Question: out of all the things you have learnt in science what is your favourate

Trystan Leng answered on 13 Nov 2018:

The favourite thing I have learnt about is something called ‘the butterfly effect’, that was discovered in the 1960s. As scientists, we used to think that if we make a very small change in the way we set up an experiment, it will only have a very small effect on the experiment’s outcome. We had to reject that belief after a guy called Edward Lorenz was trying to make a mathematical model of the weather. He showed that by changing the initial temperature in his model by a tiny amount, the same temperature change caused by a butterfly flapping its wings, he got a completely different outcome!

Not all systems are like this, but some (like the weather) are! Systems that behave like this we say have ‘sensitive dependence to initial conditions’.