"The difficulty in predicting what happens in chaotic systems comes from how minute differences in inputs can become dramatic changes to the output, in what's known as sensitivity to initial conditions. This is not an issue in classical Newtonian physics, where the regular movement of objects - planetary orbits, swinging pendulums, rolling balls - are easily predicted, even allowing for small changes to inputs."
"Sensitivity to initial conditions is also known more commonly as the "butterfly effect," which suggests the extreme possibility that a butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazonian jungle might cause a storm to rage across Europe some weeks later. I'm reminded of the idea every time I play a game of pool. What ostensibly appears to be a classical system - balls whizzing around the table - is more akin to a chaotic one."
"Ray Bradbury's 1952 short story "A Sound of Thunder" speculates on how the single action of a time traveler might alter the course of history in disconcerting ways (for instance, accidentally stomping on a golden butterfly 65 million years ago results in a significant change to language in the present, with people now uttering words phonetically). More famously, chaos theory is the central theme of Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park, published in 1990 when the field was entering the mainstream."
Sensitivity to initial conditions causes minute variations in inputs to amplify into dramatic, unpredictable differences in outputs. Classical Newtonian systems, such as planetary orbits or swinging pendulums, remain predictable under small input changes, whereas chaotic systems do not. The phenomenon is popularly called the butterfly effect, suggesting that tiny actions can have far-reaching consequences. Practical examples include a pool break-off shot: seemingly similar strikes produce irreproducible outcomes due to tiny deviations. Literary works use sensitivity to initial conditions as a plot device, exemplified by Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder" and Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park, which foreground chaos theory.
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