Catastrophic events caused by small perturbations in nature.

Question

Which famous theory can be characterized by the following rhetorical question: Can the flapping of a butterfly's wings in Brazil cause a tornado in Texas.

Answer 1

It's called the Butterfly effect. A small change of a variable in a complex system can possibly make a lot of impact with time.

Comments

Yes, you are correct.  But to get full credit you must provide the name of the theory.

Hint: out of order comes chaos and out of chaos comes order.  The ______ Theory is another good example of how everything, even the Universe itself, travels in waves.

---

The Butterfly effect stems from chaos theory. An excellent example where it would be used in is explaining the behavior of chaos pendulum which is a pendulum with 2 rotating joints or more. Depending on a variety of initial conditions the pendulum might act quite differently even with a small variation of the initial conditions.

---

Yes, I agree.  Another example is the stock/commodities market. This is where the Law of Large Numbers over time tends to smooth out these chaotic random price fluctuations.  In other words: diversity, quantity, and time will favor the best rate of return and minimize risk.