown in two parts: The first in which a butterfly lands on a woman sitting in the hospital's waiting room, and the second where time is rewound and the butterfly instead lands on the man next to her. Both halves of the episode show the noticeably (albeit sensationally) different outcomes that stem directly from the original choice of landing locations of this butterfly.[5]
In a first-season episode of the stop-motion animation show Robot Chicken titled "Operation: Rich in Spirit" there is a sketch where a young boy tries to explain the butterfly effect to a young girl. When the young girl squishes the butterfly, it causes earthquakes in Japan. A Japanese woman retaliates, stepping on a butterfly, which causes a volcano to erupt behind the children. The boy realiates as well, ripping a butterfly in half, which causes Godzilla to terrorize Japan.
In a second season episode of CSI titled "Chaos Theory", the entire CSI team investigates a disappearance of a young woman at a local university. Forensics leads them to possible suspects, and possible suspects all have probable motives, but nothing seems to pan out. This leads the team to discuss the "Chaos Theory": when combined, many seemingly innocuous events may have a deadly outcome, and closure is not always within reach.
In a third season episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer titled "The Wish", Cordelia, upset after catching her boyfriend Xander kissing their friend Willow, wishes "that Buffy Summers had never come to Sunnydale" while talking to the vengeance demon Anyanka. She fulfills that wish and the world changes: now they're in an alternative reality in which Buffy has not come to Sunnydale (becoming instead the resident slayer for the Hellmouth in Cleveland) and the vampire population has multiplied and gained in power, to the point that Xander and Willow are the Master's lieutenants. Giles meets with Cordelia before she dies and manages to discern what has happened. He subsequently summons Anyanka and destroys her necklace. As a result, Anya is made mortal again and the world returns to normal.
A Malcolm in the Middle episode shows Hal and Lois arguing about which one of them will take Malcolm and Reese to bowling and which one will stay at home with Dewey. After that, the episode will show two timelines: one where Lois takes them and another one where Hal takes them. An event from the timeline where Lois goes to the bowling is shown as a flashback in a later episode, implying that timeline to be the one in canon.
The Star Trek: Voyager episode "Year of Hell" features a large starship that is capable of erasing objects of various sizes from time, often introducing other consequences into the timeline; erasing a comet could have erased various races that evolved because of particles it spread across relevant planets, while the ship's designer's decision to erase a particular race resulted in his own people never evolving a vital enzyme that protected them from a crucial disease. The original timeline is restored by causing the ship to erase itself, and therefore preventing all the erasures it had caused from ever happening.
In the series 1 episode of Doctor Who called "Father's Day", Rose Tyler goes back in time to the day her father dies and saves him from the accident that kills him creating an alternate timeline. A group of creatures known as Reapers come to repair the damage created. By the end of the episode Pete Tyler, knowing that the only way the timeline can be repaired is with his death sacrifices himself and runs out in front of the car that should have killed him. In the series 3 episode of Doctor Who called "The Shakespeare Code", Martha says that she's worried about that she can change the future of human race by stepping on the butterfly after landing in Elizabethan London (à la Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder")- which The Doctor acknowledges as " I'll tell you what then, don't.... step on any butterflies. What have butterflies ever done to you?" In the season 4 episode called "Turn Left", Donna has a parallel universe created around her where she turns right instead of left, at the request of her mother, thus taking a different job that results in her not meeting The Doctor. As a result The Doctor dies fighting the Racnoss, and millions of people die from events The Doctor prevented in the original timeline. It is not until Rose Tyler, with the aid of UNIT and the TARDIS, sends this alternate Donna back in time to before the choice was made. Donna proceeds to jump out in front of a lorry, causing a traffic jam making it impossible for Donna's car to turn right, so she turns left, and correct time is restored.
In an episode of Frasier entitled "Sliding Frasiers", the story switches off between the possible two storylines/outcomes if Frasier was to wear a sweater vs. a suit. The title is a play on "Sliding Doors" (see above).
An episode of the third season of Heroes was entitled "The Butterfly Effect", in which the character of Peter Petrelli travels from the future to alter the timeline caused by his brother Nathan revealing the existence of humans with special abilities. His mother, Angela, who has the power of precognitive dreams, is aware of his actions, and warns him that his seemingly minor alterations to the timeline can have major consequences, alluding to Ray Bradbury's short story "A Sound of Thunder" to explain the butterfly effect to Peter. Later episodes also have Hiro Nakamura refer to Samuel Sullivan as 'Butterfly Man' after he convinces Hiro to go back in time and change things for the better
In the television show Primeval, the entirety of seasons 2 and 3 are the results of the butterfly effect, caused by Cutter time traveling in the first-season finale. The changes include replacing a character named Claudia Brown with a nearly identical woman named Jennifer Lewis, and causing the team to be based in a headquarters called "The ARC". Being the ones who time traveled, only Cutter and Helen were aware of these changes.
Dennis Miller touched on the issue in an episode of Dennis Miller Live, linking the flapping of a butterfly's wings, dislodging some dust, which makes a monkey sneeze, which startles a herd of gazelle into a stampede, which causes a nearby dam to break, sending increased moisture into the air, causing a powerful storm in the upper atmosphere, which causes his cell phone signal to deteriorate and drop calls (which he immediately blames on the butterflies themselves).
The CBS series Early Edition used the butterfly effect in many of its story lines, as the lead character would get the next day's newspaper before events happened and would try to change them.
In the SciFi Original Series Eureka 4th season premiere, titled "Founder's Day", five people are sent back in time, and when they return, they bring the town's founder with them, causing a change in the timeline.
In the sci-fi anime series and game, Steins;Gate, the butterfly effect is used extensively in the gameplay and plot, and is the device the main character, Okabe Rintarou, uses to save his friends from their fated deaths. It is also one of the core explanations for the series' science, along with the Many-worlds interpretation.
An episode of the NBC sitcom Community entitled "Remedial Chaos Theory" revolves around the concept of various existing timelines, each set up by the character Jeff rolling a die to determine which character will pick up a delivery pizza. The episode's plot follows how each timeline differs and remains the same depending on which character is chosen to retrieve the pizza. This episode of Community has been called one of the greatest sitcom episodes ever aired.[6]
In the season 2 finale episode of the Canadian sitcom Naturally, Sadie entitled "Sliding Closet Doors" the shirt that main protagonist chooses affects the outcome of both her love life and the last day of school before break.
Music
The Portuguese gothic metal band Moonspell 1999 experimental album is named The Butterfly Effect.
French Singer Bénabar wrote a song called "l'effet papillon" ( "the Butterfly effect") referring loosely to the concept on his 2008 album Infréquentable.
The Spanish band La Oreja de van Gogh touches on the effect in their song "Mariposa".
The Australian rock band The Butterfly Effect is named for the concept.
The song "Butterflies and Hurricanes" by the English rock band Muse is also based on the concept of the butterfly effect.
The British rock band The Verve have touched upon the topic in the songs "Butterfly" and "Catching the Butterfly".
Jonathan Coulton refers to the phenomenon when, in the song "Mandelbrot Set," he speculates that Benoit Mandelbrot's birth was preceded by the flapping of a butterfly's wings a million miles away.
Violinist Diana Yukawa's 2009 pop album is called The Butterfly Effect.
The American band Red Hot Chili Peppers referenced the idea in their song "Savior" from their 1999 album Californication.
South Korean hip hop group Epik High produced a song titled "Butterfly Effect" on their 2008 mini album Lovescream.
The UK hip hop artist Lowkey has a song titled "The Butterfly Effect" featuring Adrian on his 2011 album Soundtrack to the Struggle about how a soldier's specific actions in war caused him to be disabled, mentally ill and homeless.
In Ukrainian singer «The Sten» the album «The begin» included the song "Extinguished candles" (Russian: — Погасшим свечам) pointing to the butterfly effect in the relationship of the author and girl named Kate (Russian: — Катя).
In the 2010 hip-hop song "Butterfly Effect" by Kinetics & One Love, rapper Kinetics ponders what he would do if he had a time machine and could change historical events or right the regrets of his past - ultimately deciding against wanting to change anything in the fear of small changes having much larger or unintended consequences in the present. The message of the song is one of accepting things the way they are over regretting or yearning for an alternate life.[7]
Japanese girl group Prizmmy have a song titled "Butterfly Effect", which was used as the fourth opening theme for the anime Pretty Rhythm Rainbow Live.
Poetry
The butterfly effect does not often come up in poetry, although a handful of poems can be found in this category. Most have an underlying theme common with an association to the butterfly effect: that an individual can have an actual impact in his or her world. However, butterflies are a common subject of poets, who admire their careless beauty and detail. Edna St. Vincent Millay uses butterflies as the subject of her poem entitled "Mariposa":
"Butterflies are white and blue/ In this field we wander through./ Suffer me to take your hand./ Death comes in a day or two." (excerpt, the first stanza)
One example of the Butterfly Effect in a poem is "The Butterfly Effect" by David Hernandez. The poem opens as follows:
"If a butterfly flapping its wings in Beijing/ could cause a hurricane off the coast of Florida,/ so could a deck of cards shuffled at a picnic./ (lines 1-3)
This poem, as stated earlier in this section, deals with the idea that an individual, such as the woman reading a book of poems, can have their own impact on the world. Hernandez explores the idea that our own "insignificant event" can "snowball" into something greater.
See also:
Point of divergence
Alternate History
Rube Goldberg machine: A "Rube Goldberg machine" is a contraption, invention, device or apparatus that is deliberately over-engineered or overdone to perform a very simple task in a very complicated fashion, usually including a chain reaction. The expression is named after American cartoonist and inventor Rube Goldberg (1883–1970).
Over the years, the expression has expanded to mean any confusing or complicated system. For example, news headlines include "Is Rep. Bill Thomas the Rube Goldberg of Legislative Reform?" and "Retirement 'insurance' as a Rube Goldberg machine".
References:
Jump up ^ The American Dream and It's a Wonderful Life
Jump up ^ Nitpickers.com : Movie Nitpick - It's a Wonderful Life - 1946 - Post and Review nitpicks on your favorite Movies
Jump up ^ "A Sound of Thunder". Amazon.com.
Jump up ^ "El día de la langosta se vive en el Anguiano". Milenio (in Spanish). 2008-06-28. Retrieved 2012-08-17.
Jump up ^ "Scrubs: My Butterfly Recap". TV.com.
Jump up ^ "And the Best Sitcom Episode of All Time Is...". Splitsider. Retrieved 2012-06-18.
Jump up ^ "Rap Genius: Lyrics and Explanations for the Kinetics & One Love song "Butterfly Effect"".
External links:
The meaning of the butterfly: Why pop culture loves the 'butterfly effect,' and gets it totally wrong, Peter Dizikes, Boston Globe, June 8, 2008
Film: The Silence of the Lambs
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Rube Goldberg Machine
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rube_Goldberg_machine
A Rube Goldberg machine is a contraption, invention, device or apparatus that is deliberately over-engineered or overdone to perform a very simple task in a very complicated fashion, usually including a chain reaction. The expression is named after American cartoonist and inventor Rube Goldberg (1883–1970).
