The Book of Ichigo Ichie: The Art of Making the Most of Every Moment, the Japanese Way

by Héctor García

The Butterfly Effect The term the butterfly effect is associated with the popular saying, “A butterfly beating its wings in Hong Kong can unleash a storm in New York.” In other words, any change, no matter how small, ends up creating completely different circumstances due to a process of amplification. Since what happens to us affects others, which in turn affects still others, the initial disturbance ends up changing everything. This theory and the image of the butterfly were proposed by meteorologist and mathematician Edward Norton Lorenz, who postulated that if we had two identical worlds, where the only difference was that in one of them a butterfly was flapping its wings, this world would end up being totally different from the one without the butterfly. In the world with the butterfly, the concatenation—at first negligible—of causes and effects can end up triggering a faraway tornado.