Long, long ago, and long before chaos theory was known to the man on the street (if it had yet been proposed) a pop group called The Four Preps had a song in which they introduced one of their number as 'the man with the man with the big nose'. It went on, "...the last time that he died, he started up a hurricane and forty people died." Your flatulence may be even deadlier. :(
I suppose in the same way a random person in the southwestern United States could be connecting with someone in Australia now, all the while ignoring the silly response of her dear friend on the other side of the US, whom she also knows courtesy of the web. Heck, this site only exists because a "butterfly" in Tennessee flapped his wings. We're all connected. People, butterflies, hurricanes, the net... At a glance, if we didn't realize what the internet was, we'd find these connections ridiculous, but we don't because we understand it to some degree. Remember when the net was emerging? lol I do. I remember reading about it in science magazines and thinking how awesome it was that two people could someday turn on their computers and talk. It was an abstract concept back then. Unfathomable. Now we're all "butterflies" and can see/ feel the changes we create. It's not about little wings creating something big. It's about those little wings causing reactions.
Interesting answer. Like you I find the Web fascinating, even though I spent a lifetime in telecommunications and have had access to these facilities, in one form or another, since 1952. So chatting across the globe isn't new to me. And yet the wonder and variety of it still amazes me and leaves me feeling awed. I sometimes sit on my mountain in Oz and play chess with my daughter, just 30 km away, and we do it via a server in California. Fabulous!
But this question particularly, and probably a few that I may ask during the next week, are really just seeding my next blog post which I'll post in another week.
Oh Dozy I just love all that stuff...I see 'em shaking their heads on YouTube and saying things like, "there is no mathematical law that says a physicist has to be comfortable with quantum field theory."
If you have not already, be sure to read about 'quantum entanglement' some day...two electrons get paired up, and then one goes to the moon, where it reacts instantly when its partner back her on Planet Earth gets fooled with! Einstein just hated that, called it "spooky action at a distance," and said it was wrong-headed. However now there is the experimental ability to test that, and it keeps coming out "spooky." * * * And as to HOW, one hypothesis that seems to 'explain' spooky action as well as your butterfly is that like time, space is also an illusion! (i.e., the electrons and the butterfly only SEEM to be far away, but not really)
This post was edited by Benedict Arnold at March 30, 2017 12:14 PM MDT
Maybe this is what Shakespeare foreshadowed in his "more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio" comment. He was looking ahead to quantum physics and chaos theory. What an amazing man!
Element 99 