Over the years, the expression has expanded to mean any confusing or complicated system. For example, news headlines include "Is Rep. Bill Thomas the Rube Goldberg of Legislative Reform?"[1] and "Retirement 'insurance' as a Rube Goldberg machine".[2]
Rube Goldberg's cartoons became well known for depicting complicated devices that performed simple tasks in indirect, convoluted ways. The example on the right is Goldberg's "Professor Butts and the Self-Operating Napkin", which was later reprinted in a few book collections, including the postcard book Rube Goldberg's Inventions! and the hardcover Rube Goldberg: Inventions, both compiled by Maynard Frank Wolfe from the Rube Goldberg Archives.[3] The "Self-Operating Napkin" is activated when soup spoon (A) is raised to mouth, pulling string (B) and thereby jerking ladle (C), which throws cracker (D) past parrot (E). Parrot jumps after cracker and perch (F) tilts, upsetting seeds (G) into pail (H). Extra weight in pail pulls cord (I), which opens and lights automatic cigar lighter (J), setting off skyrocket (K) which causes sickle (L) to cut string (M) and allow pendulum with attached napkin to swing back and forth, thereby wiping chin.
In 1931, the Merriam–Webster dictionary adopted the word "Rube Goldberg" as an adjective defined as accomplishing something simple through complicated means.[4]
Similar expressions worldwide:
Australia — cartoonist Bruce Petty depicts such themes as the economy, international relations or other social issues as complicated interlocking machines that manipulate, or are manipulated by, people.
Austria — Franz Gsellmann worked for decades on a machine that he named the Weltmaschine ("world machine"),[5] having many similarities to a Rube Goldberg machine.
Denmark — called Storm P maskiner ("Storm P machines"), after the Danish inventor and cartoonist Robert Storm Petersen (1882 – 1949).
France — a similar machine is called usine à gaz, or gas refinery, suggesting a very complicated factory with pipes running everywhere and a risk of explosion. It is now used mainly among programmers to indicate a complicated program, or in journalism to refer to a bewildering law or regulation.
Germany — such machines are often called "Was-passiert-dann-Maschine" ("What happens next machine") for the German name of similar devices used by Kermit the Frog in the children's TV show Sesame Street.
Great Britain — a Heath Robinson contraption, named after the fantastical comic machinery illustrated by British cartoonist W. Heath Robinson, has a similar meaning but predates the Rube Goldberg machine, originating in the UK in 1912.[6]
India — the humorist and children's author Sukumar Ray, in his nonsense poem "Abol tabol", had a character (Uncle) with a Rube Goldberg-like machine called "Uncle's contraption"(khuror kol). This word is used colloquially in Bengali to mean a complicated and useless object.
Japan — "Pythagorean devices" or "Pythagoras switch". PythagoraSwitch (ピタゴラスイッチ, "Pitagora Suicchi") is the name of a TV show featuring such devices. Another related genre is the Japanese art of chindōgu, which involves inventions that are hypothetically useful but of limited actual utility.
Norway — cartoonist and storyteller Kjell Aukrust created a cartoon character named Reodor Felgen, who constantly invented complicated machinery. Though it was often built out of unlikely parts, it always performed very well. Felgen stars as the inventor of an extremely powerful but overly complicated car, Il Tempo Gigante, in the Ivo Caprino animated puppet film Flåklypa Grand Prix (1975).
Spain — devices akin to Goldberg's machines are known as Inventos del TBO (tebeo), named after those that several cartoonists ( Nit, Tínez, Marino Benejam, Frances Tur and finally Ramón Sabatés) made up and drew for a section in the TBO magazine, allegedly designed by some "Professor Franz" from Copenhagen.
Turkey — such devices are known as Zihni Sinir Proceleri, allegedly invented by a certain Prof. Zihni Sinir ("Crabby Mind"), a curious scientist character created by İrfan Sayar in 1977 for the cartoon magazine Gırgır. The cartoonist later went on to open a studio selling actual working implementations of his designs.
Professional artists:
Peter Fischli & David Weiss, Swiss artists known for their art installation movie Der Lauf der Dinge (The Way Things Go, 1987). It documents a 30 minutes long causal chain assembled of everyday objects, resembling a Rube Goldberg machine.
Tim Hawkinson has made several art pieces that contain complicated apparatuses that are generally used to make abstract art or music. Many of them are centered around the randomness of other devices (such as a slot machine) and are dependent on them to create some menial effect.
Competitions
In early 1987, Purdue University in Indiana started the annual National Rube Goldberg Machine Contest, organized by the Phi Chapter of Theta Tau, a national engineering fraternity. In 2009, the Epsilon Chapter of Theta Tau established a similar annual contest at the University of California, Berkeley.
Since around 1997, the kinetic artist Arthur Ganson has been the emcee of the annual "Friday After Thanksgiving" (FAT) competition sponsored by the MIT Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Teams of contestants construct elaborate Rube Goldberg style chain-reaction machines on tables arranged around a large gymnasium. Each apparatus is linked by a string to its predecessor and successor machine. The initial string is ceremonially pulled, and the ensuing events are videotaped in closeup, and simultaneously projected on large screens for viewing by the live audience. After the entire cascade of events has finished, prizes are then awarded in various categories and age levels. Videos from several previous years' contests are viewable on the MIT Museum website.[7]
The Chain Reaction Contraption Contest is an annual event hosted at the Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh, PA where high school teams each build a Rube Goldberg machine to complete some simple task (which changes from year to year) in 20 steps or more (with some additional constraints on size, timing, safety, etc.).
On Food Network's TV show "Challenge", competitors in 2011 were once required to create a Rube Goldberg machine out of sugar.[citation needed]
An event called Mission Possible in Science Olympiad involves students building a Rube Goldberg-like device to perform a certain series of tasks.
In April 2012, the Bosch company hosted an event called the "Playground of Engineers" in Hungary where the participant teams had to perform a series of tasks wherein they collected coins. Later that day, the main challenge was to build an overly complicated Goldberg Machine, the goal of which was to switch on a car dashboard. The teams were able to buy additional items with their collected coins above the standard issue equipment to make their machine more complicated. The main criteria of the judges were complexity, operating time and the number of components used.[citation needed]
See also:
Turboencabulator
W. Heath Robinson
Storm P
Rolling Ball Sculpture
Deathtrap
Booby trap
Gyro Gearloose
Domino effect
Domino show
Veeblefetzer
Unintelligent design
Machines in the media
Mouse Trap (game)
This Too Shall Pass (OK Go song)
References
Jump up ^ Economist's View: Is Rep. Bill Thomas the Rube Goldberg of Legislative Reform?. Economistsview.typepad.com (2005-06-06). Retrieved on 2011-05-06.
Jump up ^ Social Security's Progressive Paradox – Reason Magazine. Reason.com (2005-05-02). Retrieved on 2011-05-06.
Jump up ^ Wolfe, Maynard Frank (2000). Rube Goldberg: Inventions. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0684867249.
Jump up ^ "Rube Goldberg" (WEBPAGE). Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. 2009. Retrieved 2009-08-05.
Jump up ^ Die Weltmaschine des Franz Gsellmann. Weltmaschine.at (2010-12-18). Retrieved on 2011-05-06.
Jump up ^ History – Historic Figures: William Heath Robinson (1872–1944). BBC. Retrieved on 2011-05-06.
Jump up ^ "Friday After Thanksgiving: Chain Reaction". MIT Museum [website]. Retrieved 2011-05-06.
~~~~~~~~~~
External links
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Rube Goldberg machines.
The Official Rube Goldberg Web Site
Rube Works: The Official Rube Goldberg Invention Game
Smithsonian Archives of American Art: Oral History Interview, 1970
Detailed specifications of an award-winning Rube Goldberg machine from the New York City science fair
Friday After Thanksgiving (FAT) chain reaction competition at the MIT Museum
Rube Goldberg at DMOZ
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Build a Better Mousetrap, and the World will Beat a Path to Your Door
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Build_a_better_mousetrap,_and_the_world_will_beat_a_path_to_your_door
Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door is a phrase attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson in the late nineteenth century.[1] [2] The phrase is actually a misquotation of the statement:
If a man has good corn or wood, or boards, or pigs, to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, [2]
According to some sources, the current phrasing of the quotation didn't appear until 7 years after Emerson died. Thus, in 1889, Emerson credited with having said
If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap than his neighbor ...
rather than
If a man has good corn ... or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles or church organs, than anybody else ...
[2] It is unclear who deserves credit for the phrasing in common use today.
The phrase has turned into a metaphor about the power of innovation,[2] and is frequently taken literally, with more than 4,400 patents issued by the United States Patent and Trademark Office for new mousetraps, with thousands more unsuccessful applicants, making them the "most frequently invented device in U.S. history".[1]
References
^ Jump up to: a b Kassinger, Ruth. Build a Better Mousetrap. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. p. 128. ISBN 0-471-39538-2.
^ Jump up to: a b c d Lienhard, John H. Inventing Modern: Growing Up with X-Rays, Skyscrapers, and Tailfins. p. 204.
American Heritage Magazine, "A Better Mousetrap", 1996, Volume 47, Issue 6
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The Snowball Effect
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowball_effect
This article is about the figurative concept. For other uses, see Snowball effect (disambiguation).
Metaphorically, a snowball effect is a process that starts from an initial state of small significance and builds upon itself, becoming larger (graver, more serious), and also perhaps potentially dangerous or disastrous (a vicious circle, a "spiral of decline"), though it might be beneficial instead (a virtuous circle). This is a very common cliché in cartoons and modern theatrics and it is also used in psychology.
The common analogy is with the rolling of a small ball of snow down a snow-covered hillside. As it rolls the ball will pick up more snow, gaining more mass and surface area, and picking up even more snow and momentum as it rolls along.
In aerospace engineering, it is used to describe the multiplication effect in an original weight saving. A reduction in the weight of the fuselage will require less lift, meaning the wings can be smaller. Hence less thrust is required and therefore smaller engines, resulting in a greater weight saving than the original reduction. This iteration can be repeated several times, although the decrease in weight for each iteration decreases.
The startup process of a feedback electronic oscillator, when power to the circuit is switched on, is a technical application of the snowball effect. Electronic noise is amplified by the oscillator circuit and returned to its input filtered to contain primarily the selected (desired) frequency, gradually getting stronger in each cycle, until a steady-state oscillation is established, when the circuit parameters satisfy the Barkhausen stability criterion.
See also:
Butterfly effect
Clapotis
Domino effect
Positive feedback
Self-fulfilling prophecy
Slippery slope
Katamari Damacy, a game based on the snowball effect
Wealth condensation
Stub icon This vocabulary-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earworm
For other uses, see Earworm (disambiguation).
An earworm, sometimes known as a brainworm, is a catchy piece of music that continually repeats through a person's mind after it is no longer playing. Phrases used to describe an earworm include musical imagery repetition, involuntary musical imagery, and stuck song syndrome. The word earworm is a calque from the German Ohrwurm. The earliest known usage is in Desmond Bagley's 1978 novel Flyaway.
Researchers who have studied and written about the phenomenon include Theodor Reik, Sean Bennett, Oliver Sacks, Daniel Levitin, James Kellaris, Philip Beaman, Vicky Williamson, and, in a more theoretical perspective, Peter Szendy. The phenomenon is common and should not be confused with palinacousis, a rare medical condition caused by damage to the temporal lobe of the brain that results in auditory hallucinations.
Research and cures
According to research by James Kellaris, 98% of individuals experience earworms. Women and men experience the phenomenon equally often, but earworms tend to last longer for women and irritate them more. Kellaris produced statistics suggesting that songs with lyrics may account for 73.7% of earworms, whereas instrumental music may cause only 7.7%.
