The Meaning of the Butterfly

Peter Dizikes points out that while pop cul­ture ref­er­ences to the but­ter­fly effect are not just bad physics, they also reveal how the pub­lic thinks about sci­ence: They expose the grow­ing chasm between what the pub­lic expects from sci­en­tific research — that is, a series of ever more pre­cise answers about the world we live in — and the realms of uncer­tainty into which mod­ern sci­ence is tak­ing us.