Monday, April 13, 2009

Butterflies Do Not Cause Tornadoes

Well, I'm bored again. And you know what that means.It's time to belt The Butterfly Effect once again. For years now I've hated this movie for being stupid and pretentious, and giving totally useless people the opportunity to drop terms like chaos and attractors and what not in casual conversation. Chaos for Dummies, if you would have it.
Just to clarify things, I don't think it's wrong to simplify a scientific concept to reach out to a wider audience.In fact it's probably a good thing to do. But more often than not such attempts are doomed. I remember a bunch of people back in school who discovered books one day, A brief history of time the next day, and then suddenly they were all yakking on about warp drives and wormholes. The problem with people is this - try to simplify something for them, and more often than not they will react in the dumbest possible way. I mean, an analogy is not an isomorphism. Just because someone uses an apple to explain a wormhole, does not imply that the universe is just like an apple. The universe can't be eaten. It doesn't grow on trees, with other universes. There is no forbidden universe. Universes don't spoil after a couple of weeks in the open. All this seems laughably obvious, and yet, if I had a dime for every guy who thought he was qualified to answer the fundamental questions of science after briefly flipping through some random coffee table book with pretty pictures,well, I'd have a lot of dimes.
But I digress. I have no issues with Hawking. He makes a sincere effort to teach people things, and its not really his fault.
TBE on the other hand, sucks ass. It is the lamest movie ever made. It is so bad, that the only possible explanation of why it sucks so much, is it was written by high school drop-outs after a bout of watching Discovery Channel.(I imagine them to be these hairy drooling brutes, so I can't really imagine them reading a book about chaos theory).
And this is why: the butterfly effect is merely an analogy for sensitivity to initial conditions. it means that in a chaotic system like weather,a tiny change in the initial configuration ("a butterfly flapping its wings in hong kong") can lead to a major change over time ("a tornado in texas"). But that's where the analogy ends. The butterfly didn't cause the tornado by flapping its wings. All the elements in the initial state interacting with each other, are responsible for the final state being reached, and to try and trace a tornado back to the butterfly that caused it, is about as stupid as trying to find the exact electron which completes a circuit. And this is exactly what this movie tells you - the hero can trace all of his life's tragedies to single events in his past, and even reverse them . Whoa! Somebody call the Nobel Committee.We have life-altering scientific discoveries.
And it also really sucks that Kamal Hassan implied something similiar in his last movie. Lame.
You can all go back to being dumb now. Bah.

2 comments:

Siddhartha Sampath said...

Why this is a great post.
It belts the Butterfly Effect.

Enough said.

Su said...

watch oxford murders, ull forget butterfly effect...