In the style of cause and effect. I have the impression our professor doesn’t actually give anything but perfect scores on these anyway

A butterfly flaps its wings and somewhere, on the other side of the world, a tornado no longer destroys the barn Farmer Ebert uses to house his cows. The idea that these two events are somehow connected, rather than being isolated occurrences, is the basic concept behind a branch of Chaos Theory more commonly, and quite appropriately, known to those of us without degrees in advanced mathematics as The Butterfly Effect. It is an incredible example of how the smallest thing can almost literally change the direction of the world.

To take the marquee example, imagine that butterfly once again. Imagine it happily fluttering along through a meadow, perhaps in Africa. As it floats past, the slight change in air pressure from its wings knocks a ripe berry from a solitary bush. Now what if this berry had not fallen to the ground and instead remained hidden from the bird flying past a few minutes later? Suppose also that this one berry gives the bird enough energy to fly an extra five minutes, allowing it to travel one tree further along on its summer migration route. Sure, a small enough difference, but perhaps this new tree already contains a full quota of birds – the addition of even one more is enough make it crash to the ground. Suddenly the small effect of a butterfly’s wing has caused something far larger.
But take the theory even further. Once this tree falls, the small spring that bubbles up through the rocks between its roots is no longer protected from the sun. Soon the water heats up and begins to evaporate far more rapidly, creating a small patch of humid air that drifts out over the Atlantic Ocean. Now, probably a hurricane would be forming right about this time anyway, but pretend the addition of more humid air is enough to accelerate the process by at least a couple of minutes. By the time this storm system makes it across the sea and comes ashore in Florida, these few minutes have stretched sufficiently to change the the point of landfall by many miles. Instead of passing quickly over the south end of the state, this hurricane slams directly into the hills further north and loses most of its energy. Now weak and incapable of re-strengthening over the warm gulf of Mexico for a renewed attack on the Texas coast line, it drifts aimlessly westward, slowly dissipating into the atmosphere. The torrential rains and tornadoes that would accompany a hurricane’s remnants as they move inland instead harmlessly expend themselves over the ocean and the cow shed is indeed saved.

Of course, many other elements in the system also contribute to changes of the whole, so no one can truly show that the simple beat of an insect’s wings is enough to alter the fate of earth’s most powerful forces. However, who can prove it isn’t?