Sensitivity to Initial Conditions (Butterfly Effect) Demonstrated on a Lorenz Attractor
Sensitivity to initial conditions, known in pop-culture as the "Butterfly Effect", is one of the key features of chaos. Here we demonstrate this concept with the Lorenz attractor, drawing attention to interesting features, pointing out a fundamental mechanism for creating chaos, and discuss the differences between randomness and chaos.
This work is supported in part by the U.S. National Science Foundation under grant PHY-0754081.