In a 2006 book by Daniel Levitin entitled This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession, he states that research has shown musicians and people with obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD) are more likely to suffer from earworm attacks. An attack usually involves a small portion of a song, a hook, equal to or less than the capacity of one's auditory short-term memory. Levitin reports that capacity as usually 15 to 30 seconds. Simple tunes are more likely to get stuck than complex pieces of music. He also mentions that in some situations, OCD medications have been known to minimize the effects. In 2010, published data in the British Journal of Psychology directly addressed the subject, and its results support earlier claims that earworms are usually 15 to 30 seconds in length.
Scientists at Western Washington University found that engaging the working memory in moderately difficult tasks on paper (such as anagrams, Sudoku puzzles, or reading a novel) was an effective way of stopping earworms and of reducing their recurrence. Another publication points out that melodic music has a tendency to demonstrate repeating rhythm which may lead to endless repetition, unless a climax can be achieved to break the cycle.
Research reported in 2015, by the School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences at the University of Reading, suggested that chewing gum could help.
Notable cases:
Jean Harris, who murdered Herman Tarnower, was obsessed by the song "Put the Blame on Mame", which she first heard in the film Gilda. She would recall this regularly for over 33 years and could hold a conversation while playing it in her mind.
In popular culture:
This article may contain excessive, poor, or irrelevant examples. Please improve the article by adding more descriptive text and removing less pertinent examples. See Wikipedia's guide to writing better articles for further suggestions. (January 2015)
Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Imp of the Perverse" (1845) has the following:
It is quite a common thing to be thus annoyed with the ringing in our ears, or rather in our memories, of the burthen of some ordinary song, or some unimpressive snatches from an opera. Nor will we be the less tormented if the song in itself be good, or the opera air meritorious.
Mark Twain's 1876 story "A Literary Nightmare" (also known as "Punch, Brothers, Punch") is about a jingle that one can get rid of only by transferring it to another person.
In Robert Graves' memoir Good-Bye to All That (1929) he recorded that as he marched to battle in September 1915, "The men were singing...comic songs... Slippery Sam, When we'eve Wound up the Watch on the Rhine, and I do like a S'nice S'mince Pie. The tune of S'nice S'mince Pie ran in my head all week and I could not get rid of it." During the battle he wrote, "We waited on the fire step...for the order to go over. My mind was a blank, except for the recurrence of S'nice S'mince Pie, S'nice S'mince S'pie. The men laughed at my singing. The acting C.S.M. said: "It's murder, sir." "Of course it's murder, you bloody fool," I agreed. "But there's nothing else for it is there?""
In Henry Kuttner's short story "Nothing but Gingerbread Left" (1943), Kuttner imagines a secret allied effort against Nazi Germany using a catchy rhyme to break the opposition's concentration.[22] English speakers were safe from the earworm, as the text did not scan in English.
In Alfred Bester's 1953 novel The Demolished Man, the protagonist uses a jingle specifically crafted to be a catchy, irritating nuisance as a tool to block mind readers from reading his mind.
In Arthur C. Clarke's 1957 science fiction short story "The Ultimate Melody", a scientist, Gilbert Lister, develops the ultimate melody – one that so compels the brain that its listener becomes completely and forever enraptured by it. As the storyteller, Harry Purvis, explains, Lister theorized that a great melody "made its impression on the mind because it fitted in with the fundamental electrical rhythms going on in the brain." Lister attempts to abstract from the hit tunes of the day to a melody that fits in so well with the electrical rhythms that it dominates them completely. He succeeds and is found in a catatonic state from which he never awakens.[23]
In Fritz Leiber's Hugo Award-nominated short story "Rump-Titty-Titty-Tum-TAH-Tee" (1959), the title describes a rhythmic drumbeat so powerful that it rapidly spreads to all areas of human culture, until a counter-rhythm is developed that acts as an antidote.[24]
In Joe Simpson's 1988 book Touching the Void, he talks about not being able to get the tune "Brown Girl in the Ring" by Boney M out of his head. The book tells of his survival, against the odds, after a mountaineering accident in the remote Siula Grande region of South America. Alone, badly injured, and in a semi-delirious state, he is confused as to whether he is imagining the music or really hearing it.[25]
In the Seinfeld episode "The Jacket" (season 2, episode 3), George Costanza (Jason Alexander) walks around singing "Master of the House" from the musical Les Misérables, telling his friend, Jerry Seinfeld, that he cannot get the song out of his head. Later, Costanza accidentally sings the song in front of their friend Elaine's hard-nosed father, Alton Benes (Lawrence Tierney), prompting Benes to quip, "Pipe down, chorus boy." At the end of the program, Benes is shown singing the song while driving home alone, having apparently "caught" the earworm from Costanza.[26][27]
In episode 20 of season 7 of SpongeBob SquarePants, entitled "Ear Worm" (2010), SpongeBob gets a song stuck in his head called "Musical Doodle".[28] The episode refers to the earworm as a physical creature that enters one's head upon listening to a catchy song.
In Dexter's Laboratory, Season 4 Episode 13 entitled "Head Band", a contagious group of viruses force their host to sing what they are saying to the same "boy band" tune. The only way to be cured of the Boy Band Virus is for the viruses to break up and start their own solo careers.[29]
In the Married... with Children episode "Oldies But Young 'Uns" (Season 5, Episode 17; airdate March 17, 1991), Al Bundy becomes obsessed with finding out the name of a song that has become his earworm (originally he can only tell people the nondescript misheard lyric "hmm hmm him"). It turns out to be "Anna (Go to Him)" by Arthur Alexander.
E.B. White's 1933 satirical short story "The Supremacy of Uruguay" (reprinted in Timeless Stories for Today and Tomorrow) relates a fictional episode in the history of Uruguay where a powerful earworm is discovered in a popular American song: "thanks for unforgettable nights I never can replace." The Uruguayan military builds a squadron of pilotless aircraft armed with phonographs playing a highly amplified recording of the earworm, and conquers the entire world by reducing the citizens of all nations to mindless insanity. "[T]he peoples were hopelessly mad, ravaged by an ineradicable noise ... No one could hear anything except the noise in his own head."[30]
An article by ZME Science identified the following as factors of a song being catchy: longer and detailed musical phrases; higher number of pitches in the chorus hook; male vocalists; and higher male voices with noticeable vocal effort. Using these factors, it was concluded that British rock band Queen's "We Are The Champions" is the catchiest song in history.[31]
See also:
Idée fixe (psychology)
Phonological loop
Tetris effect
References
^ Jump up to: a b c Sacks, Oliver (2007). Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. First Vintage Books. pp. 41–48. ISBN 978-1-4000-3353-9.
Jump up ^ "Oxford Dictionaries: "earworm"". Oxford University Press. Retrieved July 4, 2013.
Jump up ^ Liikkanen, L. A. (2012). "Inducing involuntary musical imagery: An experimental study" (PDF). Musicae Scientiae 16 (2): 217–234. doi:10.1177/1029864912440770. edit
Jump up ^ Liikkanen, Lassi A. (2008). "Music in Everymind: Commonality of Involuntary Musical Imagery" (PDF). Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition (ICMPC 10) (Sapporo, Japan): 408–412. ISBN 978-4-9904208-0-2.
Jump up ^ "earworm", wordspy.com
Jump up ^ Desmond Bagley, Flyaway (1978), p. 41: "I fell into a blind, mindless rhythm and a chant was created in my mind what the Germans call an 'earworm' something that goes round and round in your head and you can't get rid of it. One bloody foot before the next bloody foot."
Jump up ^ Reik, Theodor (1953). The Haunting Melody: Psychoanalytic Experiences in Life and Music. New York: Grove Press.
Jump up ^ Bennett, Sean (August 30, 2002). Musical Imagery Repetition (Master). Cambridge University.
^ Jump up to: a b Levitin, Daniel (2006). This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession. New York, New York: Dutton, Penguin. ISBN 0452288525. Retrieved August 7, 2012.
Jump up ^ Kellaris, James J. (Winter 2001). "Identifying Properties of Tunes That Get 'Stuck in Your Head'". Proceedings of the Society for Consumer Psychology (Scottsdale, AZ: American Psychological Society): 66–67.
^ Jump up to: a b Beaman, C. P.; Williams, T. I. (2010). "Earworms (stuck song syndrome): Towards a natural history of intrusive thoughts". British Journal of Psychology 101 (4): 637. doi:10.1348/000712609X479636. edit
Jump up ^ Chatterjee, Rhitu (6 March 2012). "Earworms: Why songs get stuck in our heads". BBC News. Retrieved 7 March 2012.
Jump up ^ Szendy, Peter (2012). Hits. Philosophy in the Jukebox. translated by William Bishop. Fordham University Press.
Jump up ^ Moore, David R.; Fuchs, Paul Paul Albert; Rees, Adrian; Palmer, Alan; Plack, Christopher J. (January 21, 2010). The Oxford Handbook of Auditory Science: The Auditory Brain. Oxford University Press. p. 535. Retrieved July 3, 2013.
Jump up ^ Adams, Cecil (October 16, 2009), "Why do songs get stuck in your head?", The Straight Dope
Jump up ^ Hoffman, Carey (2001-04-04). "Songs That Cause The Brain To 'Itch': UC Professor Investigating Why Certain Tunes Get Stuck In Our Heads". University of Cincinnati. Retrieved 2012-08-06. Of the 1,000 respondents, the kind of music respondents said they got stuck on most recently were songs with lyrics for 73.7 percent, jingles or ads for 18.6 percent and an instrumental tune for 7.7 percent.
Jump up ^ Gray, Richard (24 March 2013). "Get that tune out of your head - scientists find how to get rid of earworms". The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved 25 March 2013.
Jump up ^ Got a song stuck in your head? Solving an anagram can help get rid of it, Daily Mail, 24 March 2013
Jump up ^ Schwanauer, Stephan M.; Levitt, David A. (1993). Machine Models of Music. MIT Press. p. 174. ISBN 978-0-262-19319-1.
Jump up ^ [1]
Jump up ^ Díaz de Chumaceiro, Cora L. (October 16, 2004). "Jean Harris' Obsessive Film Song Recall". PsyArt.
Jump up ^ "Nothing but Gingerbread Left" (BLOG), Tenser, said the Tensor, May 23, 2004
Jump up ^ Chorost, Michael, "The Ultimate Melody by Arthur C. Clarke", The Web site of aleph
Jump up ^ Pretor-Pinney, Gavin (2010), The Wavewatcher's Companion, Bloomsbury Publishing, p. 218, ISBN 978-0-7475-8976-1
Jump up ^ Simpson, Joe (1988). Touching the Void.
Jump up ^ Michael Dunne, "Seinfeld as Intertextual Comedy", Seinfeld, Master of Its Domain: Revisiting Television's Greatest Sitcom (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2010), p. 51.
Jump up ^ "The Jacket", Seinfeld Scripts. Retrieved: 4 June 2014.
Jump up ^ "Ear Worm: Musical Doodle". Nick.com. Retrieved July 18, 2012.
Jump up ^ "Dexter's Laboratory: Head Band / Stuffed Animal House / Used Ink". TV.com. Retrieved 29 May 2014.
Jump up ^ "The Supremacy of Uruguay". www.armandobronca.com. Retrieved January 17, 2014.
