time travel and the butterfly effect

The Scientific Explanation Of The Butterfly Effect In Time Travel

Time travel has always been a fascinating topic for me, and I'm sure many of you feel the same way. The idea of going back in time to witness historical events or to see what our future holds is incredibly alluring. However, as much as we love the concept of time travel, it's essential to understand its implications fully. One such implication is the butterfly effect, which can have profound consequences on the past, present, and future.

The butterfly effect refers to how small changes in one part of a system can lead to significant changes in another part of that system. This phenomenon was first proposed by Edward Lorenz, an American mathematician and meteorologist. He suggested that even the flapping wings of a butterfly could cause a massive hurricane weeks later halfway across the world. In this article, we'll explore how the butterfly effect applies specifically to time travel and its scientific explanation. We'll also discuss how understanding this phenomenon can alter our perception of reality and challenge some fundamental assumptions about our universe.

Understanding the Butterfly Effect

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Get ready to explore how small actions can have big consequences in the world of temporal journeys. The Butterfly Effect is a concept that comes from Chaos theory, which states that even the smallest changes in initial conditions can lead to vastly different outcomes over time. In other words, a tiny change at one point in time can cause a ripple effect that grows and magnifies as time goes on.

This idea of Cause and effect is especially important when it comes to time travel. If you were to go back in time and make even the slightest alteration to events, it could have major repercussions on the future . This is why many scientists believe that time travel may not be possible or safe, as we simply cannot predict all of the potential consequences of our actions.

Now let's delve into the theory of time travel and see how this relates to our understanding of the Butterfly Effect.

So, we've all heard of time travel in some form or another - whether it's from a sci-fi movie or the theories of physicists. But is it really possible? That's one of the key points we'll be discussing in this subtopic. We'll also delve into one of the most famous paradoxes associated with time travel: The Grandfather Paradox. It's going to be an exciting and mind-bending conversation, so buckle up!

It's totally possible to hop back and forth through the ages, but there are some serious consequences to consider. The possibility of time travel raises ethical implications that boggle the mind. Who gets to decide who can go where and when? What if someone goes back in time and changes a pivotal moment in history, thus altering the course of human events forever? These questions must be addressed before we can make any practical applications for time travel.

But let's assume for a moment that these issues have all been resolved. What then? We could potentially visit our ancient ancestors or witness historical events firsthand. We could even peek into the future and learn what lies ahead for humanity. But with every action comes an equal and opposite reaction, as Newton would say. And this brings us to the grandfather paradox...

As you journey through the twists and turns of the Grandfather Paradox, your mind creates a vision of a web-like maze with no clear exit. This paradox is the ultimate challenge for those who seek to unravel the mysteries of time travel. It poses the question: what happens if we go back in time and prevent our own grandparents from meeting each other? If they never meet, then our parents would never be born, which means we wouldn't exist either. But if we didn't exist, then how could we have gone back in time to prevent our grandparents from meeting? This is an example of a causal loop - a situation where an event causes another event that ultimately leads back to the original event.

One possible solution to this paradox is that alternate realities are created every time someone travels through time. In one reality, our grandparents met and had children who eventually gave birth to us. In another reality, we prevented them from meeting and ceased to exist in that timeline. This theory suggests that any change made in the past creates a new branch of reality, allowing for multiple versions of events to coexist simultaneously. With this idea in mind, let's explore how small changes can have significant consequences when traveling through time - known as the butterfly effect.

As we consider these theories surrounding time travel and its potential impacts on history, it's important to understand how even small actions can lead to significant consequences - such as causing or preventing historical events or altering entire timelines altogether. The butterfly effect highlights just how delicate these relationships between cause and effect can be when exploring temporal possibilities.

You can gain a deeper understanding of how small actions can have significant consequences by examining the intricacies of temporal causality. This is where the butterfly effect comes into play in time travel. The concept suggests that even the slightest change in the past can lead to major changes in the future, much like how a flap of a butterfly's wings can cause a hurricane on the other side of the world.

The butterfly effect is closely tied with chaos theory and quantum mechanics, which explains time dilation and temporal displacement. As we traverse through different timelines or alter events in history, we create ripples that could affect our present and future selves. It's important to note that these changes may not always be immediate, but rather may take some time before they manifest themselves. With this knowledge in mind, it's crucial to be cautious when meddling with time as it could lead to unpredictable outcomes down the line.

This brings us to another intriguing theory about multiple universes - one where every possible outcome exists simultaneously. How does this relate to time travel? We'll explore this fascinating topic next.

As we delve deeper into the science of time travel, we can't help but explore the fascinating concept of the multiverse theory. The idea that there are multiple universes existing parallel to our own is mind-boggling yet intriguing. We'll also examine how the butterfly effect fits in with this theory and how even the slightest change in one universe could create a ripple effect across all others.

Think about it, in another universe, every decision you didn't make has created a completely different reality. This idea of multiple universes is not just a concept from science fiction but is actually supported by the theory of parallel realities in quantum mechanics. According to this theory, there are an infinite number of universes that exist alongside our own, each with its own unique set of possibilities and outcomes.

To better understand this concept, let's explore some examples:

• In one universe, you decided to take a job offer in another city and moved away from your hometown.
• In another universe, you chose to stay put and continue working at your current job.
• In yet another universe, you decided to quit your job altogether and pursue your passion for art.

Each decision creates a new reality that branches off into its own separate universe. These parallel realities may seem far-fetched but are actually supported by scientific evidence. So how does the butterfly effect fit into all of this?

(Note: The subsequent section will discuss how the butterfly effect fits into the idea of multiple universes.)

It's mind-boggling to imagine the infinite possibilities and diverging paths that each decision we make can lead to, creating a unique reality in every parallel universe. The theory of multiple universes suggests that every time we make a choice, a new universe branches off from our current one, where the alternative outcome exists. This idea has implications for our understanding of the butterfly effect in time travel.

The butterfly effect describes how small changes or causes can have significant consequences over time. In this context, even the smallest difference in past events could create an entirely different present and future. For example, if you were to go back in time and change something as seemingly insignificant as stepping on a bug, it could set off a chain reaction leading to major changes down the line. The butterfly effect emphasizes how interconnected everything is and highlights the unpredictability of complex systems like time travel.

Our understanding of the universe will never be the same, as this mind-bending theory shows how even the slightest change can have monumental and unforeseeable consequences. The butterfly effect in time travel has numerous implications for our understanding of the universe, ranging from theoretical to philosophical. Here are some of the most important ones:

• The butterfly effect highlights the interconnectedness of all events in time and space. A seemingly insignificant action can cause a chain reaction that leads to major changes across history.
• Time travel is not just a tool for altering the past but also a way to understand its intricacies better. By observing how small changes can affect outcomes, we gain insight into what might have happened if something had occurred differently.
• The butterfly effect challenges our traditional views on free will by suggesting that even our smallest choices could potentially alter history in profound ways.
• This theory also raises ethical questions about whether it's ever right to change history intentionally and whose interests are being served when doing so.
• Finally, studying the butterfly effect encourages us to adopt a more humble perspective on our place in the universe. We may think we control our destinies, but in reality, one small action could set off an unpredictable series of events that alters everything we know.

In conclusion, understanding the butterfly effect in time travel pushes us to rethink many fundamental assumptions about history and human agency. By recognizing how much power even tiny actions can hold over future outcomes, we begin to appreciate just how complex and uncertain our world truly is.

When discussing the butterfly effect, it's impossible not to mention its relationship with chaos theory. Fractal patterns and sensitive dependence are two key elements of chaos theory that help explain how small changes in one aspect of a system can lead to significant differences in the system as a whole. The butterfly effect is an example of this phenomenon, where the flapping of a butterfly's wings in one part of the world can ultimately cause a hurricane on the other side of the planet. This concept highlights just how interconnected everything is and how we must take into account even seemingly insignificant details when considering complex systems. Understanding these principles can help us predict and manage potential outcomes more effectively in various fields such as economics, weather forecasting, and even time travel (as we will explore further).

Examples of the butterfly effect can be observed in our daily lives. It's the idea that small actions can have big consequences, even if they seem insignificant at first. For example, forgetting to set your alarm clock might make you miss an important meeting, which could lead to missed opportunities or lost business deals. Or, choosing to recycle your plastic bottles instead of throwing them away could have a positive impact on the environment and contribute to a cleaner planet. These are just two examples of how small actions can have big consequences, and it shows that we can observe the butterfly effect in our daily lives if we pay attention.

Understanding the butterfly effect has practical applications beyond just theory. It is an essential concept in chaos theory that helps us predict and analyze complex systems like weather patterns, economic markets, and even human behavior. However, with great power comes great responsibility. The ethical implications of the butterfly effect cannot be ignored. Real-world examples like the unintended consequences of introducing non-native species into an ecosystem or the effects of a single decision made by a politician can have far-reaching and devastating consequences on our planet and society as a whole. As we continue to learn more about this phenomenon, it is crucial that we use this knowledge responsibly to create positive change for ourselves and future generations.

