English

On the butterfly effect

General Physics 2016-05-27 v1

Abstract

The term "butterfly effect" means an extreme sensitivity of a dynamical system to small perturbations: "The beating of a butterfly wing in South America can result in the considerable change of positions and force of a tropical cyclon in Atlantic 2 weeks later". Numerical simulations of R.Robert show the absence of the butterfly effect in some simple flows of 2-d ideal incompressible fluid which is a model of the atmosphere. In this work a more complicated flow is considered. Numerical simulation demonstrates the butterfly effect in the strongest form. The effect is robust, and the experiment is 100% reproducible.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1605.08271,
  title  = {On the butterfly effect},
  author = {Alexander Shnirelman},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1605.08271},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

6 pages, 7 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-22T14:10:14.845Z