The Butterfly Effect

“It has been said that something as small as the flutter of a butterfly’s wing can ultimately cause a typhoon halfway around the word. –Chaos Theory“

So began the film.
The Butterfly Effect is a movie about a boy played by Ashton Kutcher, who suffers severe traumas while growing up. He blacks out, often at moments of high stress and people around him aren’t sure if he is lying. While fishing for answers to heal his emotional scars, he finds that when he reads from his journals, that he has been keeping throughout his adolescence, he travels back in time, and is able to essentially ‘correct’ parts of his past, thereby causing the blackouts he experienced as a child. However, as a consequence to his corrective choices, when he propagates back to the present: his alternate futures never remain same. His corrective actions influence the characters and they end up being different from where he had started- a hazardous side effect of time travel. No choice is the 'right' one.

Quite influenced by the film which marks a fitting end to my day, I googled up a little about The Effect. Beyond the mathematical psychobabble, what this lesser mortal could grasp in a nutshell is that it is a component of Chaos Theory and is all about the sensitive dependence on initial condition. It states that small variations in the initial condition of a dynamic system may produce large variations in the long term behavior of the system itself. Eg, a ball placed at the crest of a hill might roll into any of several valleys depending on slight differences in initial position.

This theory marks a very interesting departure from the prevalent notions of fate and fortune. Even if we consider the remotest possibility of knowing the future, the fact that we will change our present or near future decisions based on that knowledge to avoid say a problem will create a ripple in the continuum of time, whose magnitude will affect the future that could have been. Hence the only constant that still remains is change.

Today I was woken up by a phone call from this lady that I am quite fond of and developing a great liking for. She asked me to go through the horoscope for the day. Bleary eyed, I obliged. There it was on page 3 of a supplement, written by a tarot and coffee cup reader (whatever that is)!!! Her predictions for the lady were- “An issue concerning love may become a cause for concern as two people fight for your affection. You’ll have to let go of one for the other.” Ooops, I forgot to mention. She also has a second admirer who it seems grew confident enough about his feelings by the end of the day to inform the lady about the seriousness of his intent. It’s a tad interesting to note that I was the one who introduced them to each other. Now the tricky and difficult part…..the questions. For starters-

1. How different things would be if I hadn’t introduced them?
2. If she was absolutely sure about today’s predictions, how different her reactions would be?
3. Was the other guy influenced by the horoscope….influenced even a teeny weenie bit?
4. If the three of us absolutely believed in the prophesy, would we try to avoid the conflict? If so, how ?

Many more corollaries may follow, but answers to them will never be known with absolute certainty. We may speculate, but then they would be just that. And when I was almost tempted to think….I wish I never got them introduced….. the Chaos Theory kicked in. If it wasn’t him….it would be someone else….the space, time and characters may change but life doesn’t magically transform into a bed of roses. And probably this is what makes life worth living.

Image Courtesy :: Stumm47 from deviantart.com