When pondering the butterfly effect, one cannot help but question the concept of determinism. While determinism suggests that everything happens for a specific reason and that events are predetermined, the butterfly effect reveals its limitations. The tiny actions of a butterfly's wings can ultimately lead to significant changes in future events, demonstrating how even the slightest alterations can have profound consequences. In this way, the butterfly effect plays a crucial role in unpredictability and challenges our belief in a preordained fate.

As the saying goes, "there's more than meets the eye." This is certainly true when it comes to our understanding of the universe. The idea of parallel universes has been a topic of debate for decades, but recent developments in quantum mechanics have given this theory some weight. Some scientists believe that there may be an infinite number of parallel universes, each with its own unique set of physical laws and properties. While there is not yet concrete evidence to support this theory, it's an exciting prospect that could potentially change our understanding of reality as we know it.

So there you have it, the scientific explanation of the butterfly effect in time travel. We've explored how a small change in one timeline can have enormous consequences on another timeline, and how this phenomenon is known as the butterfly effect. This concept has been studied by scientists for years and has led to breakthroughs in fields such as chaos theory.

But what does this mean for us? Well, according to recent studies, just one tiny decision we make today could potentially alter our entire future. In fact, research suggests that up to 40% of our daily actions are based on habits rather than conscious decisions. So who knows what kind of impact these little habits could have on our lives down the road?

It's truly fascinating to think about how much power we hold over not only our own lives but also potentially infinite timelines within the multiverse. The butterfly effect may seem like a small concept, but its implications are immense and far-reaching. It opens up a whole new world of possibilities and challenges us to think outside the box when it comes to understanding time travel and the universe as a whole.

The Quantum Butterfly Effect

By Craig Tyler August 1, 2021

Craig Tyler Editor

At the intersection of quantum physics, time travel, and chaos theory, nothing is simple or straightforward—except the result.

Last year, as the impact of one tiny virus rippled across the entire world and upended virtually every facet of human civilization, Los Alamos scientists discovered that quantum-level disruptions, rippling across time, do not spiral out of control. According to the scientists’ simulations, one can take a particle in a specific quantum state back in time and deliberately modify its state in the past without significantly changing it in the present. Voilà: the butterfly effect—in which tiny changes progress into enormous ones—is thwarted at the quantum level.

“It’s a little more complicated than that,” groans Los Alamos physicist Bin Yan. “For starters,” he says, “there’s more than one way to construe the butterfly effect.”

Indeed there is. Sixty years ago, MIT Professor Edward Lorenz was running a weather simulation and rounded off one of the parameters from six decimal places to three. To his surprise, two months of simulated weather were completely different as a result. He would later liken the situation to the flap of a butterfly’s wings spawning a distant tornado. That’s the butterfly effect most often mentioned; it’s an expression of chaotic behavior. In complex systems such as the weather, a small change in the conditions at one moment can produce an enormous subsequent change overall.

But an earlier version of the butterfly effect derives from the 1955 short story A Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury. In it (spoiler alert), a man time-travels back to dinosaur times and accidentally steps on a butterfly. When he returns to the present, everything has changed: people’s attitudes are different, words are misspelled, and a different candidate has won the recent presidential election.

Yan’s point is this: the two butterfly effects are related but differ somewhat in character. Lorenz tells a story of chaotic behavior, of small causes producing big effects due to the complexity of the system. Such things can evolve fairly quickly. (Indeed, some scientists argue that accurately predicting the weather more than two or three weeks out will always be impossible, for precisely this reason.) Bradbury tells a story that’s more timeline sensitivity than chaos—small changes being amplified in modest increments over the long haul, like biological evolution—and, technically, involves a backwards-in-time operation.

Ever the overachiever, Yan worked out the quantum analogues of both.

Quantum chaos

“At the outset, it wasn’t clear that quantum chaos would even exist,” says Yan. “The equations of quantum physics give no immediate indication of it.”

In classical (nonquantum) physics, objects can be treated as a collection of point particles in distinct locations with distinct states of motion. Yet despite such a rigid description of reality, there are times when chaotic behavior readily emerges. Even a small number of simple objects can be assembled in such a way that small changes in the initial setup lead to wildly varying outcomes. A common example is a frictionless pendulum made from two equal-length rods joined by a hinge, similar to a human arm (although in the case of the pendulum, its “elbow” may freely hyperextend). Where a single-rod pendulum released from a horizontal position would swing back and forth repeatedly along the same semicircular arc, a double-rod pendulum would flail about in an enormously complicated fashion, folding and unfolding as it swings and sometimes windmilling its lower arm full-circle around its elbow. If it were released from a slightly different height or with its elbow ever-so-slightly bent one way or the other, the sequence of motion would be entirely different.

At the outset, it wasn’t clear that quantum chaos would even exist.

But unlike classical physics, the quantum description of reality does not specify discrete objects at distinct locations with exact states of motion. The basic “object” is not generally a solid entity but rather a diffuse type of particle imbued with certain wave properties. The mathematical description of its state is called a wave function, and according to the equation governing wave functions, a particle in a fixed energy state doesn’t change in time. The more general case of numerous particles in a mixture of states makes the math considerably messier, but a key feature remains: because the equation governing the time evolution is linear, small changes in the initial configuration remain small as time passes. There is no obvious provision for the emergence of chaotic behavior. 

Studying chaotic behavior in the quantum realm, therefore, has often involved a little cheating. A pristine quantum system (intended to be analogous to something like a frictionless double-rod pendulum, perhaps) is not chaotic on its own, in the sense that a change in initial conditions doesn’t generate complex outcomes. But it might become chaotic if one accounts for a non-pristine system. In particular, by acknowledging that a quantum object, such as an atom, can never be fully shielded from its environment—there are always at least a few stray radio waves or magnetic fields or whatnot flitting about, even in the most tightly controlled laboratory—one can introduce some realistic variations into the equation and thereby obtain complex results. About 20 years ago, scientists defined a quantity known as a “Loschmidt echo” to capture the degree to which variations in a system’s environment allow for the emergence of such complexity.

The connection among measures of quantum chaos was suggestive. We were closing in on something.

But is that really the same thing as chaos? Is it the Lorenz-type butterfly effect?

“In those early studies,” Yan explains, “environmental perturbations, and the Loschmidt echoes that quantify their effect, were viewed as a necessary substitute for true chaos. But it was unclear if there was a genuine butterfly effect at work. After all, we weren’t taking some tightly controlled system and perturbing its initial conditions; we were perturbing its exposure to the outside world.” Even a boring, back-and-forth, single-rod pendulum might exhibit complex behavior if it were being batted around by wind and hail. 

Baby butterflies

As the 21 st century progressed, quantum chaos researchers continued to use Loschmidt echoes and other comparable measures to characterize, well, whatever it was that wasn’t exactly chaos but wasn’t exactly not either. The relationship to Lorenz-type butterflies remained uncertain. Then in 2015 another quantity gained a great deal of attention within the research community: the out-of-time-order correlator, or OTOC. It examines any two measurable properties of a quantum system (its energy and its rotation, perhaps), but it does so in a scrambled time order. Specifically, it considers measuring one property in the present, then mathematically allowing the system to evolve backward in time and measuring the other property in the past, and subsequently returning to the present to assess how different the first property is. Now, quantum measurements normally disturb whatever they’re measuring, so if you measure this and then that and then remeasure this again, even without all the bother of time travel, you generally get a different result the second time. But the OTOC captures a key variation on that effect by including forward and backward evolution in time. Essentially, the OTOC is a measure of the Bradbury-type butterfly effect. 

Yan decided to see if he could find a bridge between the two key quantities in the emerging field of quantum chaos, the Loschmidt echo and the OTOC. He and his Los Alamos colleagues Lukasz Cincio and Wojciech Zurek—(Cincio recently won the IBM Quantum Challenge, while Zurek is widely recognized for foundational research bridging the quantum-classical divide with a theory of quantum decoherence)—set out to see if they could link the two analytically (pencil and paper) or numerically (via computer calculation). As it turned out, they could do both: they found that the two were intrinsically related, that the OTOC could be approximated from the Loshmidt echo. Complex quantum systems, it seemed, had elements of both butterfly effects.

“The connection between OTOC and Loschmidt echo—between Bradbury and sort-of Lorenz—was suggestive,” says Yan. “We were closing in on something. And yet, all along, there was a nagging sense that something was unsubstantiated, that we were getting ahead of ourselves.” Yan notes that a classical chaotic system, like a double-rod pendulum, still has an exact position and state of motion at any moment, while a quantum wave function generally has neither. “It was never entirely clear that wave functions were suitable quantities for exploring of quantum chaos.”

Working this time with a colleague from Caltech, Yan set out to see if he could learn anything by trying to justify the use of wave functions in chaos studies. Borrowing a concept called “circuit complexity” from quantum computing, he analyzed the relative complexity of quantum wave functions in order to precisely quantify how much two initially similar wave functions will deviate from one another over time. This is the essence of chaotic behavior, slight variations in initial conditions leading to large, system-wide departures, and by this circuit-complexity measure—unlike the standard measures of wave-function overlap used in quantum mechanics that stay constant during the time evolution—the wave functions did indeed diverge with time. It even turned out that the complexity growth separating initially similar wave functions could be calculated with OTOCs.

