I'm taking a 24 hour break from our series on digital art to observe election day in the United States.
Here are a few panels from a classic Al Williamson story for EC, written by the prophet Ray Bradbury.
For any youngsters out there who may need a little more of the background:
All right, who stepped off the path?
13 comments:
The 'butterfly effect' is a reductionist belief. The world does not work like this.
Lyman did win yesterday.
If this theory were true, every single breath we take would fundamentally change the world.
As far as the art, it too is like a sci-fi counterfactual. It asks "What if Al Williamson had never studied with John Prentice." Oh how the world would have been different!
Anonymous-- you'll have to do better than "the world does not work like this" if you expect me to give up my best possible explanation for how a free and democratic people could elect a grotesque caricature of a human being. The alternative explanations are far too dark.
Kev Ferrara-- No, Bradbury only says that a breath COULD change the world, not that it would. Plenty of influential people-- from Sophocles to Jimi Hendrix-- are alleged to have suffocated for want of a breath, but there have also been trillions of breaths that have made no difference at all. We just got unlucky with this butterfly.
David, "The 'butterfly effect' is a reductionist belief. The world does not work like this." was me - for some reason I have to re-sign in every time I switch on my laptop, and I keep forgetting to do that!
you'll have to do better than "the world does not work like this" if you expect me to give up my best possible explanation for how a free and democratic people could elect a grotesque caricature of a human being. The alternative explanations are far too dark.
Maybe they were voting for things other than the personality of the incumbent.
This Brit jus' sayin'.
Off the top of my head, "Trans kids", and parents losing custody of theirs for not going along with something so utterly abusive ?
Bad man, or utter lunatics, and no option 3....
Exhibit A:
https://queerdoc.com/nullectomy-nullification/
"If this theory were true, every single breath we take would fundamentally change the world."
And it does, through all those tiny factors that we call chance — which can, for example, nudge the throw of a die, thereby winning or losing a fortune and changing the course of a life, and in turn the lives of others and yet others in a cascading effect. (Or take those microscopic conditions that determine which sperm cell out of many millions penetrates the ovum, and therefore which genes a child will have.)
Mathematical analysis shows that many systems, including the weather, are unstable: a minuscule change will propagate and grow bigger and bigger. So yes, the beat of a butterfly's wing, and every breath you take today, will significantly change the path of a hurricane next month, and so history from that point. That IS how the world works.
The "mistake" in Bradbury's story is not the notion that stepping on a butterfly in the past would change the course of history, but the suggestion that in visiting the past they could possibly AVOID changing history, whatever they did.
But of course, we cannot see the future and have no other timeline we can compare ours to, so we have no way to perceive the infinitely complex connections that bind every tiny event in the present to every consequential event in the future. And that's probably for the best.
"And it does."
Don't be absurd. There obviously is such a thing as an insignificant event. Most events are insignificant. Throw a kleenex in the toilet or the trash; it's a wash in terms of differential consequence.
And who in heck would trust the "mathematical analyses" that you refer to? Mathematical analyses of vastly complex systems are massively lossy things anyway; game-like and hermetic. Most models are dumb, and in ways the model makers generally haven't yet fathomed. The only accurate model of reality is reality itself. (Reliance on game-like models causes a lot of mischief in the world, especially as they allow headstrong "intellectuals" to believe they have all the answers, thus they should be given all the power.)
Trump knows exactly which lies will frighten ignorant people the most.
Ah yes , the "for the want of nail" phenomenon.
Chaotic systems are interesting. On one hand, small variations lead to very different outcomes. On the other hand, when seen from outside, all (most of) the possible outcome states look the same. It makes a huge difference if there's a tornado where you are or not, but at the same time there's always a tornado somewhere.
Also sometimes what you see as chaotic in one model or dimension is pretty deterministic in another. Like random processes vs. the law of large numbers, or the result of elections vs. the evolution of class relations.
On another note, I absolutely lost the ability to read that style of comics. I don't know why, but my mind starts to wander. Perhaps it's the wall of text, perhaps it's the fact that from a glance at the drawings, there's nothing happening.
"There obviously is such a thing as an insignificant event."
No, there is not – not in the sense you propose – and the fact that there is not becomes obvious upon even very slight consideration, even discounting the theory. If you throw a tissue in the trash or in the toilet, that choice will forever change the distribution of stuff in the world in a small but definite way. At some point, that difference will inevitably have some minor consequence: an ant takes a detour around the tissue and is caught by a spider, say. So now bugs move around differently in the two scenarios, they're in other places at other times, which means birds and small rodents soon do as well. At some point, a cat is hit by a car in one of the cases but not the other, and some people's day changes. Traffic patterns become slightly different, which means that different accidents occur. The lives of some people become completely different, which in turn changes the lives of those around them. Soon, there are massive differences in the details between the two alternative worlds.
As for the mathematical models, they have in many cases been proven both mathematically and empirically. You don't need a particularly complex system to encounter chaotic behavior, either.
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