OED SF database (UNCLASSIFIED)

[Mullins, Bill AMRDEC]

Classification:  UNCLASSIFIED
Caveats: NONE


>
>  But there are two butterflies in this garden,
> both effecting great changes from tiny causes.
>
> One is [Bradbury's] butterfly, whose death in the Jurassic (?)
> era tips a close election in our time, a change invisible to
> all but the time travelers who left Present[0] and returned
> to Present[1].
>
> I don't know who gets credit for the other butterfly, which
> is associated with chaos theory. (Terry Pratchett used it,
> but didn't come up with it.) This one flaps its wing, & the
> tiny air movement eventually causes a hurricane half a world away.

I wish I had seen this paper by Robert Hilborn yesterday:
http://phys.csuchico.edu/ayars/427/handouts/AJP000425.pdf

It describes how the term came about.


OED has for 1st cites of "Butterfly effect":
[1972 E. N. LORENZ in R. C. Hilborn Chaos & Nonlinear Dynamics (2000) i.
38 (title) Predictability: does the flap of a butterfly's wings in
Brazil set off a tornado in Texas.] 1979 Amer. Jrnl. Sociol. 85 504 In
meteorology, this has been called the '*butterfly effect': 'even if the
atmosphere could be described by a deterministic model in which all
parameters were known, the fluttering of a butterfly's wings could alter
the initial conditions and thus..alter the long term prediction.'

It would appear that the [1972] cite should be credited to P. Merilees
as well as Lorenz, and should be preceded by a [1969] cite as described
in Hilborn's paper above.

Classification:  UNCLASSIFIED
Caveats: NONE

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