At the quantum scale, reality is self-healing.

The circuit-complexity approach clearly worked, and its connection to the OTOC was encouraging, but was it actually correct? To verify this, Yan performed a key consistency check in physics, examining whether his new approach would successfully reproduce known results in a situation that had already been solved. For example, Einstein’s gravity theory, which properly governs extreme gravitational situations, such as a black hole or the big bang, reduces to Newton’s much earlier gravity theory in less extreme situations, such as the orbit of the moon or the trajectory of a baseball. Yan was able to show that the circuit-complexity approach to quantum chaos properly reduces to the standard measure of classical chaos under appropriate conditions. 

So here, at long last, was the Lorenz-type quantum butterfly effect. A quantum wing flap could theoretically produce a quantum tornado. And while a lesser scientist might have just declared victory, Yan felt there was something special about the way the OTOC, a Bradbury-type butterfly, naturally shows up in Lorenz-type quantum chaos. The interrelation implied fertile ground for exploration—and perhaps a hidden reality yet to be revealed.

The anti-butterfly effect

Yan and his Los Alamos colleague Nikolai Sinitsyn set up an experiment to test the quantum butterfly effect, Bradbury-style, on an IBM-Q quantum processor. 

A regular, nonquantum computer performs calculations by taking a bunch of bits of information, ones and zeros, and sending them through a complicated “logic circuit,” the elements of which are called gates. Along the way, the ones and zeros interact with one another. (For example, the AND gate compares two bits and returns a value of 1 only if both bits were already 1; if either was 0 to begin with, the gate returns 0.) A quantum computer does its calculations the same way, except that it uses quantum bits, or qubits, and has some additional gates that only work with qubits. 

Qubits differ from classical bits in two important ways. First, they carry more complicated information than a binary one or zero. Second, when they interact with one another as they are passed along a logic circuit, they become “entangled,” meaning that they cease to be purely individual qubits and instead share their states. Probing one member of an entangled group of qubits—for example, checking its value—will in some way affect the state of all the others.

Yan and Sinitsyn created a complicated logic circuit and prepared a group of qubits to send through it. However, for this experiment, they sent the qubits through the circuit in reverse order—the last gate first, the first gate last—to simulate the qubits’ states evolving backward in time. Once the qubits had passed backward through the circuit, becoming entangled along the way, the scientists measured the state of one qubit. Because measurements in quantum physics affect the object being measured in an unpredictable way, this measurement amounts to deliberately damaging the state of that qubit and therefore the information it carries. In addition, all of the other qubits entangled with it would also be partially modified.

But here’s the trick: now, Yan and Sinitsyn send the qubits, including the directly damaged one, forward in time—i.e., passing through the circuit of logic gates again, but this time in the proper forward direction. To their great surprise, the scientists found that the damaged qubit, once returned to the present, was actually in its original state (the “before time travel” state), modified only by some small background noise. The same was true of all the other qubits. As long as the circuit is complicated enough to produce significant entanglement among the qubits, the potential damage is curtailed; any information damaged in the past is recovered in the present. 

“It’s effectively the opposite of the Bradbury-type butterfly effect!” says Yan. “At the quantum scale, reality is self-healing. Entanglement is preserving the present, protecting it.”

Better living without butterflies

Successfully exploring the nature of the quantum butterfly effect—via either perspective, Lorenz or Bradbury—would have been prize enough. But Yan and his colleagues got an extra bonus with the discovery that natural entanglement serves to restore damaged information. And this quantum anti-butterfly effect—now that it is known to exist—can be put to use.

Entangled qubits might be exploited to provide a reliable rescue against information loss.

The most obvious application is a straightforward assessment of “how quantum” a quantum computation is. To what extent is a quantum computer actually making use of its quantum resources, rather than relying on its classical ones? “In principle, finding the answer is simple,” says Yan. “Create a forward-and-backward logic circuit to check for the preservation of information. Since the anti-butterfly effect is a purely quantum phenomenon, the degree to which information is protected represents the degree to which it is quantum information to begin with.” 

More ambitious, perhaps, would be a direct information-security application. In principle, any information can be encoded in qubits and protected from damage with a forward-and-backward logic-circuit operation. Whether the threat of damage comes from a prosaic vulnerability—such as a power surge, a computer glitch, or ever-present natural radioactivity affecting physical circuitry—or from a deliberate cyber attack, the anti-butterfly nature of entangled qubits might be exploited to provide a reliable rescue.

And of course, there’s the most important application of all: when we finally do learn to send people back in time, maybe we can construct a suitable quantum anti-butterfly gizmo to prevent time-travel tourists from disturbing the timeline we’ve all come to know. LDRD

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How The Butterfly Effect's Time Travel Works

Hello friends and fellow travelers, and welcome back for a new adventure here at the CinemaBlend labs! When we last met, we got to dig into the temporal madness of Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys , and yes, that was young Brad Pitt ’s butt! Also, if that film is to be believed, fate is a horrific mistress we cannot run from, no matter how many random voice mails you leave for future posterity. Quick sidetrack: does anyone else think 12 Monkeys would make a good double feature with Tenet ? Well, there’s no need to worry about that now, as this time out, we’ll be time traveling with Ashton Kutcher, as he tries to use The Butterfly Effect to create the perfect life.

If you really want to read a breakdown of Tenet , or any other time related adventure we’ve tackled during out studies in traveling from here to there in the then and now, you can always travel into our archives and read our studies nice and carefully. Though, it should be noted, that if you subscribe to the method of time travel that The Butterfly Effect displays throughout its twisted tale, you might not want to read too carefully. As an example of why you should be careful, I just opened up our past examination of the Happy Death Day time loops , and had to figure out how to escape all three loops that writeup entailed. Grab some compositional notebooks, a freshly sharpened pencil, and a ton of tissues with Aloe, as we’re about to dive into The Butterfly Effect’s chaotic theory on time travel.

The Time Travel in The Butterfly Effect

Living in suburbia already has enough of a bum rap, but the lives of Evan Treborn ( Ashton Kutcher ) and Kayleigh Miller (Amy Smart) are filled with traumas all the way down. The pair of childhood sweethearts seem to be separated by fate, with Evan swearing to carve the perfect path for the two of them to live on. Which is where the young man’s time traveling abilities come into play.

Who's Time Traveling

Blessed (or cursed, depending on how you see things) with the hereditary ability to travel back in time, Evan is one of two time travelers that we know of in The Butterfly Effect . The only other person we see with those abilities is Jason (Callum Keith Rennie), Evan’s father.

From When To When

While there’s no exact time frame given to The Butterfly Effect’s chain of events, there’s an easy chain of clues to give us the three years that make up the film’s storyline. This time span is based off of the fact that in their teenage years, Evan and his friends go to see Se7en in its theatrical release, which happened in 1995. Using that as a benchmark, the childhood events six years prior would have taken place in 1989, with the bulk of the “present day” story being set seven years later, in 2002. So Evan’s traveling between events that take place in 1989, 1995, and 2002.

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The Purpose Of Their Trip

The one thing that Evan really wants in life is to be able to live in peace, with Kayleigh by his side. After accidentally triggering her suicide in the initial timeline of The Butterfly Effect , Evan gets the bright idea to revisit key points of traumatic events in their childhood, in order to fix their collective fate. But what starts out as a quest to save one life turns into a chain reaction that ruins several in its wake; leaving Evan to make another trip, in hopes that it will be the one to correct the entire mess.

How Time Travel Happens In The Butterfly Effect

Good news, time travelers! The Butterfly Effect doesn’t require any sort of special computers of doom , hijacked alien vessels , or 1.21 Gigawatt lightning strikes that mimic the presence of plutonium! In a story that sees tons of problems crop up in the lives of Evan and his friends, all of the good news we can get is much appreciated. All you really need to time travel is a really good memory, thanks to a habit of keeping journals throughout your traumatic, blackout filled childhood.

Plagued by moments of lost time throughout his life, Evan is told to keep a journal of his memories, so he can more easily fill in the gaps he’s been experiencing. However, those journals, and his inherited abilities, are the ultimate method of time travel in The Butterfly Effect . All Evan has to do is concentrate on his journals extra hard, read back the memories he’s written down, and he’s transported back to the moments he wants to go to in order to potentially change everyone’s fate. This method also works with home movies, something that comes in handy when it comes to Evan’s final time traveling trip in the big finale.

Revisiting a memory can bring him back to that time and be in control of his past self.

Can History Be Changed As A Result Of Time Travel In The Butterfly Effect?

In the history of time travel examinations I’ve conducted here at the CinemaBlend labs, this is probably the most chaotic example of history being changed through the usage of time travel. Not to mention The Butterfly Effect takes its name from a bedrock set of principles in Chaos Theory that dictate the unpredictable nature one decision can have on changing the flow of time. At this point, I’d like to just say a quick thank you to two pioneers of Chaos Theory: Dr. Ian Malcolm and author Ray Bradbury !

As we see throughout Evan’s actions throughout his quest to create the perfect version of his life with Kayleigh, the more he tries to change things, the more out of control things get.

