The Science
You could read this poem through once. Alternatively, loop continuously around its butterfly wings, randomly switching and never settling, and follow a Lorenz Attractor describing the shape of a chaotic system.
Nature is chaotic, seemingly behaving randomly though governed by cause and effect. Take the weather. Temperature, pressure, etc obey physical laws within a chaotic system that is extremely sensitive to initial conditions and famously unpredictable. Indeed weather forecasting spawned chaos theory through the work of American mathematician and meteorologist Edward Lorenz.
Lorenz found that small differences in initial conditions can lead to dramatically different outcomes—coining the ‘butterfly effect’ in the 1972 paper “Predictability: Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?”—and that natural chaos has an underlying order. So weather stays within a bounded space of outcomes, and over longer periods it becomes possible to predict the unfolding climate. Although one tornado forms chaotically, there is order in climate change driving increasing numbers and intensity, as well as sadly killing butterflies directly and indirectly through habitat change.
Let’s loop round the chaos of human systems and ask: can small attempts in science communication lead to radically different outcomes?
Clare Bryden “After the lecture there was time for questions”, text and audio, Consilience, Issue 21: Chaos, Editor’s Pick, June 2025, online.
Mandy Abel-Zurstadt “Issue 21 Editor’s Pick: ‘After the lecture there was time for questions‘ by Clare Bryden”, Consilience, Substack, 23 June 2025.