Butterfly Effect

A midday call between my boss in London and someone in Budapest runs over, causing my early morning call from New York with the same manager to start and finish late.  This causes me to miss my intended train from New York to Philadelphia.  The next train is delayed by 5 minutes, which results in my taxi arriving in the car park at the office in Philadelphia at precisely the same moment that a woman named Rosemary, on her way to her great aunt's funeral, eases her new Honda out of its parking spot and directly into the passenger door of my cab.

One cannot help but wonder at the staggering number of minor events around the world (and these are just the ones I know of) which conspired to leave poor Rosemary with a shredded bumper and airbags scrotal and shriveled.  Due to the split-second timing of events like this, given sufficient time, I could enumerate an endless number of factors that affected the timing of my journey and therefore contributed to this minor incident, from the number of vehicles on the Schuylkill Expressway to the friction caused by the specific configuration of the atoms on the rails over which my train passed.  Surely you can think of any number of similar situations in your own life - seemingly minor events which, aggregated, give rise to a significant event.  How did you meet your partner, for example?

But one must also realize that these coincidences did not actually cause the event; they merely acted as inputs to an incredibly complex system, producing a specific reality in which Rosemary's car is damaged.  This event itself probably had unknown knock on effects.

And this, I suppose, is how life really happens.  Every action produces a small change in a complex system, this change gives rise a specific reality immediately around it.  This reality combines with other realities produced by other small changes, giving rise to a broader reality which, in turn, combines with other broad realities which have been influenced by events elsewhere, and on and on and on, an endless dance of molecules and phone calls and automobile accidents.  If Rosemary's car is single pebble thrown into a pond, we live in a rain-rippled ocean.

Chaos theorists call this the "butterfly effect," positing that in a system as complex as weather, the flap of a butterfly's wing in one part of the world can, when combined with other specific small incidents, give rise to  dramatic shifts in the overall weather.  This is commonly misrepresented as a butterfly in Brazil "causing" a tornado in Texas.  That is, of course, an absurd oversimplification; but if one considers how small events are contributing factors to significant ones, one cannot but conclude that absolutely everything is interconnected in a way that we cannot understand, let alone predict.

The children are both in our bed, displaced by visiting grandparents.  I have been awake since two this morning, the jetlag playing its usual tricks with sleep and appetite.  I have moved downstairs to the couch to avoid waking the kids.  It's now four o'clock, and it's hot and sticky and I have opened the windows.  The sky is brightening and the birds are just warming up their morning cacophony.  I've spent some time writing this, you've just spent a few minutes reading it.  Our lives have both been altered in ways that we cannot comprehend.