With Evan’s life alone, we see him go from a simple psych student to a frat boy, an amputee, a prisoner, and an unintentional murderer. Travelling back in time to key hinge points in his own timeline, The Butterfly Effect sees our protagonist, and everyone around him, changing with every alteration he decides to put into play. Each time, that decision rewrites the entirety of the timeline from that moment forward, with some pretty severe consequences on the line.

What Are The Consequences Of Time Travel In The Butterfly Effect?

Evan’s trials and tribulations in The Butterfly Effect lead to all sorts of variations in his life, ranging from something as small as a cigarette burn to larger consequences like the deaths and/or traumas of his friends and family. There’s also a physical toll that Evan’s journey takes on him, as while he’s able to remember everything from the various timelines, by the time he gets to the final iteration, he’s packed on about 40 years worth of memories. With each new trip, each deviation from the previous timeline, Evan’s mind becomes more physically damaged and he come back with increasingly severe nosebleeds.

The Butterfly Effect does ultimately arrive at Evan arriving at a crossroads that see him arrive at one final play to save his life, and the lives of all around him. One path leads to a happier/bittersweet result, while the other is the darkest timeline possible. Depending on which cut you watch, the result differs drastically.

The Best Scenario In The Butterfly Effect

In the theatrical cut of The Butterfly Effect, Evan uses his mother’s home movies and goes back to the birthday party where he and Kayleigh met, circa 1989. Evan tells Kayleigh that he hates her, as well as delivers the ultimatum that if she ever comes near him again, “I’ll kill you and your whole damned family.” This scares Kayleigh into going to live with her mother, instead of her father, which wipes the entire history between Kayleigh, Tommy, Lenny, and Evan.

Kayleigh and Tommy live a happy life with their mother, while Evan and Lenny remain friends through life. Eventually, the boys even become college roommates; though the awesome memories of Ethan Suplee’s Thumper will live on forever. However, Evan does find Kayleigh again in 2002, as they pass as strangers in New York. Depending on which of the four endings to The Butterfly Effect you watch, the two friends either keep going their separate ways, or reconnect with a chance of paving the way to a new future together. Either way, someone who looks a lot like Demi Moore is probably on the other end of that phone call, as this flash forward is supposed to take place in 2010; provided our timeline math holds up.

The Worst Scenario In The Butterfly Effect

If you watched the Director’s Cut of The Butterfly Effect, there’s a totally different, much darker fate that awaits Evan. Rather than just separating himself from Kayleigh altogether, Evan thinks that the world would be a lot better off without him. This is supported by a deleted scene where a fortune teller literally tells him that he was “never meant to be,” and that he doesn’t even have a soul.

By time the ending to the Director’s Cut kicks in, the home movie Evan’s watching is the day that his mother gave birth to him. Just when you thought The Butterfly Effect couldn’t get any darker, our protagonist goes back to his own birth, and kills himself by strangulation in the womb. And based on the voice over from Evan’s mother Andrea (Melora Walters) that plays during his death, this might be the fourth time this sort of scenario has happened. With Evan out of the picture, the rest of the Theatrical Cut’s events occur, with Tommy and Kayleigh straightening up and Lenny never finding himself traumatized into a catatonic state.

We'll Come Back For You

Friends and fellow travelers, thank you so much for taking this dark journey into the heart of The Butterfly Effect! If you like what you’ve seen, I’d like to remind you that you can hit the CinemaBlend Time Travel Archives and see past studies in temporal madness. Not to mention, if there’s a time travel story you really want to see broken down through our scientific methods, you can drop us a line and we’ll grab it in time. In fact, our next trip is one we’ve been looking forward to for a while, and it also came up as a suggestion from one of you fantastic fans!

Looks like it’s time to go back to space, the final frontier… again. You asked for it, you’ve been waiting for it, and I literally threw this into my list of initial stories to examine; yes folks, Star Trek ‘09 is next in the lineup! Which means I’ll need to fill out some pre-expedition paperwork with Tempus Fugit Insurance , so the inevitable damage claims get processed and paid in time.

Mike Reyes is the Senior Movie Contributor at CinemaBlend, though that title’s more of a guideline really. Passionate about entertainment since grade school, the movies have always held a special place in his life, which explains his current occupation. Mike graduated from Drew University with a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science, but swore off of running for public office a long time ago. Mike's expertise ranges from James Bond to everything Alita, making for a brilliantly eclectic resume. He fights for the user.

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‘The Butterfly Effect’ 20 Years Later: Exploring the Dark Side of Time Travel

From the infamous grandfather paradox to accidentally creating a timeline where Ned Flanders rules the world, there’s an element of existential horror to every single time travel story. However, it seems that most filmmakers prefer to focus on the exciting adventure aspects of these mind-bending yarns, as very few films choose to explore the terrifying personal ramifications of going back in time to mess with events in your own life.

Obviously, there are several exceptions to this “rule,” and one of the most entertaining just happens to be Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber’s sci-fi thriller The Butterfly Effect , an under-appreciated relic of the 2000s that I think has aged into a much better movie than most folks give it credit for. And now that we have two decades of hindsight regarding time travel cinema, I’d like to take a look back on this weird little flick and dive into why it might also appeal to horror fans.

The film that became The Butterfly Effect began its journey to the big screen as a highly-sought-after spec script that just couldn’t secure enough funding to be brought to life. It was only when Bress and Gruber made a name for themselves by writing Final Destination 2 that they managed to get a hold of Ashton Kutcher to produce and star in their long-gestating project, leading to the flick’s release in early 2004.

In the finished film, we follow Kutcher as Evan Treborn, a troubled young man who experienced a series of mysterious blackouts when he was growing up. He eventually discovers that these blackouts were the result of his ability to travel back in time and occupy his own consciousness in the past, with this discovery leading Evan to use his powers to improve his depressing present. Naturally, this temporal meddling has unforeseen consequences, and Evan soon finds himself trapped in increasingly dire timelines as he faces the titular Butterfly Effect .

SO WHY IS IT WORTH WATCHING?

Over the years, The Butterfly Effect has garnered a reputation as “ Donnie Darko for frat bros,” with a lot of cinephiles agreeing that it’s a deeply silly and excessively morbid movie that bites off more than it can chew when it comes to sci-fi shenanigans. While I can’t exactly argue that this film is an unsung masterpiece, I think folks have been way too hard on what was always meant to be just an entertaining midnight movie.

The overall plot may not stand on its own where logic is concerned (though I guess you could say the same for pretty much all time-travel flicks), but you’ve got to admit that the film does a great job of using its sci-fi elements as an excuse to explore deeply disturbing subject matter as it tells a story about coming to terms with trauma. Sure, some of these situations feel like they were ripped straight out of a soap-opera, but the exaggerated emotional stakes give the characters a chance to shine as they deal with sociopathic children, abusive parents and even dead babies.

And regardless of what you think about his career before and after Butterfly Effect , there’s no denying that Kutcher is completely dedicated to his role here. The actor supposedly conducted months of research into both psychopathology and chaos theory in order to bring the troubled Evan to life, and while not all that effort can be appreciated on-screen, you can certainly tell that he was really psyched to a part of this project.

Lastly, while this doesn’t necessarily reflect the overall quality of the movie, I also really appreciate the flick’s overall vibe . I mean, The Butterfly Effect contains some quintessential early-2000s atmosphere, with the movie being part of the so-called movement that the internet is now referring to as “nu-metal cinema.” The saturated colors and period-appropriate outfits and soundtrack may be unintentional quirks of the era, but they also make the experience feel like a snapshot of a slightly more stylish (and admittedly corny) moment in film history – which I think is quite fitting for a time travel flick.

AND WHAT MAKES IT HORROR ADJACENT?

The Butterfly Effect may not contain any out-right jump-scares or imagery traditionally associated with the horror genre, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t tackle some downright scary ideas . From forcing the protagonist to face a sociopath hell-bent on burning his dog to death to having characters be brutally murdered, there’s no shortage of dark moments here.

Sure, the movie is regrettably blunt when dealing with some of its disturbing subject matter (like the surprisingly insensitive subplot about sexual assault in prison and the entire character of Katie’s pedophile dad), but I appreciate that the filmmakers were willing to explore the logical extremes of their intriguing premise. Hell, the movie even managed to squeeze in a little bit of body horror once Kutcher’s temporal shenanigans result in a timeline where his character loses both arms after trying to prevent a childhood tragedy.

However, one of the most horrific aspects of the film didn’t actually make it to the theatrical release, as the studio originally opted to change Bress and Gruber’s original ending due to its uncomfortable implications. And while I have some reservations about the director’s cut (mostly due to it feeling like It’s a Wonderful Life in reverse), I’d argue that it’s the more interesting version of the film and worth seeking out if you’ve only ever seen the theatrical cut.

The Butterfly Effect is far from a perfect film, suffering from inconsistent time-travel logic and more than a few groan-worthy plot contrivances, but I think it’s still a really great time if you can set logic aside and simply enjoy the ride. While I understand that some viewers may be put off by the more edgy and mean-spirited elements of the flick, I think this blast from the past is just as effective today as it was back in ’04.

There’s no understating the importance of a balanced media diet, and since bloody and disgusting entertainment isn’t exclusive to the horror genre, we’ve come up with  Horror Adjacent  – a recurring column where we recommend non-horror movies that horror fans might enjoy.