Jump up ^ Puiu, Tibi (October 3, 2011). "ZME Science". Retrieved September 23, 2012.
Further reading
Vadim Prokhorov (22 June 2006), "Can't get it out of my head", The Guardian
Divya Singhal (December 8, 2011), Why this Kolaveri Di: Maddening Phenomenon of Earworm
External links
Lassi A. Liikkanen, The World of Involuntary Musical Imagery Research
"Earworms in TV and pop culture". TVtropes.com.
Margulis, Elizabeth Hellmuth (January 16, 2014), "Why Songs Get Stuck in Your Head", The Atlantic
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Tetris Effect
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris_effect
Other examples
The Tetris effect can occur with other video games.[2] It has also been known to occur with non-video games, such as the illusion of curved lines after doing a jigsaw puzzle, or the involuntary mental visualisation of Rubik's Cube algorithms common amongst speedcubers.
On a perceptual level, sea legs are a kind of Tetris effect. A person newly on land after spending long periods at sea may sense illusory rocking motion, having become accustomed to the constant work of adjusting to the boat making such movements (see "Illusions of self-motion" and "Mal de debarquement"). The poem Boots by Rudyard Kipling describes the effect, resulting from repetitive visual experience during a route march:
’Tain’t—so—bad—by—day because o’ company,
But—night—brings—long—strings—o’ forty thousand million
Boots—boots—boots—boots—movin’ up an’ down again.
There’s no discharge in the war!
—Rudyard Kipling, Boots
On the mental level, computer programming has resulted in dreams about coding.[3] Mathematicians have reported dreaming of numbers or equations, for example Srinivasa Ramanujan, or Friedrich Engels who remarked "last week in a dream I gave a chap my shirt-buttons to differentiate, and he ran off with them".[4]
Place in cognition
Stickgold et al. (2000) have proposed that Tetris imagery is a separate form of memory, likely related to procedural memory. This is from their research in which they showed that people with anterograde amnesia, unable to form new declarative memories, reported dreaming of falling shapes after playing Tetris during the day, despite not being able to remember playing the game at all.[5]
A study, conducted by Lynn Okagaki and Peter Frensch in 1994, showed that participants who played Tetris for twelve 30-minute sessions (with no previous experience of the game) did much better than the control group in both the paper-pencil test version of spatial skills as well as the computerized version. The conclusions drawn from this experiments were that video games such as Tetris had a positive effect on three areas of spatial skills including mental rotation, spatial perception and spatial visualization in those who played for a prolonged period continuously.[6]
Another 2009 Oxford study suggests that playing Tetris-like video games may help prevent the development of traumatic memories. If the video game treatment is played soon after the traumatic event, the preoccupation with Tetris shapes is enough to prevent the mental recitation of traumatic images, thereby decreasing the accuracy, intensity, and frequency of traumatic reminders. "We suggest it specifically interferes with the way sensory memories are laid down in the period after trauma and thus reduces the number of flashbacks that are experienced afterwards," summarizes Dr. Emily Holmes, who led the study.[7][8]
History of the term
The earliest known reference to the term appears in Jeffrey Goldsmith's article, "This is Your Brain on Tetris", published in Wired in May 1994:
No home was sweet without a Game Boy in 1990. That year, I stayed "for a week" with a friend in Tokyo, and Tetris enslaved my brain. At night, geometric shapes fell in the darkness as I lay on loaned tatami floor space. Days, I sat on a lavender suede sofa and played Tetris furiously. During rare jaunts from the house, I visually fit cars and trees and people together. [...]
The Tetris effect is a biochemical, reductionistic metaphor, if you will, for curiosity, invention, the creative urge. To fit shapes together is to organize, to build, to make deals, to fix, to understand, to fold sheets. All of our mental activities are analogous, each as potentially addictive as the next.[9]
The term was rediscovered by Earling (1996),[1] citing a use of the term by Garth Kidd in February, 1996.[10] Kidd described "after-images of the game for up to days afterwards" and "a tendency to identify everything in the world as being made of four squares and attempt to determine 'where it fits in'". Kidd attributed the origin of the term to computer-game players from Adelaide, Australia. An early description of the general phenomenon appears in Neil Gaiman's science fiction poem "Virus"[11] (1987) in Digital Dreams.
See also:
Domino effect
Earworm
Fixation (psychology)
Highway hypnosis
Neuroplasticity
Tetromino
Video game addiction
References
^ Jump up to: a b c Earling, A. (1996, March 21–28). The Tetris Effect: Do computer games fry your brain? Philadelphia City Paper
Jump up ^ Daniel Terdiman (January 11, 2005). "Real World Doesn't Use a Joystick". Wired.
Jump up ^ "14-Year-Old Prodigy Programmer Dreams In Code". THNKR. @radical.media.
Jump up ^ Engels, Friedrich (August 10, 1881). "Marx-Engels Correspondence 1881" (Letter to Karl Marx). Retrieved July 31, 2014.
Jump up ^ Stickgold, Robert; Malia, April; Maguire, Denise; Roddenberry, David; O'Connor, Margaret (2000). "Replaying the Game: Hypnagogic Images in Normals and Amnesics". Science 290 (5490): 350–353. doi:10.1126/science.290.5490.350. PMID 11030656.
Jump up ^ Okagaki, L., Frensch,P. (1994). Effects of video game playing on measures of spatial performance: Gender effects in late adolescence. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 15(1) 33-58.
Jump up ^ Holmes EA, James EL, Coode-Bate T, Deeprose C, (2009). Bell, Vaughan, ed. "Can Playing the Computer Game "Tetris" Reduce the Build-Up of Flashbacks for Trauma? A Proposal from Cognitive Science". PLoS ONE 4 (1): e4153. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0004153. PMC 2607539. PMID 19127289
Jump up ^ "Tetris 'helps to reduce trauma'". BBC News. January 7, 2009.
Jump up ^ Goldsmith, Jeffrey (May 1994). "This is Your Brain on Tetris". Wired Issue 2.05. Retrieved 20 December 2012.
Jump up ^ Kidd, G. (1996). Possible future risk of virtual reality. The RISKS Digest: Forum on Risks to the Public in Computers and Related Systems 17(78)
Jump up ^ Virus
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The "Domino Effect"
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domino_effect
A domino effect or chain reaction is the cumulative effect produced when one event sets off a chain of similar events.[1] The term is best known as a mechanical effect, and is used as an analogy to a falling row of dominoes. It typically refers to a linked sequence of events where the time between successive events is relatively small. It can be used literally (an observed series of actual collisions) or metaphorically (causal linkages within systems such as global finance or politics).
See also:
Rube Goldberg machine: A "Rube Goldberg machine" is a contraption, invention, device or apparatus that is deliberately over-engineered or overdone to perform a very simple task in a very complicated fashion, usually including a chain reaction. The expression is named after American cartoonist and inventor Rube Goldberg (1883–1970).
Over the years, the expression has expanded to mean any confusing or complicated system. For example, news headlines include "Is Rep. Bill Thomas the Rube Goldberg of Legislative Reform?" and "Retirement 'insurance' as a Rube Goldberg machine".
Relevant physical theory:
Butterfly effect
Cascading failure
Causality
Chain reaction
Snowball effect
Mathematical theory:
Mathematical induction
Political theory:
Domino theory
References
Jump up ^ "domino effect". The Free Dictionary. Farlex, Inc. Retrieved 29 September 2014.
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Domino effect.
Impact Mechanics, W. J. Stronge, Cambridge University Press, 2004, ISBN 0-521-60289-0, ISBN 978-0-521-60289-1
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The Butterfly Effect
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect
In chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state. The name of the effect, coined by Edward Lorenz, is derived from the metaphorical example of the details of a hurricane (exact time of formation, exact path taken) being influenced by minor perturbations such as the flapping of the wings of a distant butterfly several weeks earlier. Lorenz discovered the effect when he observed that runs of his weather model with initial condition data that was rounded in a seemingly inconsequential manner would fail to reproduce the results of runs with the unrounded initial condition data. A very small change in initial conditions had created a significantly different outcome.
The butterfly effect is exhibited by very simple systems. For example, the randomness of the outcomes of throwing dice depends on this characteristic to amplify small differences in initial conditions—the precise direction, thrust, and orientation of the throw—into significantly different dice paths and outcomes, which makes it virtually impossible to throw dice exactly the same way twice.
History
Chaos theory and the sensitive dependence on initial conditions were described in the literature in a particular case of the three-body problem by Henri Poincaré in 1890.[1] He later proposed that such phenomena could be common, for example, in meteorology.[2]
In 1898,[1] Jacques Hadamard noted general divergence of trajectories in spaces of negative curvature. Pierre Duhem discussed the possible general significance of this in 1908.[1] The idea that one butterfly could eventually have a far-reaching ripple effect on subsequent historic events made its earliest known appearance in "A Sound of Thunder", a 1952 short story by Ray Bradbury about time travel (see Literature and print here).
In 1961, Lorenz was running a numerical computer model to redo a weather prediction from the middle of the previous run as a shortcut. He entered the initial condition 0.506 from the printout instead of entering the full precision 0.506127 value. The result was a completely different weather scenario.[3] In 1963 Lorenz published a theoretical study of this effect in a highly cited, seminal paper called Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow.[4][5] (The calculations were performed on a Royal McBee LGP-30 computer.[6][7]) Elsewhere he stated
One meteorologist remarked that if the theory were correct, one flap of a sea gull's wings would be enough to alter the course of the weather forever. The controversy has not yet been settled, but the most recent evidence seems to favor the sea gulls.[7]
Following suggestions from colleagues, in later speeches and papers Lorenz used the more poetic butterfly. According to Lorenz, when he failed to provide a title for a talk he was to present at the 139th meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1972, Philip Merilees concocted Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas? as a title.[8] Although a butterfly flapping its wings has remained constant in the expression of this concept, the location of the butterfly, the consequences, and the location of the consequences have varied widely.[9]
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 another location. The butterfly does not power or directly create the tornado. The term is not intended to imply—as is often misconstrued—that the flap of the butterfly's wings causes the tornado. The flap of the wings is a part of the initial conditions; one set of conditions leads to a tornado while the other set of conditions doesn't. The flapping wing represents a small change in the initial condition of the system, which cascades to large-scale alterations of events (compare: domino effect). Had the butterfly not flapped its wings, the trajectory of the system might have been vastly different—it's possible that the set of conditions without the butterfly flapping its wings is the set that leads to a tornado.
The butterfly effect presents an obvious challenge to prediction, since initial conditions for a system such as the weather can never be known to complete accuracy. This problem motivated the development of ensemble forecasting, in which a number of forecasts are made from perturbed initial conditions.[10]
Some scientists have since argued that the weather system is not as sensitive to initial condition as previously believed.[11] David Orrell argues that the major contributor to weather forecast error is model error, with sensitivity to initial conditions playing a relatively small role.[12][13] Stephen Wolfram also notes that the Lorenz equations are highly simplified and do not contain terms that represent viscous effects; he believes that these terms would tend to damp out small perturbations.[14]
Theory and mathematical definition[edit]
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) since it is impossible to measure the starting atmospheric conditions completely accurately.
A dynamical system displays sensitive dependence on initial conditions if points arbitrarily close together separate over time at an exponential rate. The definition is not topological, but essentially metrical.
