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Butterflies, Chaos Theory, Jurassic Park, and a Nobel Prize in Physics
How are a 20th century meteorologist, a 1993 Stephen Spielberg movie, and the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics connected?
In 2018 I wrote about chaotic and complex systems in my book Films from the Future: The Technology and Morality of Sci-Fi Movies. The book uses science fiction movies to explore the growing challenges around socially responsible and ethical innovation — and it starts withe the 1993 classic Jurassic Park.
To celebrate the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics being awarded to Syukuro Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann, and Giorgio Parisi, for their work on climate change and complexity theory, here’s the section from that chapter on The Butterfly Effect.
THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT
From chapter 2 (Jurassic Park), Films from the Future: The technology and Morality of Science Fiction Movies
Michael Crichton started playing with the ideas behind Jurassic Park in the 1980s, when “chaos” was becoming trendy. I was an undergraduate at the time, studying physics, and it was nearly impossible to avoid the world of “strange attractors” and “fractals.” These were the years of the “Mandelbrot Set” and computers that were powerful enough to calculate the numbers it contained and display them as stunningly psychedelic images. The recursive complexity in the resulting fractals became the poster child for a growing field of mathematics that grappled with systems where, beyond certain limits, their behavior was impossible to predict. The field came to be known informally as chaos theory.
Chaos theory grew out of the work of the American meteorologist Edward Lorenz. When he started his career, it was assumed that the solution to more accurate weather prediction was better data and better models. But in the 1950s, Lorenz began to challenge this idea. What he found was that, in some cases, minute changes in atmospheric conditions could lead to dramatically different outcomes down the line, so much so that, in sufficiently complex systems, it was impossible to predict the results of seemingly insignificant changes.
In 1963, when he published the paper that established chaos theory, it was a…