Born Brazilian, raised Canadian, Luiz is a writer and Film student that spends most of his time watching movies and subsequently complaining about them.

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First Omens and Immaculate Conceptions: Pregnancy Horror Is Having a Moment

WARNING: The following contains major spoilers for Immaculate and The First Omen .

Horror has always served as a frightening mirror to reality. In his 1981 treatise on the genre Danse Macabre , author Stephen King writes, “we make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones”; it seems scary movies have been helping us do that since the earliest days of storytelling. Modern examples include The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) now considered a reaction to the 1973 oil crisis, Dawn of the Dead (1978) which stands as a horrific condemnation of consumerism, and the explosion of the torture porn subgenre in the wake of 9/11. As the United States enters a new phase of fear, two films have converged in an exploration of horrific pregnancy caused by religious abuse. As reproduction becomes more dangerous, Michael Mohan’s Immaculate and Arkasha Stevenson’s The First Omen both follow nuns impregnated against their will and forced to carry fetuses intended to save the world. 

It’s no coincidence that both films hit at a time of increased threat to reproductive rights. The 2022 Dobbs decision plunged the United States into medical chaos and rescinded the right to bodily autonomy for millions of women. A pregnant person’s access to care now depends on her zip code and laws regulating routine medical procedures are creating gynecological deserts which threaten the health and safety of all women. The opinions of politicians and lawyers weigh more than those of doctors and strangers have the right to challenge a person’s private medical decisions. Regardless of belief or ideology, the reality is that childbirth in the US is less safe than it was two years ago and becoming pregnant feels more like a horror movie with each passing day. Both films explore this horrific atmosphere by taking us to convents where women have willingly given their lives to the Lord. But even in this restrictive environment forced impregnation is an egregious violation and innocent women are treated as nothing more than available wombs. 

Though their stories vary wildly, both Immaculate and The First Omen begin in similar places. Two novitiates fly to Italian convents and prepare to take vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. Cecilia ( Sydney Sweeney ) has just moved into an abbey that doubles as an assisted living facility when she discovers that she is pregnant seemingly by immaculate conception. At first honored as a holy vessel, she quickly becomes a prisoner on the grounds, forced to carry whatever has been placed inside her womb. Serving as a mirror image to Cecilia, Stevenson’s novitiate Margaret ( Nell Tiger Free ) is still preparing to join the cloth when a priest approaches her with an ominous warning. As the pieces of this sinister story fall into place, Margaret realizes that she is pregnant with the devil’s child. She quickly gives birth to twins; an unnamed baby girl and a boy who will come to be known as Damien. Only concerned with her male offspring, the murderous clergy steal the baby and place him in the arms of an American ambassador, hoping to spread their dark influence across the world. 

‘The First Omen’

Both films show the trauma of pregnancy and the violent nature of birth, but neither story concerns itself with the resulting babies. Aside from brief glances, these stories belong to the mothers and it is their experiences that bring the horror. However, the characters they engage with care only for the contents of their wombs. When Cecilia is attacked and nearly killed by a fellow sister, doctors immediately check the status of her pregnancy. They’re relieved to see that the fetus is fine, but the frightened young woman reminds them that she is not. She asks to be seen by an outside doctor and must fake a life-threatening miscarriage to be taken seriously. Margaret faces similar abandonment moments after giving birth. A priest carries her son to a waiting crowd and it’s not until she calls for the child she just delivered that they remember she’s still in the room. Both films also feature a pregnant woman pleading for release through a locked door – a haunting parallel to the experience of being trapped in an unwanted pregnancy. 

It’s important to note that neither woman gives consent for their conditions. We don’t see the moment Cecilia conceives, but we eventually learn that a priest dabbling in genetics has impregnated her with the ancient DNA of Jesus Christ. Margaret has been bred under a specific set of circumstances to create a mother capable of bearing the Antichrist. To achieve this evil goal, her fellow clergy drug and assault her in a hideous ritual that has been repeated many times before. Both Cecilia and Margaret have chosen a life of chastity and neither woman shows anything but horror at the traumatic months of gestation to come. Even though they have willingly dedicated their lives to God, they are forced to give up their bodies as well, sacrificing their mental and physical health for babies they never expected or wanted. 

Immaculate unfolds in three chapters, mirroring the major stages of a typical pregnancy. Sometime during the second trimester, Cecilia notices that she has lost a tooth. Likely a nod to superstitions about the loss of one tooth per child, this harrowing moment also reflects a larger truth. Growing and birthing another human being forever changes a person’s body. In addition to more well-known symptoms like nausea and postpartum depression, expectant mothers also experience gum disease, carpal tunnel syndrome, nosebleeds, and hair loss. Even the size of a woman’s feet have been known to change after giving birth. As her due date nears, Cecilia watches with trepidation as her belly begins to move on its own. While this can be an exciting feeling with a wanted child, Mohan presents these baby kicks with horror. An alien being has taken root inside Cecilia’s belly. Her body has been commandeered by a stranger and she can do nothing but wait for it to emerge. It’s easy to remember the bookends of pregnancy – conception and birth – forgetting that the pregnant person is “with child” every minute of 280 days. Mohan shows us the messy details in the middle and reminds us that reproduction is so much more than two isolated events. 

‘Immaculate’

Also during the second trimester, Cecilia goes through what appears to be a miscarriage. She wakes up screaming and notices heavy blood pouring from between her legs. The frightened mother-to-be begs a priest to take her to a hospital and wails that she doesn’t want to die. This terrifying scene likely hits home to any woman who’s ever suffered pregnancy loss. The brutal experience is often marked by heavy bleeding as the body tries to expel the nonviable fetus. If emergency care does not follow, the mother could die due to excessive blood loss. If the uterus is not cleared of all fetal tissue, sepsis, infection, organ failure, and death may follow. We eventually learn that Cecilia has faked this miscarriage to escape the convent. With chicken’s blood covering her legs, she runs through a field as two priests drag her back to an idling car. While Cecilia’s life is not in immediate danger, this scene presents a horrifying reality playing out across the country. Cecilia simply wants medical care, but the men in control of her fate must believe that she is minutes away from death before they will act. 

Margaret only has a few hours to experience her awful pregnancy, but her labor is intense. Due to the baby’s demonic parentage, her belly rapidly balloons as the unholy twins expand inside her. On the chosen hour, she experiences debilitating spasms and falls to her knees as fluid gushes from between her legs. Cecilia’s water also breaks in the film’s final act, preceding a daring escape while she experiences active labor. After murdering her caretakers, she staggers through the convent halls seeking to kill anyone who stands in her way. But as she goes on her righteous rampage, contractions start to rip through her body. It’s a powerful depiction of this unique type of pain. The massive cramps drown everything else out and Cecilia has no choice but to wait for the current contraction to abate. She may be running from a murderous priest who will surely cut open her stomach and leave her for dead, but even then, the pain is so great that it stops her in her tracks. 

In addition to the trauma of labor, both films accurately depict the brutality of birth. While delivery can be a beautiful process, many women report a shockingly violent experience. Moments after her belly enlarges, Margaret is strapped to a gurney and rolled into a secret operating room. Stoic faces ignore her pleas for help and inject her with drugs to calm her down. Ominous medical tools are presented as instruments of torture and Margaret watches in helpless horror as the surgeons begin their work. They cut into her belly and jostle around inside her abdomen as they search for a membranous sac containing the twins. This terrifying scene reflects the experience of cesarean birth. Numb from the rib cage down, it’s still possible to feel the surgeon’s hands moving your body from side to side, rearranging internal organs and clearing a passage to pull out the baby.

Cecilia experiences a different kind of birth – arguably the film’s most powerful scene. After escaping the convent, she finds herself on the edge of a cliff surrounded by wilderness. The camera hovers inches from her face as she bears down and screams through her final contractions. The baby soon passes out of her body and Cecilia desperately tries to recapture her breath. Though we hear tiny coughs and gurgles from the product of her womb, we never see the so-called savior’s face. Cecilia severs the umbilical cord with her teeth and steps away from the reddish-brown creature wriggling on the ground. After locating a heavy rock, she braces herself and then slams it down on the newborn creature. This shocking moment perfectly captures her rage at this tiny stranger. She did not give permission for a fetus to grow inside her and she resents the way it has turned her life upside down. 

Both films explore the concept of good and bad women by following nuns who draw the line at sacrificing their wombs. Margaret tells a misunderstood orphan that she is not “bad,” explaining, “They just tell you that you are because you’re not doing what they want you to do.“ The Catholic church has been telling these two women what to do since birth. They have always been governed by someone else’s religious ideals and given no choice in the way they live out their own faith. As long as Cecilia and Margaret are playing their assigned roles in a hellish plot, they are considered good, even holy. But the minute they exert any will of their own, they are vilified and targeted for death. Another nun tells Cecilia that “suffering is love,” hoping to convince her to allow the abuse of her body. But suffering is only love when it is a choice. Cecilia never chose to be in this position and what happens to her can only be considered punishment. She and Margaret are punished simply because they have fertile wombs – a powerful reflection of what it feels like to be a woman in the US today. 