If M is the state space for the map f^t, then f^t displays sensitive dependence to initial conditions if for any x in M and any δ > 0, there are y in M, with distance d(. , .) such that 0 < d(x, y) < \delta and such that
d(f^\tau(x), f^\tau(y)) > \mathrm{e}^{a\tau} \, d(x,y)
for some positive parameter a. The definition does not require that all points from a neighborhood separate from the base point x, but it requires one positive Lyapunov exponent.
The simplest mathematical framework exhibiting sensitive dependence on initial conditions is provided by a particular parametrization of the logistic map:
x_{n+1} = 4 x_n (1-x_n) , \quad 0\leq x_0\leq 1,
which, unlike most chaotic maps, has a closed-form solution:
x_{n}=\sin^{2}(2^{n} \theta \pi)
where the initial condition parameter \theta is given by \theta = \tfrac{1}{\pi}\sin^{-1}(x_0^{1/2}). For rational \theta, after a finite number of iterations x_n maps into a periodic sequence. But almost all \theta are irrational, and, for irrational \theta, x_n never repeats itself – it is non-periodic. This solution equation clearly demonstrates the two key features of chaos – stretching and folding: the factor 2n shows the exponential growth of stretching, which results in sensitive dependence on initial conditions (the butterfly effect), while the squared sine function keeps x_n folded within the range [0, 1].
Examples
The butterfly effect is most familiar in terms of weather; it can easily be demonstrated in standard weather prediction models, for example.[15]
The potential for sensitive dependence on initial conditions (the butterfly effect) has been studied in a number of cases in semiclassical and quantum physics including atoms in strong fields and the anisotropic Kepler problem.[16][17] Some authors have argued that extreme (exponential) dependence on initial conditions is not expected in pure quantum treatments;[18][19] however, the sensitive dependence on initial conditions demonstrated in classical motion is included in the semiclassical treatments developed by Martin Gutzwiller[20] and Delos and co-workers.[21]
Other authors suggest that the butterfly effect can be observed in quantum systems. Karkuszewski et al. consider the time evolution of quantum systems which have slightly different Hamiltonians. They investigate the level of sensitivity of quantum systems to small changes in their given Hamiltonians.[22] Poulin et al. presented a quantum algorithm to measure fidelity decay, which "measures the rate at which identical initial states diverge when subjected to slightly different dynamics". They consider fidelity decay to be "the closest quantum analog to the (purely classical) butterfly effect".[23] Whereas the classical butterfly effect considers the effect of a small change in the position and/or velocity of an object in a given Hamiltonian system, the quantum butterfly effect considers the effect of a small change in the Hamiltonian system with a given initial position and velocity.[24][25] This quantum butterfly effect has been demonstrated experimentally.[26] Quantum and semiclassical treatments of system sensitivity to initial conditions are known as quantum chaos.[18][24]
See also:
Actuality and potentiality
Avalanche effect
Behavioral cusp
Butterfly effect in popular culture
Cascading failure
Causality
Chain reaction
Clapotis
Determinism
Domino effect
Dynamical systems
Fractal
Great Stirrup Controversy
Innovation butterfly
Kessler syndrome
Law of unintended consequences
Point of divergence
Positive feedback
Representativeness heuristic
Ripple effect
Snowball effect
Traffic congestion
Tropical cyclogenesis
References
^ Jump up to: a b c Some Historical Notes: History of Chaos Theory
Jump up ^ Steves, Bonnie; Maciejewski, AJ (September 2001). The Restless Universe Applications of Gravitational N-Body Dynamics to Planetary Stellar and Galactic Systems. USA: CRC Press. ISBN 0750308222. Retrieved January 6, 2014.
Jump up ^ Gleick, James (1987). Chaos: Making a New Science. Viking. p. 16. ISBN 0-8133-4085-3.
Jump up ^ Lorenz, Edward N. (March 1963). "Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow". Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences 20 (2): 130–141. Bibcode:1963JAtS...20..130L. doi:10.1175/1520-0469(1963)020<0130:DNF>2.0.CO;2. ISSN 1520-0469. Retrieved 3 June 2010.
Jump up ^ Google Scholar citation record
Jump up ^ "Part19". Cs.ualberta.ca. 1960-11-22. Retrieved 2014-06-08.
^ Jump up to: a b Lorenz, Edward N. (1963). "The Predictability of Hydrodynamic Flow" (PDF). Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences 25 (4): 409–432. Retrieved 1 September 2014.
Jump up ^ Lorenz: "Predictability", AAAS 139th meeting, 1972 Retrieved May 22, 2015
Jump up ^ "The Butterfly Effects: Variations on a Meme". AP42 ...and everything. Retrieved 3 August 2011.
Jump up ^ Woods, Austin (2005). Medium-range weather prediction: The European approach; The story of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. New York: Springer. p. 118. ISBN 978-0387269283.
Jump up ^ Orrell, David; Smith, Leonard; Barkmeijer, Jan; Palmer, Tim (2001). "Model error in weather forecasting". Nonlinear Proc. Geoph. 9: 357–371.
Jump up ^ Orrell, David (2002). "Role of the metric in forecast error growth: How chaotic is the weather?". Tellus 54A: 350–362. doi:10.3402/tellusa.v54i4.12159.
Jump up ^ Orrell, David (2012). Truth or Beauty: Science and the Quest for Order. New Haven: Yale University Press. p. 208. ISBN 978-0300186611.
Jump up ^ Wolfram, Stephen (2002). A New Kind of Science. Wolfram Media. p. 998. ISBN 978-1579550080.
Jump up ^ "Chaos and Climate". RealClimate. Retrieved 2014-06-08.
Jump up ^ Heller, E. J.; Tomsovic, S. (July 1993). "Postmodern Quantum Mechanics". Physics Today.
Jump up ^ Gutzwiller, Martin C. (1990). Chaos in Classical and Quantum Mechanics. New York: Springer-Verlag. ISBN 0-387-97173-4.
^ Jump up to: a b Rudnick, Ze'ev (January 2008). "What is...Quantum Chaos" (PDF). Notices of the American Mathematical Society.
Jump up ^ Berry, Michael (1989). "Quantum chaology, not quantum chaos". Physica Scripta 40 (3): 335. Bibcode:1989PhyS...40..335B. doi:10.1088/0031-8949/40/3/013.
Jump up ^ Gutzwiller, Martin C. (1971). "Periodic Orbits and Classical Quantization Conditions". Journal of Mathematical Physics 12 (3): 343. Bibcode:1971JMP....12..343G. doi:10.1063/1.1665596.
Jump up ^ Gao, J. & Delos, J. B. (1992). "Closed-orbit theory of oscillations in atomic photoabsorption cross sections in a strong electric field. II. Derivation of formulas". Phys. Rev. A 46 (3): 1455–1467. Bibcode:1992PhRvA..46.1455G. doi:10.1103/PhysRevA.46.1455.
Jump up ^ Karkuszewski, Zbyszek P.; Jarzynski, Christopher; Zurek, Wojciech H. (2002). "Quantum Chaotic Environments, the Butterfly Effect, and Decoherence". Physical Review Letters 89 (17): 170405. arXiv:quant-ph/0111002. Bibcode:2002PhRvL..89q0405K. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.89.170405.
Jump up ^ Poulin, David; Blume-Kohout, Robin; Laflamme, Raymond & Ollivier, Harold (2004). "Exponential Speedup with a Single Bit of Quantum Information: Measuring the Average Fidelity Decay". Physical Review Letters 92 (17): 177906. arXiv:quant-ph/0310038. Bibcode:2004PhRvL..92q7906P. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.92.177906. PMID 15169196.
^ Jump up to: a b Poulin, David. "A Rough Guide to Quantum Chaos" (PDF).
Jump up ^ Peres, A. (1995). Quantum Theory: Concepts and Methods. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic.
Jump up ^ Lee, Jae-Seung & Khitrin, A. K. (2004). "Quantum amplifier: Measurement with entangled spins". Journal of Chemical Physics 121 (9): 3949. Bibcode:2004JChPh.121.3949L. doi:10.1063/1.1788661.
Further reading
James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science, New York: Viking, 1987. 368 pp.
Devaney, Robert L. (2003). Introduction to Chaotic Dynamical Systems. Westview Press. ISBN 0670811785.
Hilborn, Robert C. (2004). "Sea gulls, butterflies, and grasshoppers: A brief history of the butterfly effect in nonlinear dynamics". American Journal of Physics 72 (4): 425–427. Bibcode:2004AmJPh..72..425H. doi:10.1119/1.1636492.
External links
The meaning of the butterfly: Why pop culture loves the 'butterfly effect,' and gets it totally wrong, Peter Dizikes, Boston Globe, June 8, 2008
New England Complex Systems Institute - Concepts: Butterfly Effect
The Chaos Hypertextbook. An introductory primer on chaos and fractals
ChaosBook.org. Advanced graduate textbook on chaos (no fractals)
Weisstein, Eric W., "Butterfly Effect", MathWorld.
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Butterfly effect in popular culture
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect_in_popular_culture
The butterfly effect is the phenomenon whereby a minor change in circumstances can cause a large change in outcome.
Films
In arguably the earliest illustration of the butterfly effect in a story on film, an angel in It's a Wonderful Life (1946) shows George Bailey how rewriting history so that George was never born would detrimentally affect the lives of everyone in his hometown. In a subtle butterfly effect, snow falls in one version of reality but not the other.[1][2]
The complex plot of the 1985 film Brazil by Terry Gilliam is set into motion when a bug gets caught in machinery, changing the arrest order of "Archibald Tuttle" into the innocent "Archibald Buttle."
In the Polish film Blind Chance directed by Krzysztof Kieślowski, three parallel outcomes are shown depending on how the protagonist Witek deals with the obstacles on his way to catching a train, and whether he catches it. The film was made in 1981 but only released in 1987, due to suppression by the Polish authorities.
A 1989 episode of "The Ray Bradbury Theater" adapts the story very closely. The episode is named "The Sound of Thunder" after his short story of the same name, which itself predated the "butterfly effect" phrase.
The 1998 British movie Sliding Doors (influenced by Blind Chance) runs two parallel stories of the same woman, Helen (Gwyneth Paltrow). In one universe, Helen manages to catch a London Underground train home on time, and in the other she misses it. This small event influenced her life dramatically.
The French film Le Battement d'ailes du papillon (2000), translated as Happenstance in the English release, makes direct references to the butterfly effect in title, dialogue, and theme.
In 12B, a 2001 Tamil Film, Butterfly Effect is the theme of the story - missing or not missing a bus on a specific moment defines the whole of a man's subsequent life.
In many cases, minor and seemingly inconsequential actions in the past are extrapolated over time and can have radical effects on the present time of the main characters. In the movie The Butterfly Effect (2004), Evan Treborn (Ashton Kutcher), when reading from his adolescent journals, is able to essentially "redo" parts of his past. As he continues to do this, he realizes that even though his intentions are good, the actions he takes always have unintended consequences. Despite its title, however, this movie does not seriously explore the implications of the butterfly effect; only the lives of the principal characters seem to change from one scenario to another. The greater world around them is mostly unaffected. Furthermore, the changes made in the past of the principal character are far from minor and in that sense the title of the film is a misnomer. An element of the butterfly effect in general terms is that differences in start conditions for different scenario outcomes are virtually undetectable, and consequences are not related to cause in a directly apparent way.
