Intelligent Design

[InchoateHand]

Sorry, I was playing with this butterfly in China, and you know how things tend to get out of control...

[DVaut1]

[ QUOTE ]
Sorry, I was playing with this butterfly in China, and you know how things tend to get out of control...

[/ QUOTE ]

Chaos theory = God can do whatever he wants

...duh

(Note: I realize Chaos Theory is a physics theory, but is it not also used to describe those "A butterfly flaps its wings in China...---> armaggedon" scenarios? I'm actually rather curious about this, so if anyone has any information on this, I'm interested...can't remember WTF they're called, if anything)

[InchoateHand]

Sorry, my implication was supposed to be that I am the designer. I'll let others argue about my purported intelligence.

[DVaut1]

[ QUOTE ]
Sorry, my implication was supposed to be that I am the designer. I'll let others argue about my purported intelligence.

[/ QUOTE ]

I was just being stupid before...but I'm now terribly curious about this:

[ QUOTE ]
Sorry, I was playing with this butterfly in China, and you know how things tend to get out of control...

[/ QUOTE ]

I can't remember what these type scenarios (butterfly flaps its wings in China leads to a tornado in Texas) are called...Chaos theory? The butterfly effect? Something like that, right?

[InchoateHand]

Hm.

Well, I'm on S. Main and Madison now if you want me to explain it in person.

[DVaut1]

[ QUOTE ]
Hm.

Well, I'm on S. Main and Madison now if you want me to explain it in person.

[/ QUOTE ]

I would but I'm at work near the corner of State and Ellsworth...I used to live on E. Madison, though.

You go to U of M?

Go Blue. [img]/images/graemlins/cool.gif[/img]

(thread hijack complete - I'm sure we can take this to PM)

Back to the other discussion, after some Googling - I was trying to get at this (which is what I thought you were referring to):

"The butterfly effect, first described by Lorenz at the December 1972 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C., vividly illustrates the essential idea of chaos theory. In a 1963 paper for the New York Academy of Sciences, Lorenz had quoted an unnamed meteorologist's assertion that, if chaos theory were true, a single flap of a single seagull's wings would be enough to change the course of all future weather systems on the earth. By the time of the 1972 meeting, he had examined and refined that idea for his talk, "Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wings in Brazil set off a Tornado in Texas?" The example of such a small system as a butterfly being responsible for creating such a large and distant system as a tornado in Texas illustrates the impossibility of making predictions for complex systems; despite the fact that these are determined by underlying conditions, precisely what those conditions are can never be sufficiently articulated to allow long-range predictions."