When Margaret realizes she has been impregnated, she immediately asks for an abortion, insisting, “I need it out of my now.” While upsetting, this sentiment is familiar to millions of women facing pregnancy in a country where religious ideology has taken precedence over medical care. Both films explore these relatable horrors and follow women who refuse to let their bodies be sacrificed to someone else’s understanding of God. Traumatized, assaulted, and violated in every conceivable way, Margaret and Cecilia attempt to murder their unholy offspring with varying levels of success. Though horrific, their actions challenge a patriarchal system that sees them as nothing more than vessels for reproduction. Neither woman renounces her faith and both stand against the hypocrisy that would harm one child of God to produce another. Though their stories end in different places, both women decide that a church that doesn’t care about the mother does not deserve the child. 

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Quantum Mechanics Proves 'Back to the Future' Is B.S.

But the Avengers' method of time travel totally checks out.

• Like in certain mathematical conditions , the timeline can overcome some disruptions.
• No one can take Back to the Future away from you.

In trippy new research, scientists say they’ve confirmed what they call the Avengers: Endgame model of time travel.

They did this by running a quantum time travel simulation that runs backward and forward, letting them “damage” the past and see what resulted. And, as they say, the devil is in the details—the experiment involves an extremely simplified idea of a “world,” and is only the very first step toward demonstrating any big ideas about causality.

🤯 The universe is a mindf#!@. Let's explore it together.

In a statement, sponsoring Los Alamos National Laboratory likens the movie Back to the Future , where Marty McFly must carefully not disrupt the timeline of his own inception, to the idea of the “butterfly effect.” The idea is simple: Because of the complex way time moves and how causality “ripples out” in unexpected or just unfathomable ways, stepping on a butterfly in the past could change the entire world you try to return to.

Games with procedurally generated worlds use a reverse butterfly effect to create those worlds—a randomized “seed,” which is a string of characters that determines different variables. In Songbringer , for example, the player makes up their own six-letter seed and then plays through the world they created. Since the randomness is an illusion based on high numbers, entering the same seed makes the same world over and over.

But what if the world is, to some extent, self healing? This is where the Endgame version of events comes into play, and where the quantum experiment begins. In this version of events, no matter what “seed” shifted the world—what information was included, left out, or examined—the timelines would all eventually converge. The Avengers can go back, gently meddle, and return to the present without making a ripple.

This may sound like the same narrative handwaving that enables all time travel stories, but the Los Alamos experiment came to the same conclusion.

Here’s the scenario: Alice and Bob, two agents in a system, each have a piece of data—a qubit , or quantum bit. Alice sends her data backward in time, where Bob measures it, altering it in accordance with the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. What happens when the qubit returns?

In their simulations, the researchers found the qubit didn't change—or even affect—the original timeline. They used a series of quantum logic gates and an operator called a Hamiltonian, which in quantum mechanics is a measurement of potential and kinetic energy. Here’s where the idea stops being the stuff of sci-fi watercooler talk and starts to sound real. From the paper :

“The evolution with a complex Hamiltonian generally leads to information scrambling. A time-reversed dynamics unwinds this scrambling and thus leads to the original information recovery. We show that if the scrambled information is, in addition, partially damaged by a local measurement, then such a damage can still be treated by application of the time-reversed protocol.”

In other words, the nature of the time-affected operator they studied is such that it ends up affecting information that travels through it, and for some far-off application like quantum internet, that fact could end up making a big difference.

If researchers know they can “rewind” the information to see how it looked originally without changing the outcome, they may be able to guarantee fidelity of data in a situation previously thought to result in, well, some digital broken eggs.

Caroline Delbert is a writer, avid reader, and contributing editor at Pop Mech. She's also an enthusiast of just about everything. Her favorite topics include nuclear energy, cosmology, math of everyday things, and the philosophy of it all. 

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September 21, 2020

The Quantum Butterfly Noneffect

A familiar concept from chaos theory turns out to work differently in the quantum world

By Nikolai Sinitsyn & Bin Yan

Getty Images

Chaos theory says that a tiny, insignificant event or circumstance can have outsized influence in shaping the way a large, complex system evolves into the future. Many people are familiar with this so-called butterfly effect, an idea often traced to science fiction author Ray Bradbury’s 1952 story “A Sound of Thunder.” In that tale, a man who has time-traveled into the deep past to hunt a Tyrannosaurus rex inadvertently crushes a butterfly under his foot. When he returns to the present, he discovers that this seemingly trivial act altered the course of history—and not in a good way.

In the early 1970s, meteorologist and mathematician Edward Norton Lorenz articulated the butterfly effect in science and launched the field of chaos theory. In plain language, this version of the effect says that initial conditions strongly influence the evolution of highly complex systems. In Lorenz’s metaphor, the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil could ultimately lead a tornado in Texas that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. By implication, if you could go back and alter the past even slightly, a different future would evolve within the system. The future containing your present would vanish.

The butterfly effect is well accepted in our everyday world, where classical physics describes systems above the atomic scale. But in the submicroscopic world where quantum mechanics reigns, different—and very strange—rules apply. Does the butterfly effect still hold true? If not, what happens instead?

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As we describe in a peer-reviewed article in Physical Review Letters, we explored this facet of quantum mechanics when we were developing a novel method to protect quantum information. Exploiting the property of quantum entanglement induced by a complex evolution, we wanted to put qubits (quantum bits) into a state where they would be immune to damage. Then they could be retrieved without alteration, even if someone tried to damage or steal the information. That ability would help secure quantum information and provide a method for hiding information, as well.

To do so, we started with a theoretical analysis using the equations of quantum mechanics—good old whiteboard work. Then we ran an experiment on the IBM-Q quantum processor .

For the whiteboard theory phase, we compared the evolution of a complex quantum system to an identically designed system, but with locally changed initial conditions, by measuring and therefore altering one qubit. We expected a result similar to the classical result. That is, as the system evolved over a sufficiently long time, we thought the local variables that described a particular qubit in the once-twin systems eventually would have very different values—in other words, the butterfly effect.

In our thought experiment, we recruited every quantum theorist’s old friends, Alice and Bob, our experimental avatars. The evolution that they considered involved a circuit that evolves in a complex way. The circuit applies many quantum gates randomly to many qubits. The gates perform an operation on the qubits, and each gate represents a step in time, like the tick of a clock.

This is the forward-in-time travel operation in our theoretical “world on a chip.”

Alice prepares one of her qubits in the present time and runs the circuit backwards, emulating travel back in time. In the past, Bob measures the qubit’s polarization, which is the local information stored in Alice’s qubit. Because measurement in the quantum world alters the state of the particle being measured, this measurement changes the polarization, which is the information in this case. Also, by the laws of quantum dynamics, this invasive measurement destroys all of the qubit’s quantum correlations with the rest of the world on a chip. So, we thought this past world was altered in such a way that a return to the previous present—the future of this altered qubit—would change the entire world on a chip.

Next we ran the circuit forward in time to bring the world back to the present time. According to Ray Bradbury’s vision, Bob’s small damage to the state of the qubit should have been quickly magnified during the complex forward-in-time evolution. That would mean that Alice could not recover her information at the end. The squashed butterfly should have drastically altered her information in the present.

But it didn’t.

For our next test of these results, we ran a similar experiment in a simulation on the IBM-Q quantum processor. To simulate time travel, we sent qubits through the computer gates in reverse order. The gates manipulate the qubits and represent time steps as well. Then we damaged information in this simulated past by measuring just one local qubit, while all the other qubits maintained their quantum correlations and remained entangled.

After the damaging measurement, we ran our forward-in-time protocol and then measured the qubit’s state: it had returned to essentially the same state it had been in before backward evolution, plus some small background noise. Because the initial state of the whole system was strongly entangled in quantum correlations, the long complex evolution essentially recovered the information of the perturbed qubit.

To our surprise, we not only disproved the butterfly effect in a quantum system, but we also found a sort of no-butterfly effect , as if the system wants to protect the present.

Being strongly entangled in the quantum sense meant that the system initially had robust quantum correlations among its parts. Entangled qubits share various properties, such as polarization, and in some ways act as one. Even after changing the local information, purely quantum and global correlations across all the entangled qubits put guard rails on the quantum dynamics, guiding them to restore the damaged local variables. The longer and more complex the evolution is, the more quantum correlations it generates, so the better our predictions become, and the more robust the present.

You could say reality in quantum mechanics is self-healing.

Our theory applies to a sufficiently complex quantum evolution in which quantum correlations among the different qubits have time to appear during the backward-in-time evolution. This approach has practical applications, such as testing the quantumness of quantum computers. Where it is uncertain whether a quantum computer is actually using quantum mechanics to get its results—it might still be relying on classical physics—our no-butterfly effect can be used to test it, because our effect is purely quantum mechanical. Another potential application is protecting information, since a random evolution on a quantum circuit can protect a qubit from attack.

Next, we hope to experimentally verify the effect in an actual, physical quantum system in a laboratory (not a quantum computer), probably using ultracold atoms, which behave quantum mechanically. This will allow us to demonstrate the effect under conditions that could be applied to the practical problem of protecting quantum information.

