2. Butterfly Effect

Vanishingly small causes can have important effects after a while!
This property of deterministic chaotic systems astonished natural scientists most, because they intuitively believed that very small fluctuations on the atomic scale could never have an important influence on the behavior of a macroscopic system. That a butterfly could influence a hurricane a few days later at a very distant place was counterintuitive.....but it is true! See the difference caused by one drop of water after 80 seconds!

Hints for demonstrations

By selecting Butterfly Effect after stopping the waterwheel, a big red point in the center of bucket 1 (with orange outline) indicates the position of bucket 1 of a second identical waterwheel. However, this second waterwheel contains at time zero 0.1 permil (one big raindrop of 0.37 g) more water in this bucket 1, all other initial variables and all parameters being identical. You will realize that the two waterwheels behave almost the same during 80 seconds. However, after this "predictability horizon", the movements of the two systems become uncorrelated after a short time.

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