As Bob Dylan famously sang, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” Yet if you do have enough wind velocity information, combined with an array of readings from barometers, ...

A monarch butterfly (Dannaux plexippus) flaps its wings in Piedra Herrada Sanctuary, Mexico. Might this start a chain of events that results in a tornado in Texas? Photograph by Jaime Rojo In 1961, ...

Researchers are using chaos theory to 3D-print stunning pieces of jewelry. As Einstein himself said, "The greatest scientists are always artists as well." Monisha Ravisetti was a science writer at ...

Is the 2004 Ashton Kutcher vehicle The Butterfly Effect a good movie? Definitely not, no—but try telling that to me at age thirteen. And then wrap your head, once more, around the fact that if you had ...

The 2004 film The Butterfly Effect was bad, but its badness wasn’t just a product of Ashton Kutcher’s horrible performance, Amy Smart’s scenery chewing, or director Eric Bress’s bruised pallet. The ...

“Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?” Might sound like the type of question posed by science fiction explorers to reveal the precarity of time travel, but in ...

There is an iconic scene in “Jurassic Park” where Jeff Goldblum explains chaos theory. “It simply deals with unpredictability in complex systems,” he says. “The shorthand is ‘the butterfly effect.’ A ...

In 1961, MIT meteorologist Edward Lorenz was inputting numbers into a weather prediction program. His model was based on a dozen variables, the value of one being .506127. When he ran the model again, ...