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Nearly 45 years ago, during the 139th meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Edward Lorenz posed a question, "Does the flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?" The answer to that question probably differs from what you've heard.
The concept referred to as the butterfly effect has been embraced by popular culture, where the term is often used to emphasize the outsize significance of minute occurrences, as in the 1990 movie Havana, in which Robert Redford, playing the role of Jack Weil, a gambler with a knack for math, proclaims to his costar, Lena Olin, that "a butterfly can flutter its wings over a flower in China and cause a hurricane in the Caribbean."
Lorenz, the mild-mannered Massachusetts Institute of Technology meteorology professor who developed the concept, never intended for it to be applied in this way....