Beyond these practical uses, the no-butterfly effect raises interesting questions about the differences between the quantum realm and the classical-physics world of our everyday experience. Most physicists believe quantum mechanics apply to scale we can observe, anywhere we look, but it often produces the same predictions as classical physics. Physicists are still grappling with how the classical world emerges from the quantum world in our everyday life. To what extent the no-butterfly effect might apply in the macroscopic world of our lives is an open question, as is the degree to which the classical butterfly effect might apply in the quantum world. We hope to answer those questions in future research. Time will tell.

The research described here was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences, Materials Sciences and Engineering Division, Condensed Matter Theory Program.

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July 29, 2020

Simulating quantum 'time travel' disproves butterfly effect in quantum realm

by Los Alamos National Laboratory

Using a quantum computer to simulate time travel, researchers have demonstrated that, in the quantum realm, there is no "butterfly effect." In the research, information—qubits, or quantum bits—'time travel' into the simulated past. One of them is then strongly damaged, like stepping on a butterfly, metaphorically speaking. Surprisingly, when all qubits return to the 'present,' they appear largely unaltered, as if reality is self-healing.

"On a quantum computer, there is no problem simulating opposite-in-time evolution, or simulating running a process backwards into the past," said Nikolai Sinitsyn, a theoretical physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory and coauthor of the paper with Bin Yan, a post doc in the Center for Nonlinear Studies, also at Los Alamos. "So we can actually see what happens with a complex quantum world if we travel back in time, add small damage, and return. We found that our world survives, which means there's no butterfly effect in quantum mechanics ."

In Ray Bradbury's 1952 science fiction story, "A Sound of Thunder," a character used a time machine to travel to the deep past, where he stepped on a butterfly. Upon returning to the present time, he found a different world. This story is often credited with coining the term "butterfly effect," which refers to the extremely high sensitivity of a complex, dynamic system to its initial conditions. In such a system, early, small factors go on to strongly influence the evolution of the entire system.

Instead, Yan and Sinitsyn found that simulating a return to the past to cause small local damage in a quantum system leads to only small, insignificant local damage in the present.

This effect has potential applications in information-hiding hardware and testing quantum information devices. Information can be hidden by a computer by converting the initial state into a strongly entangled one.

"We found that even if an intruder performs state-damaging measurements on the strongly entangled state, we still can easily recover the useful information because this damage is not magnified by a decoding process," Yan said. "This justifies talks about creating quantum hardware that will be used to hide information."

This new finding could also be used to test whether a quantum processor is, in fact, working by quantum principles. Since the newfound no-butterfly effect is purely quantum, if a processor runs Yan and Sinitsyn's system and shows this effect, then it must be a quantum processor.

To test the butterfly effect in quantum systems, Yan and Sinitsyn used theory and simulations with the IBM-Q quantum processor to show how a circuit could evolve a complex system by applying quantum gates, with forwards and backwards cause and effect.

Presto, a quantum time-machine simulator.

In the team's experiment, Alice, a favorite stand-in agent used for quantum thought experiments, prepares one of her qubits in the present time and runs it backwards through the quantum computer. In the deep past, an intruder—Bob, another favorite stand-in—meaures Alice's qubit. This action disturbs the qubit and destroys all its quantum correlations with the rest of the world. Next, the system is run forward to the present time.

According to Ray Bradbury, Bob's small damage to the state and all those correlations in the past should be quickly magnified during the complex forward-in- time evolution. Hence, Alice should be unable to recover her information at the end.

But that's not what happened. Yan and Sinitsyn found that most of the presently local information was hidden in the deep past in the form of essentially quantum correlations that could not be damaged by minor tampering. They showed that the information returns to Alice's qubit without much damage despite Bob's interference. Counterintuitively, for deeper travels to the past and for bigger "worlds," Alice's final information returns to her even less damaged.

"We found that the notion of chaos in classical physics and in quantum mechanics must be understood differently," Sinitsyn said.

Journal information: Physical Review Letters

Provided by Los Alamos National Laboratory

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June 2004 (Volume 13, Number 6)

Butterflies, tornadoes, and time travel.

The term "butterfly effect" was coined by meteorologist Edward Lorenz, who discovered in the 1960's that tiny, butterfly—scale changes to the starting point of his computer weather models resulted in anything from sunny skies to violent storms—with no way to predict in advance what the outcome might be.

In the movie The Butterfly Effect , actor Ashton Kutchner plays a man who has found a way to travel back in time to his youth. Each time he returns to his childhood, he makes minuscule changes that radically alter his life in the present, inevitably leading to (you guessed it) terrifying results.

Human time travel is a purely fictional concept, but according to Rutgers biophysicist Troy Shinbrot, the idea that small changes can lead to dramatically different outcomes is firmly rooted in the physics of chaos theory, at least for some systems.

"If you're willing to suspend your disbelief long enough to accept the possibility of time travel," says Shinbrot, "then, yes, the movie sounds like it has a reasonably plausible premise, from a physics point of view."

Shinbrot should know—his PhD dissertation at the University of Maryland was based on groundbreaking butterfly effect experiments.

Scriptwriters, it seems, have found that the butterfly effect is a useful tool for establishing dramatic tension.

For scientists like Shinbrot, it can be a useful tool for manipulating chaotic systems. In fact, Shinbrot's dissertation was part of an effort to learn how to make small adjustments to a chaotic system to choose the system's outcome.

"NASA currently directs trajectories of spacecraft using the butterfly effect," says Shinbrot. "The first example that I know of was the International Cometary Explorer. They used the fact that the butterfly effect applies to trajectories in the solar system. With tiny amounts of hydrazine fuel, they created little puffs that steered the spacecraft halfway across the solar system to meet up with comet Giacobini-Zinner That's how they achieved the first ever scientific cometary encounter."

In order to make use of the butterfly effect, NASA scientists must study highly accurate models of satellites in the solar system.

As for the adventures Kutchner faces in The Butterfly Effect , says Shinbrot, "If he had a better model for the system that is his life, perhaps he could have chosen better outcomes. But then the movie wouldn't be very interesting."

— Adapted from Physicscentral.com

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The Meanest Time Travel Movie Ever Made, 20 Years Later

If ‘The Butterfly Effect’ is remembered for anything, it’s unrelenting cruelty. The thing is, it was almost even crueler.

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In the feverish final moments of The Butterfly Effect , Evan Treborn (Ashton Kutcher) escapes his psychiatric cell, turns on an old home video of his pregnant mother, and magically wormholes his way into her womb. It’s a sacrificial last resort. Over the course of this unrelenting psychological thriller, Evan’s time travel abilities have created numerous alternate realities with disastrous ripple effects for his friends and family. Ultimately, he concludes that killing himself is the only way to ensure that his loved ones survive.

Moments later, floating in his amniotic sac, Evan wraps his umbilical cord around his neck and flatlines.

Cue the credits.

Twenty years later, the movie’s writer-directors, Eric Bress and Jon Mackye Gruber, can’t exactly remember who came up with that horrifying and twisted fade to black. “I think it was your girlfriend,” Gruber tells Bress over a recent Zoom call. Either way, the sci-fi concept, a sort of “anti– It’s a Wonderful Life ,” as Bress describes it, was the first image that unlocked one of the bleakest, meanest time travel movies of all time. “I thought the idea was really cool,” Gruber says. “You’re young and you’re being a little punk rock, and at the end of the movie, the audience is gonna sit there and go, ‘Don’t talk to me. I need to absorb what I just saw . ’”

Loosely based on chaos theory—the idea that small actions can have unpredictable and extreme consequences— The Butterfly Effect is primarily a cinematic montage of worst-case scenarios. When a college-aged Evan discovers he can portal back to his traumatic adolescence and change the past, each of his well-intentioned alterations makes things worse for those around him. In various time lines, he’s confronted with pedophilia, fatal cancer, and animal abuse. In others, his girlfriend, Kayleigh, falls victim to drug addiction, while Evan commits manslaughter and goes to prison. At one point, he even becomes a paraplegic and nearly drowns himself. No matter how many times Evan returns to the past, everyone around him ends up miserable. His death by suicide tops off two hours of philosophical misery porn.

The Ringer ’s Streaming Guide

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Except audiences never saw that gut punch of an ending. Despite New Line Cinema’s initial interest in the filmmakers’ extremist sensibilities, the studio got cold feet and requested that Bress and Gruber sub in a more palatable finale. The pair eventually complied, removing the torturous miscarriage and shooting an open-ended conclusion in which Evan never befriends Kayleigh instead. When the movie debuted in theaters, the open-ended coda hit a different emotional note. “I was quite upset at the moment,” Gruber says. “I was so mentally attached to that baby ending.”

Today, the directors still have mixed feelings about it. The theatrical version, which scored big at the box office, offers a respite from the movie’s relentless pain and suffering. But the original ending, which was relegated to the director’s cut DVD, commits to Evan’s ultimate sacrifice and has since provoked ethical debates. Like their time-traveling protagonist, the filmmakers can’t help but imagine how things might have been different had the studio kept their vision two decades earlier. “I think the human mind is geared toward living in regret and what-if,” Bress says. “We’re kind of wired to do it.”