On the other hand, the movie Run Lola Run (Lola rennt in German - 1998), represents the butterfly effect more clearly. Minor and almost sub-conscious actions in everyday life can be seen to have gross and widespread effects upon the future. For example, the fact that Lola bumps into someone instead of passing by may lead to a painful death after suffering paralysis. As such, seemingly inconsequential actions can be seen to have drastic long-term results.
The second film in the Back to the Future trilogy also vividly illustrates the cascading and broad effects of what seemed a minor change in the course of events: because the loathsome Biff Tannen accidentally gets his hands on a sports almanac from 2015, he is able to grow rich and corrupt Marty McFly's home town. When McFly (Michael J. Fox) returns to 1985, he finds it utterly degraded from what used to be.
In the 2000 movie Frequency, a son, John Sullivan (James Caviezel), has an opportunity to prevent the death of his father, Frank Sullivan (Dennis Quaid), through a miracle of nature in which they were both able to communicate across time 30 years using the same ham radio, transmitting the signal via a freak occurrence of the Northern Lights. This one action, however, had several undesirable consequences, including the murder of his mother by a vicious killer known as the Nightingale who was supposed to have never been caught. In the original timeline, when the killer is lying unconscious in the hospital, he dies from a reaction of two medicines, Benazepril and Benadryl that were mistakenly administered intravenously into his system. In the alternate timeline, Frank visits his wife, a nurse named Julia, at the hospital immediately after surviving the fire in which he was supposed to die. As they are talking, she sees the wrong medication being administered to the killer. She prevents this from happening, and the killer survives to murder not only her, but six more people; all nurses. Also, this film illustrates a theoretical side effect of the butterfly effect, where John is able to remember the original future time, as well as other alternate futures that were created each time his father changed something in the past.
In the 1990 movie Havana with Robert Redford and Lena Olin, Redford even makes a direct reference to: "And a butterfly can flutter its wings over a flower in China and cause a hurricane in the Caribbean. I believe it. They can even calculate the odds. It just isn't likely and it takes so long." He's referring to the probability of the two of their characters ever getting together. Redford's character was a gambler in late 50's Cuba and Olin was spotted earlier in the movie looking at books on the Theory of Numbers and Probability in the apartment of Redford's character.
In another 1990 movie Mr. Destiny, James Belushi plays Larry, a man who blames all of his life's problems on the fact that he struck out during a key moment of a high school baseball game. Michael Caine plays the title role of Mr. Destiny and allows Larry to live the life he would have had if his high school at-bat resulted in a game-winning home run instead of a game-losing strike three. Larry discovers that he is no longer married to Ellen, the woman he loves, played by Linda Hamilton but is now married to the glamorous Cindy Jo, played by Rene Russo. In this case, that one baseball hit in high school made Larry rich and powerful.
In the 1993 movie, Jurassic Park, Jeff Goldblum's character Dr. Malcolm attempts to explain chaos theory to Laura Dern's character, Dr. Sattler, specifically using the butterfly effect as an example.
In the 2005 movie A Sound of Thunder (borrowing the title from the Ray Bradbury story mentioned in the next section), an accidental killing of a butterfly literally triggers time waves that change the present bit by bit.
In a 2008 Tamil movie, "Dasavatharam" the hero Govind (Kamal Haasan) states butterfly effect or Chaos theory by comparing event happened in the 12th century had an adverse effect over Tsunami on December 26, 2004.
The 2009 Japanese film Fish Story directed by Yoshihiro Nakamura depicts how a mistake made by an inexperienced translator helps humankind survive more than 50 years after the original mistake itself is made.
In the 2010 film Hot Tub Time Machine, the butterfly effect is mentioned when Jacob explains that stepping on an insect in the past may, for instance, result in the internet ceasing to exist in the future.
The concept is referred to specifically - when describing how Nemo Nobody's parents met - and generally throughout the film Mr. Nobody (2009). In the plot, multiple stories are told consecutively with the differences being the result of choices made by the main character, Nemo Nobody.
Two episodes of Ugly Betty viz. "The Butterfly Effect Part 1" and "The Butterfly Effect Part 2".
In About Time the protagonist goes back a few years to his personal past, and when coming back to his home he finds that his beloved baby girl had been replaced by an unfamiliar baby boy. The protagonist's father tells him that he must never travel to a time before his children were conceived, because anything he did there might effect which of his countless sperm would fertlize the ovum, and then he would have a different child.
12 Monkeys of 1995 and inspired by it cognominal TV series of 2015 tell us about the time travel from a future post apocaliptic world into the present with the aim to prevent human race extinction. Even though heroes claim the it to be impossible to change the events that have already happened, somehow we see things change once affected in the 'past'.
Literature and print
Charles Fort, wrote about the interconnectedness of nature and the butterfly effect before the term was coined in his books New Lands (1932) and Wild Talents (1941). In "New Lands" he makes reference to a migration of birds in New York that could cause a storm in China.
In the 1952 short story by Ray Bradbury, "A Sound of Thunder", the killing of a butterfly during the time of dinosaurs causes the future to change in subtle but meaningful ways: e.g., the spelling of English and the outcome of a political election.[3]
The butterfly effect was invoked by fictional chaotician Ian Malcolm in both the novel Jurassic Park and subsequent film adaptation. He used it to explain the inherent instability of (among other things) an amusement park with dinosaurs as the attraction.
In Terry Pratchett's Interesting Times, the magical "Quantum Weather Butterfly", whose wings have finite area but infinite length, has the ability to manipulate weather patterns. These microclimates, which the butterfly uses to attract mates and fend off predators, play an important role in the resolution of the plot.
In the 1632 series of time-travel science fiction by Eric Flint and David Weber et al., speculation about the butterfly effect that happens when the West Virginia town of Grantville is instantaneously dropped into 1632 Germany. The speculation is that the events which drive the genetic makeup of a human are so sensitive to chance that every human born in the world changed by the "Ring of Fire" event would be genetically different from what they otherwise would have been within a very small period of time, depending on the distance from Germany, but in all cases within a year. Specifically, thousands of sperm vying for entry into an egg would be very sensitive to very small differences in position or timing that would assuredly result in a different sperm winning out, and a different person (a brother or sister, but no closer related than that) being born. The speculation centers especially on the birth of Baruch de Spinoza in Amsterdam a few months following the Ring event.
The (practical) applications are explored in Greg Egan's Permutation City. The premise is that if the details of the chaotic system can be determined with sufficient accuracy, then the butterfly effect could be used to leverage small actions into much larger desired consequences. E.g., deliberately flap the butterfly in just the place and time so as to end a drought, or prevent a hurricane from forming.
A variant is introduced in the 1993 short story "The Mosquito's Choice" by Henry Cowper, describing two alternate history timelines diverging radically due solely to a choice made by a mosquito. On a hot summer evening during the First World War, a French artillery officer is making calculations for the offensive on the German positions due to be launched the next day, while his orderly is preparing coffee. The mosquito, hovering inside the tent, needs to choose which of the sweating men - from its point of view, equally tempting sources of nourishment - it would bite. In one timeline it had bitten the officer - making him lose concentration and transpose figures in his calculations, and leading to the next day's artillery bombardment falling off target. This resulted in the history we know. In the divergent timeline the mosquito had bitten the orderly while the officer made the correct calculations - with the result that on the following day a French artillery shell came down directly on Corporal Adolf Hitler and blew him to bits. This resulted in a history where the Nazi Party remained an insignificant splinter group in Munich, while Germany underwent a restoration of the Kaiser in 1934 and won the Second World War in 1944 due to a nuclear bomb developed by Einstein and other Jewish scientists.
Still another variant on the theme of a seemingly trivial change having drastic results is explored in Cathleen Ward's story "Boy or Girl". The entire future of the world depends on whether or not an unimportant lower middle class New Yorker would make a completely trivial short phone call to a friend on an evening in 2003. His making the call would delay by some three minutes the moment of the friend getting into bed, making love to his wife and impregnating her - and would effect which of the friend's multitude of sperm cells would fuse with the wife's egg cell. As a result, there are two diverging timelines with (as the title implies) a male baby being born in one timeline and a female one in the other. In both timelines, the child is an exceptionally gifted mathematical genius. In the timeline where it is a boy, he is very early recognized, encouraged and effortlessly gains academic prominence, developing a complacent and conformist personality. In the 2030s he becomes the willing servant of a harsh religious-nationalist dictatorship seizing power over North America, and helps develop a terrible super-weapon for the regime - with the ultimate result of a cataclysmic war sweeping the globe, destroying all of humanity except for a few enclaves of survivors thrown back into the stone Age. Conversely, in the timeline where the genius is a girl, she is denied recognition and has to wage a bitter struggle against a hostile male environment, developing a rebellious and highly independent character. In the 2030s she joins the underground, and plays a crucial role in overthrowing the dictatorial regime and instituting a libertarian utopia.
The Southern Victory series of novels by Harry Turtledove explores what might have happened if Robert E. Lee's Special Order 191 had not been intercepted by Union soldiers. Rather it sets off a series of events where the South wins the American Civil War and splits North America into two separate world powers.
Interactive media
Andrew Hussie constantly demonstrates this in his webcomic "Homestuck", in which he shows many points diverging from a single point based around certain characters who manipulate time. A perfect example of this is when the character Dave Strider travels back in time repeatedly in trying to save his friend John Egbert from dying, with subtle shifts along the way.
The webcomic Kevin and Kell refers to Bradbury in the March 10, 1998 strip, which has Coney eating a butterfly while the family is in the Stone Age. A caption reads "When they return to 1998, they'll discover that a writer named Ray Bradbury never existed".
In the videogame Second Sight, main character John Vattic is able to change the present by having flashbacks to six months earlier, where he does things differently, affecting the future; only he remembers the alternate futures.
In the videogame Resident Evil 2, there's an interesting variation of the butterfly effect. Based on whether or not you choose Claire or Leon to start a new game, the story drastically changes. The alternate scenarios are shown to be caused by whether or not Leon's police cruiser crashes head first into a pole (choosing Claire's scenario first) or the car spins around and crashes back end first (choosing Leon's scenario first). This drastically alters the story, including what happens to several of the supporting characters and who faces specific boss enemies.
In the Facebook game Marvel: Avengers Alliance, the hero Bishop goes back in time to kill Sin before she becomes Skadi, in order to easily win the current battle against the Worthy, however, this lead to a grim future which the HYDRA teamed up with the Sentinels, leading to the extermination of the mutantkind, but this future is prevented by Cable. The same issue also lead Kang to fight an alternative version of himself.
The company behind the video game Eve Online, CCP used the Butterfly Effect in one of their advertisements.
The sports blog The Dubious Goals Committee run a feature called The Butterfly Effect, which details how sporting landscapes could have changed based on a single moment in history.
The installation El día de la langosta (The day of the locust) by Mexican artist Susana Rodríguez explores the concept of a small human action leading on to large effects, drawing on the concepts of chaos theory and the butterfly effect.[4]
The webcomic xkcd published an interactive comic strip on April Fools' Day 2014 entitled Lorenz. The webcomic could go down dozens of different paths according to small choices made by the reader in various panels. The title text for the strip directly alluded to the butterfly effect, reading, "Every choice, no matter how small, begins a new story."
Television
In Star Trek; The Next Generation, Season 3 Episode 15, "Yesterday's Enteprise," the Enterprise D encounters the Enterprise C, whose departure from what is considered a historically insignificant battle has changed all history and placed the entire Federation in jeopardy. In Season 6 Episode 15, "Tapestry," Q shows Picard the long-term, large ramifications to his life caused by one rash action in his youth. In Season 7 Episode 11, "Parallels," Worf goes goes through a rift in space-time and begins shifting between different personal and political realities shaped by small choices.
