Issue 21 Editor’s Pick: ‘After the lecture there was time for questions‘ by Clare Bryden

by Mandy Abel-Zurstadt

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‘After the lecture there was time for questions’ is a striking calligram in the silhouette of a butterfly. Both its shape and content refer to the work of Edward Lorenz, the founder of modern chaos theory. For these reasons, it’s already a great thematic representation for this issue of Consilience, but it’s much deeper than scientific allusion and a fitting form. It questions the very concept of chaos theory.

Lorenz’ Butterfly Effect was never meant to be taken literally but instead understood as a metaphor for the idea that small changes, or initial conditions, can enact large ones. These inciting events are the starting points in chaotic systems, but there’s not just one endpoint.

Bryden's poem begs the questions:

If the cause of a chaotic event goes away, does the effect also vanish? Do tornadoes cease to be if butterflies do?

If so, what does this mean for cause-and-effect relationships central to chaos theory?

I doubt that the theory itself will change, but the initial conditions, and their interactions and outcomes might. We can already see, and feel, an example of that. Climate change on average is being shown to increase, not decrease, the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events like tornadoes, even as other research is documenting the decline of butterflies.

In many ways, that concerns me – the inevitable mass extinction of species and the worsening of dangerous weather patterns all over the world – but, in one way, it doesn’t.

I find comfort in the laws of physics during times of great uncertainty and stress; not in any one particularly, but in their collective immutability. Personal health, relational dynamics, financial situations, political agendas, and environmental conditions all change, yet the observable phenomena of gravity, thermodynamics, motion, and chaos, persist.

For as much as humans, and definitely scientists, thrive on order, all would be lost without chaos.

But chaos will never be lost.

Read Issue 21 here