In The Simpsons Halloween episode, "Time and Punishment", Homer repeatedly travels back to the time of dinosaurs with a time machine (à la Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder"). Each time there, Homer's actions (involving intentional and unintentional violence) drastically alter the current universe: some of the changes include a totalitarian society with Ned Flanders as world dictator, a universe where his family is rich and classy and it rains donuts, and a seemingly normal universe with the exception of humans having long reptilian tongues.
In the Family Guy episode "Meet the Quagmires", Peter, with the help of Death, repeatedly travels back to the 80's to live up his teenage years and cancel a date with Lois. This leads to her marrying Quagmire and Peter marrying Molly Ringwald, while Chevy Chase is host of The Tonight Show, and Al Gore is president of the United States; when things seem normal again, it turns out Roger from American Dad! is living with them.
In a 2004 television episode of comedy sitcom Scrubs called "My Butterfly", the episode is shown in two parts: The first in which a butterfly lands on a woman sitting in the hospital's waiting room, and the second where time is rewound and the butterfly instead lands on the man next to her. Both halves of the episode show the noticeably (albeit sensationally) different outcomes that stem directly from the original choice of landing locations of this butterfly.[5]
In a first-season episode of the stop-motion animation show Robot Chicken titled "Operation: Rich in Spirit" there is a sketch where a young boy tries to explain the butterfly effect to a young girl. When the young girl squishes the butterfly, it causes earthquakes in Japan. A Japanese woman retaliates, stepping on a butterfly, which causes a volcano to erupt behind the children. The boy realiates as well, ripping a butterfly in half, which causes Godzilla to terrorize Japan.
In a second season episode of CSI titled "Chaos Theory", the entire CSI team investigates a disappearance of a young woman at a local university. Forensics leads them to possible suspects, and possible suspects all have probable motives, but nothing seems to pan out. This leads the team to discuss the "Chaos Theory": when combined, many seemingly innocuous events may have a deadly outcome, and closure is not always within reach.
In a third season episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer titled "The Wish", Cordelia, upset after catching her boyfriend Xander kissing their friend Willow, wishes "that Buffy Summers had never come to Sunnydale" while talking to the vengeance demon Anyanka. She fulfills that wish and the world changes: now they're in an alternative reality in which Buffy has not come to Sunnydale (becoming instead the resident slayer for the Hellmouth in Cleveland) and the vampire population has multiplied and gained in power, to the point that Xander and Willow are the Master's lieutenants. Giles meets with Cordelia before she dies and manages to discern what has happened. He subsequently summons Anyanka and destroys her necklace. As a result, Anya is made mortal again and the world returns to normal.
A Malcolm in the Middle episode shows Hal and Lois arguing about which one of them will take Malcolm and Reese to bowling and which one will stay at home with Dewey. After that, the episode will show two timelines: one where Lois takes them and another one where Hal takes them. An event from the timeline where Lois goes to the bowling is shown as a flashback in a later episode, implying that timeline to be the one in canon.
The Star Trek: Voyager episode "Year of Hell" features a large starship that is capable of erasing objects of various sizes from time, often introducing other consequences into the timeline; erasing a comet could have erased various races that evolved because of particles it spread across relevant planets, while the ship's designer's decision to erase a particular race resulted in his own people never evolving a vital enzyme that protected them from a crucial disease. The original timeline is restored by causing the ship to erase itself, and therefore preventing all the erasures it had caused from ever happening.
In the series 1 episode of Doctor Who called "Father's Day", Rose Tyler goes back in time to the day her father dies and saves him from the accident that kills him creating an alternate timeline. A group of creatures known as Reapers come to repair the damage created. By the end of the episode Pete Tyler, knowing that the only way the timeline can be repaired is with his death sacrifices himself and runs out in front of the car that should have killed him. In the series 3 episode of Doctor Who called "The Shakespeare Code", Martha says that she's worried about that she can change the future of human race by stepping on the butterfly after landing in Elizabethan London (à la Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder")- which The Doctor acknowledges as " I'll tell you what then, don't.... step on any butterflies. What have butterflies ever done to you?" In the season 4 episode called "Turn Left", Donna has a parallel universe created around her where she turns right instead of left, at the request of her mother, thus taking a different job that results in her not meeting The Doctor. As a result The Doctor dies fighting the Racnoss, and millions of people die from events The Doctor prevented in the original timeline. It is not until Rose Tyler, with the aid of UNIT and the TARDIS, sends this alternate Donna back in time to before the choice was made. Donna proceeds to jump out in front of a lorry, causing a traffic jam making it impossible for Donna's car to turn right, so she turns left, and correct time is restored.
In an episode of Frasier entitled "Sliding Frasiers", the story switches off between the possible two storylines/outcomes if Frasier was to wear a sweater vs. a suit. The title is a play on "Sliding Doors" (see above).
An episode of the third season of Heroes was entitled "The Butterfly Effect", in which the character of Peter Petrelli travels from the future to alter the timeline caused by his brother Nathan revealing the existence of humans with special abilities. His mother, Angela, who has the power of precognitive dreams, is aware of his actions, and warns him that his seemingly minor alterations to the timeline can have major consequences, alluding to Ray Bradbury's short story "A Sound of Thunder" to explain the butterfly effect to Peter. Later episodes also have Hiro Nakamura refer to Samuel Sullivan as 'Butterfly Man' after he convinces Hiro to go back in time and change things for the better
In the television show Primeval, the entirety of seasons 2 and 3 are the results of the butterfly effect, caused by Cutter time traveling in the first-season finale. The changes include replacing a character named Claudia Brown with a nearly identical woman named Jennifer Lewis, and causing the team to be based in a headquarters called "The ARC". Being the ones who time traveled, only Cutter and Helen were aware of these changes.
Dennis Miller touched on the issue in an episode of Dennis Miller Live, linking the flapping of a butterfly's wings, dislodging some dust, which makes a monkey sneeze, which startles a herd of gazelle into a stampede, which causes a nearby dam to break, sending increased moisture into the air, causing a powerful storm in the upper atmosphere, which causes his cell phone signal to deteriorate and drop calls (which he immediately blames on the butterflies themselves).
The CBS series Early Edition used the butterfly effect in many of its story lines, as the lead character would get the next day's newspaper before events happened and would try to change them.
In the SciFi Original Series Eureka 4th season premiere, titled "Founder's Day", five people are sent back in time, and when they return, they bring the town's founder with them, causing a change in the timeline.
In the sci-fi anime series and game, Steins;Gate, the butterfly effect is used extensively in the gameplay and plot, and is the device the main character, Okabe Rintarou, uses to save his friends from their fated deaths. It is also one of the core explanations for the series' science, along with the Many-worlds interpretation.
An episode of the NBC sitcom Community entitled "Remedial Chaos Theory" revolves around the concept of various existing timelines, each set up by the character Jeff rolling a die to determine which character will pick up a delivery pizza. The episode's plot follows how each timeline differs and remains the same depending on which character is chosen to retrieve the pizza. This episode of Community has been called one of the greatest sitcom episodes ever aired.[6]
In the season 2 finale episode of the Canadian sitcom Naturally, Sadie entitled "Sliding Closet Doors" the shirt that main protagonist chooses affects the outcome of both her love life and the last day of school before break.
Music
The Portuguese gothic metal band Moonspell 1999 experimental album is named The Butterfly Effect.
French Singer Bénabar wrote a song called "l'effet papillon" ( "the Butterfly effect") referring loosely to the concept on his 2008 album Infréquentable.
The Spanish band La Oreja de van Gogh touches on the effect in their song "Mariposa".
The Australian rock band The Butterfly Effect is named for the concept.
The song "Butterflies and Hurricanes" by the English rock band Muse is also based on the concept of the butterfly effect.
The British rock band The Verve have touched upon the topic in the songs "Butterfly" and "Catching the Butterfly".
Jonathan Coulton refers to the phenomenon when, in the song "Mandelbrot Set," he speculates that Benoit Mandelbrot's birth was preceded by the flapping of a butterfly's wings a million miles away.
Violinist Diana Yukawa's 2009 pop album is called The Butterfly Effect.
The American band Red Hot Chili Peppers referenced the idea in their song "Savior" from their 1999 album Californication.
South Korean hip hop group Epik High produced a song titled "Butterfly Effect" on their 2008 mini album Lovescream.
The UK hip hop artist Lowkey has a song titled "The Butterfly Effect" featuring Adrian on his 2011 album Soundtrack to the Struggle about how a soldier's specific actions in war caused him to be disabled, mentally ill and homeless.
In Ukrainian singer «The Sten» the album «The begin» included the song "Extinguished candles" (Russian: — Погасшим свечам) pointing to the butterfly effect in the relationship of the author and girl named Kate (Russian: — Катя).
In the 2010 hip-hop song "Butterfly Effect" by Kinetics & One Love, rapper Kinetics ponders what he would do if he had a time machine and could change historical events or right the regrets of his past - ultimately deciding against wanting to change anything in the fear of small changes having much larger or unintended consequences in the present. The message of the song is one of accepting things the way they are over regretting or yearning for an alternate life.[7]
Japanese girl group Prizmmy have a song titled "Butterfly Effect", which was used as the fourth opening theme for the anime Pretty Rhythm Rainbow Live.
Poetry
The butterfly effect does not often come up in poetry, although a handful of poems can be found in this category. Most have an underlying theme common with an association to the butterfly effect: that an individual can have an actual impact in his or her world. However, butterflies are a common subject of poets, who admire their careless beauty and detail. Edna St. Vincent Millay uses butterflies as the subject of her poem entitled "Mariposa":
"Butterflies are white and blue/ In this field we wander through./ Suffer me to take your hand./ Death comes in a day or two." (excerpt, the first stanza)
One example of the Butterfly Effect in a poem is "The Butterfly Effect" by David Hernandez. The poem opens as follows:
"If a butterfly flapping its wings in Beijing/ could cause a hurricane off the coast of Florida,/ so could a deck of cards shuffled at a picnic./ (lines 1-3)
This poem, as stated earlier in this section, deals with the idea that an individual, such as the woman reading a book of poems, can have their own impact on the world. Hernandez explores the idea that our own "insignificant event" can "snowball" into something greater.
See also:
Point of divergence
Alternate History
Rube Goldberg machine: A "Rube Goldberg machine" is a contraption, invention, device or apparatus that is deliberately over-engineered or overdone to perform a very simple task in a very complicated fashion, usually including a chain reaction. The expression is named after American cartoonist and inventor Rube Goldberg (1883–1970).
Over the years, the expression has expanded to mean any confusing or complicated system. For example, news headlines include "Is Rep. Bill Thomas the Rube Goldberg of Legislative Reform?" and "Retirement 'insurance' as a Rube Goldberg machine".
References:
Jump up ^ The American Dream and It's a Wonderful Life
Jump up ^ Nitpickers.com : Movie Nitpick - It's a Wonderful Life - 1946 - Post and Review nitpicks on your favorite Movies
Jump up ^ "A Sound of Thunder". Amazon.com.
Jump up ^ "El día de la langosta se vive en el Anguiano". Milenio (in Spanish). 2008-06-28. Retrieved 2012-08-17.
Jump up ^ "Scrubs: My Butterfly Recap". TV.com.
Jump up ^ "And the Best Sitcom Episode of All Time Is...". Splitsider. Retrieved 2012-06-18.
Jump up ^ "Rap Genius: Lyrics and Explanations for the Kinetics & One Love song "Butterfly Effect"".
External links:
The meaning of the butterfly: Why pop culture loves the 'butterfly effect,' and gets it totally wrong, Peter Dizikes, Boston Globe, June 8, 2008
Film: The Silence of the Lambs
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Rube Goldberg Machine
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rube_Goldberg_machine
A Rube Goldberg machine is a contraption, invention, device or apparatus that is deliberately over-engineered or overdone to perform a very simple task in a very complicated fashion, usually including a chain reaction. The expression is named after American cartoonist and inventor Rube Goldberg (1883–1970).
Over the years, the expression has expanded to mean any confusing or complicated system. For example, news headlines include "Is Rep. Bill Thomas the Rube Goldberg of Legislative Reform?"[1] and "Retirement 'insurance' as a Rube Goldberg machine".[2]
Rube Goldberg's cartoons became well known for depicting complicated devices that performed simple tasks in indirect, convoluted ways. The example on the right is Goldberg's "Professor Butts and the Self-Operating Napkin", which was later reprinted in a few book collections, including the postcard book Rube Goldberg's Inventions! and the hardcover Rube Goldberg: Inventions, both compiled by Maynard Frank Wolfe from the Rube Goldberg Archives.[3] The "Self-Operating Napkin" is activated when soup spoon (A) is raised to mouth, pulling string (B) and thereby jerking ladle (C), which throws cracker (D) past parrot (E). Parrot jumps after cracker and perch (F) tilts, upsetting seeds (G) into pail (H). Extra weight in pail pulls cord (I), which opens and lights automatic cigar lighter (J), setting off skyrocket (K) which causes sickle (L) to cut string (M) and allow pendulum with attached napkin to swing back and forth, thereby wiping chin.
In 1931, the Merriam–Webster dictionary adopted the word "Rube Goldberg" as an adjective defined as accomplishing something simple through complicated means.[4]
Similar expressions worldwide:
Australia — cartoonist Bruce Petty depicts such themes as the economy, international relations or other social issues as complicated interlocking machines that manipulate, or are manipulated by, people.
Austria — Franz Gsellmann worked for decades on a machine that he named the Weltmaschine ("world machine"),[5] having many similarities to a Rube Goldberg machine.
Denmark — called Storm P maskiner ("Storm P machines"), after the Danish inventor and cartoonist Robert Storm Petersen (1882 – 1949).
France — a similar machine is called usine à gaz, or gas refinery, suggesting a very complicated factory with pipes running everywhere and a risk of explosion. It is now used mainly among programmers to indicate a complicated program, or in journalism to refer to a bewildering law or regulation.
Germany — such machines are often called "Was-passiert-dann-Maschine" ("What happens next machine") for the German name of similar devices used by Kermit the Frog in the children's TV show Sesame Street.
Great Britain — a Heath Robinson contraption, named after the fantastical comic machinery illustrated by British cartoonist W. Heath Robinson, has a similar meaning but predates the Rube Goldberg machine, originating in the UK in 1912.[6]
India — the humorist and children's author Sukumar Ray, in his nonsense poem "Abol tabol", had a character (Uncle) with a Rube Goldberg-like machine called "Uncle's contraption"(khuror kol). This word is used colloquially in Bengali to mean a complicated and useless object.
Japan — "Pythagorean devices" or "Pythagoras switch". PythagoraSwitch (ピタゴラスイッチ, "Pitagora Suicchi") is the name of a TV show featuring such devices. Another related genre is the Japanese art of chindōgu, which involves inventions that are hypothetically useful but of limited actual utility.
Norway — cartoonist and storyteller Kjell Aukrust created a cartoon character named Reodor Felgen, who constantly invented complicated machinery. Though it was often built out of unlikely parts, it always performed very well. Felgen stars as the inventor of an extremely powerful but overly complicated car, Il Tempo Gigante, in the Ivo Caprino animated puppet film Flåklypa Grand Prix (1975).
Spain — devices akin to Goldberg's machines are known as Inventos del TBO (tebeo), named after those that several cartoonists ( Nit, Tínez, Marino Benejam, Frances Tur and finally Ramón Sabatés) made up and drew for a section in the TBO magazine, allegedly designed by some "Professor Franz" from Copenhagen.
Turkey — such devices are known as Zihni Sinir Proceleri, allegedly invented by a certain Prof. Zihni Sinir ("Crabby Mind"), a curious scientist character created by İrfan Sayar in 1977 for the cartoon magazine Gırgır. The cartoonist later went on to open a studio selling actual working implementations of his designs.
Professional artists:
Peter Fischli & David Weiss, Swiss artists known for their art installation movie Der Lauf der Dinge (The Way Things Go, 1987). It documents a 30 minutes long causal chain assembled of everyday objects, resembling a Rube Goldberg machine.
Tim Hawkinson has made several art pieces that contain complicated apparatuses that are generally used to make abstract art or music. Many of them are centered around the randomness of other devices (such as a slot machine) and are dependent on them to create some menial effect.
Competitions
In early 1987, Purdue University in Indiana started the annual National Rube Goldberg Machine Contest, organized by the Phi Chapter of Theta Tau, a national engineering fraternity. In 2009, the Epsilon Chapter of Theta Tau established a similar annual contest at the University of California, Berkeley.
Since around 1997, the kinetic artist Arthur Ganson has been the emcee of the annual "Friday After Thanksgiving" (FAT) competition sponsored by the MIT Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Teams of contestants construct elaborate Rube Goldberg style chain-reaction machines on tables arranged around a large gymnasium. Each apparatus is linked by a string to its predecessor and successor machine. The initial string is ceremonially pulled, and the ensuing events are videotaped in closeup, and simultaneously projected on large screens for viewing by the live audience. After the entire cascade of events has finished, prizes are then awarded in various categories and age levels. Videos from several previous years' contests are viewable on the MIT Museum website.[7]
The Chain Reaction Contraption Contest is an annual event hosted at the Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh, PA where high school teams each build a Rube Goldberg machine to complete some simple task (which changes from year to year) in 20 steps or more (with some additional constraints on size, timing, safety, etc.).
On Food Network's TV show "Challenge", competitors in 2011 were once required to create a Rube Goldberg machine out of sugar.[citation needed]
An event called Mission Possible in Science Olympiad involves students building a Rube Goldberg-like device to perform a certain series of tasks.
In April 2012, the Bosch company hosted an event called the "Playground of Engineers" in Hungary where the participant teams had to perform a series of tasks wherein they collected coins. Later that day, the main challenge was to build an overly complicated Goldberg Machine, the goal of which was to switch on a car dashboard. The teams were able to buy additional items with their collected coins above the standard issue equipment to make their machine more complicated. The main criteria of the judges were complexity, operating time and the number of components used.[citation needed]
See also:
Turboencabulator
W. Heath Robinson
Storm P
Rolling Ball Sculpture
Deathtrap
Booby trap
Gyro Gearloose
Domino effect
Domino show
Veeblefetzer
Unintelligent design
Machines in the media
Mouse Trap (game)
This Too Shall Pass (OK Go song)
References
Jump up ^ Economist's View: Is Rep. Bill Thomas the Rube Goldberg of Legislative Reform?. Economistsview.typepad.com (2005-06-06). Retrieved on 2011-05-06.
Jump up ^ Social Security's Progressive Paradox – Reason Magazine. Reason.com (2005-05-02). Retrieved on 2011-05-06.
Jump up ^ Wolfe, Maynard Frank (2000). Rube Goldberg: Inventions. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0684867249.
Jump up ^ "Rube Goldberg" (WEBPAGE). Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. 2009. Retrieved 2009-08-05.
Jump up ^ Die Weltmaschine des Franz Gsellmann. Weltmaschine.at (2010-12-18). Retrieved on 2011-05-06.
Jump up ^ History – Historic Figures: William Heath Robinson (1872–1944). BBC. Retrieved on 2011-05-06.
Jump up ^ "Friday After Thanksgiving: Chain Reaction". MIT Museum [website]. Retrieved 2011-05-06.
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External links
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Rube Goldberg machines.
The Official Rube Goldberg Web Site
Rube Works: The Official Rube Goldberg Invention Game
Smithsonian Archives of American Art: Oral History Interview, 1970
Detailed specifications of an award-winning Rube Goldberg machine from the New York City science fair
Friday After Thanksgiving (FAT) chain reaction competition at the MIT Museum
Rube Goldberg at DMOZ
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Build a Better Mousetrap, and the World will Beat a Path to Your Door
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Build_a_better_mousetrap,_and_the_world_will_beat_a_path_to_your_door
Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door is a phrase attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson in the late nineteenth century.[1] [2] The phrase is actually a misquotation of the statement:
If a man has good corn or wood, or boards, or pigs, to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, [2]
According to some sources, the current phrasing of the quotation didn't appear until 7 years after Emerson died. Thus, in 1889, Emerson credited with having said
If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap than his neighbor ...
rather than
If a man has good corn ... or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles or church organs, than anybody else ...
[2] It is unclear who deserves credit for the phrasing in common use today.
The phrase has turned into a metaphor about the power of innovation,[2] and is frequently taken literally, with more than 4,400 patents issued by the United States Patent and Trademark Office for new mousetraps, with thousands more unsuccessful applicants, making them the "most frequently invented device in U.S. history".[1]
References
^ Jump up to: a b Kassinger, Ruth. Build a Better Mousetrap. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. p. 128. ISBN 0-471-39538-2.
^ Jump up to: a b c d Lienhard, John H. Inventing Modern: Growing Up with X-Rays, Skyscrapers, and Tailfins. p. 204.
American Heritage Magazine, "A Better Mousetrap", 1996, Volume 47, Issue 6
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The Snowball Effect
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowball_effect
This article is about the figurative concept. For other uses, see Snowball effect (disambiguation).
Metaphorically, a snowball effect is a process that starts from an initial state of small significance and builds upon itself, becoming larger (graver, more serious), and also perhaps potentially dangerous or disastrous (a vicious circle, a "spiral of decline"), though it might be beneficial instead (a virtuous circle). This is a very common cliché in cartoons and modern theatrics and it is also used in psychology.
The common analogy is with the rolling of a small ball of snow down a snow-covered hillside. As it rolls the ball will pick up more snow, gaining more mass and surface area, and picking up even more snow and momentum as it rolls along.
In aerospace engineering, it is used to describe the multiplication effect in an original weight saving. A reduction in the weight of the fuselage will require less lift, meaning the wings can be smaller. Hence less thrust is required and therefore smaller engines, resulting in a greater weight saving than the original reduction. This iteration can be repeated several times, although the decrease in weight for each iteration decreases.
The startup process of a feedback electronic oscillator, when power to the circuit is switched on, is a technical application of the snowball effect. Electronic noise is amplified by the oscillator circuit and returned to its input filtered to contain primarily the selected (desired) frequency, gradually getting stronger in each cycle, until a steady-state oscillation is established, when the circuit parameters satisfy the Barkhausen stability criterion.
See also:
Butterfly effect
Clapotis
Domino effect
Positive feedback
Self-fulfilling prophecy
Slippery slope
Katamari Damacy, a game based on the snowball effect
Wealth condensation
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