In the mid-1990s, Bress and Gruber were eager to break into Hollywood. Influenced by the decade’s indies like Clerks and Swingers , their scripts defied standard three-act structures and “went all over the place,” Bress says. But they struggled to turn heads: “We were sort of lazy writers who lived in a world of ‘Let’s reinvent the wheel over here in this loft.’”

One late night—while smoking weed—they began brainstorming about the past. At the time, Bress had been mulling over a traumatic experience he’d had with a friend. He wondered how his life might be different if he’d been able to reverse this bit of personal history. “We just played it out. ‘Well, if that had never happened, then we wouldn’t have met,’” he says. “It was just kind of fascinating to think that all these little decisions could have such a huge impact on life.” That’s when the baby ending formed, a climax that could be reverse engineered into a time-travel story. “We were still fighting the Hollywood system,” Bress says. “We just wanted it to be darker and grittier and really interesting.”

Soon, the two of them hashed out a script called Blackouts , a sci-fi drama about a kid who loses his memory at various traumatic points in his life—the moments his future self attempts to change. “We hadn’t structurally cracked the nut yet,” Gruber says. “But we thought there was something there.” The rough draft was so sinister—one scene featured an 8-year-old Evan blowing a guy’s head off with his dad’s shotgun—that it left their manager disgusted. “He was like, ‘You should not be doing this. This is not your thing,’” Gruber remembers. “He made us feel so bad about it, like it was a piece of shit.” The pair put it in a drawer. “We were kind of disappointed because we felt like, ‘Wow, there was something unique in there.’”

Two years later, a mutual friend landed them a sit-down with J.C. Spink and Chris Bender at Zide Entertainment. The two managers liked some of their scripts but asked whether the pair had anything else to share. “We’re like, ‘Well, we have this one thing, but we think it’s probably not very good …’” Gruber remembers. On a flight the next day, Bender couldn’t get over the final pages. “I distinctly remember reading the ending just before getting off the plane, and when I walked off, I called them right away,” Bender says. “I had never seen anything like that before. It’s such a disturbing idea.”

The pair’s dusty draft still needed work—the butterfly effect concept hadn’t been fully developed yet. “We really dove into the rules and logic and tried to make it all work,” Bender says. After Bress and Gruber filled in plot holes and fleshed out characters, they returned with a sanded-off script. But “there was no weight to any of the changes,” Bress says. “There was no real ride to go on.” In a sense, they overcorrected, practically pushing the story into lighthearted rom-com territory. “We wanted to make them like us. We thought maybe it was too dark our way,” Gruber says. “And then we had to realize the reason they brought us in is because they like the darkness.”

Back to the drawing board. Though both Bress and Gruber consider themselves “mischievous, not sadistic,” they also admittedly found disturbing things funny. Over the next month, they sat on their apartment floor and began thinking up the darkest, most dire outcomes and circumstances to push their protagonist over the edge. “It became patterns of just going back and forth and trying to have a progression,” Gruber says. “Each time we had to up the ante.” After tying up some loose ends with producer and writer Craig Perry, they began shopping their script around and taking meetings with various studios. “Everyone kept on saying, ‘It’s too complex, and it’s really dark, and I don’t know if there’s an audience for it,’” Gruber says.

In the face of rejection, Bress and Gruber eventually found a detour. New Line head Richard Brener was looking for writers for Final Destination 2 . He’d liked the Blackouts script and thought their sensibility might match a franchise all about killing people in eccentric ways. What are those baby-killer guys like? Brener thought. They seem to have the right temperament. The pair eventually wrote a formidable sequel and in 2002 convinced New Line to sign off on some speculative funding for their script, so long as they secured a major star. At the same time, Ashton Kutcher was looking to pivot away from comedy—what better way to do that than with a time travel movie in which his character shanks an inmate in the groin?

Shot in Vancouver on a tight schedule, The Butterfly Effect and its crew pushed things to their ethical limits. In one scene, Kayleigh’s brother traps a dog in a burlap bag, and it’s suggested that he sets the dog on fire. Gruber remembers his DP shaking his head in the midst of filming an animatronic dog inside the bag. “He goes, ‘This might be the worst thing I’ve ever shot in my career.’” In another scene , a firework explodes inside a mailbox, killing a mother and her baby. “There’s a close-up on the ground of the pacifier falling with flames on it,” Gruber says with a laugh. “There’s a couple of shots that we instinctively knew would never live in the movie, but we shot them anyway, just for our own sick amusement.”

Inspired by Requiem for a Dream and Trainspotting , the filmmakers quickly learned that their sense of humor didn’t exactly translate to the screen. Not everything would be as funny outside their on-set bubble. “Those final seconds are traumatizing,” Bress says of the firework bomb. “There is no joke—there’s no room for humor, no bandwidth for that at all.”

After watching the guys film an onslaught of cruelty, Bender began having second thoughts about the movie’s climactic sacrifice. He remembered what an older line producer told him at the start of filming. “He’s like, ‘I don’t understand why you guys want to make this movie. It seems so dark and without any hope at the end,’” Bender says. As a younger producer, he was thirsty for surprises and twist endings. But doubt was creeping in. “I remember feeling like, ‘You know, he’s not wrong.’”

Near the final days of production, Bress and Gruber started prepping for the finale. They knew that the actual strangling would take place on an ultrasound monitor, and that most of the shots inside the womb would rely on visual effects and a solemn score. Still, wanting to demonstrate Evan’s transference without being cheesy, they put out a casting call for a real newborn. As with some of the other dark scenes they had shot, things got a little awkward. “I remember the casting of the baby and wanting to make sure the baby looked fetus-like enough,” Bender says, “which is sort of a bizarre thing to be casting for.”

Eventually, they landed on a 2-week-old infant whose mother was so eager to have him on-screen that “it almost seems like she signed her baby up for SAG in the womb,” Gruber laughs. With just 20 minutes to work with, they put the baby on a lazy Susan that had been covered in a plain black cloth so that effects could be added in post. Then they draped a prosthetic umbilical cord near the baby’s throat. “The mother’s like, ‘You could put it really in there if you want,’” Gruber remembers with shock. “It was sort of scary.” But the biggest challenge was keeping their equipment dry. “The baby kept on peeing into the camera lens,” he says. “As much as we wanted it, Eric and I just felt uncomfortable.”

As the movie began wrapping up, New Line intervened. The studio had grown concerned about the ending and wanted some backup material in case audiences didn’t respond well. “I think Ashton almost didn’t want to do [the alternative ending]. He’s like, ‘Don’t even give them the option to sabotage your film,’” Gruber says. “Even [cinematographer] Matthew Leonetti said, ‘I joined this film because of that ending.’” But the first-time directors couldn’t sandbag their debut, so Bress and Gruber looked over the studio’s proposed script changes, thought up a few shot designs, and set up cameras downtown.

In the reimagined conclusion, Evan cuts ties with Kayleigh as a kid. The script then portals him back to college, where he learns everyone is unharmed. Eight years later, in New York, Evan is on the phone with his mother when he vaguely recognizes Kayleigh on the street. In the first ending, they pass each other, turn around briefly, and then go their separate ways. “He may not be in her life anymore, but she’s having a happy life,” Gruber says. “There’s resolution. It’s bittersweet, but he’s still honorable.”

But still, the studio wanted a few more options. On the next take, the directors set up the same preamble, but after the cut to New York, Evan walks by Kayleigh, pauses, and begins following her. The directors called it their “stalker version.” “We were definitely like, that is creepy ,” Bress says. “It might have come off as hopeful, like he’s giving it another shot. But the angles [looked like] he was following her down the road and sneaking up on her.”

The last take was narratively controversial: Instead of passing each other, Evan and Kayleigh stop to introduce themselves and agree to a cup of coffee. “I don’t even know why we shot that,” Bress says. “The one lesson in the film is stay out of her life. Let her live.” Ultimately, Gruber wasn’t too worried. “Eric and I were still convinced that the baby ending was living,” he says.

After a rough cut of the movie had been put together, New Line began screening the different endings for test audiences. Though the studio preferred the romantic meet-cute version, the ambiguous walk-by earned glowing reviews at the first screening. New Line was convinced enough to keep it. “They’re like, ‘It ain’t broke, why fix it?’” Gruber remembers. “We’re like, what about screening our ending? They go, ‘That’s why you’ve got DVD.’”

Gruber felt as if they’d lost their most valuable asset. The ending that had crystallized the movie—the ending that got Bender to hire them—wouldn’t hit the big screen. “It was heartbreaking for me and Eric,” Gruber says. “We wrote this when I was 25. We were like, ‘That’s just so much fucking better.’”

“It wasn’t a cop-out,” Bender says. “It was still true to the story we told. It was a choice he made. It just wasn’t as dark of a choice.”

When The Butterfly Effect premiered in theaters on January 23, 2004, the lighter ending didn’t prevent critics from scrutinizing its unstructured logic and nonstop cruelty. “There’s so much flashing forward and backward, so many spins of fate, so many chapters in the journals, that after a while I felt that I, as well as time, was being jerked around,” Roger Ebert wrote in his review. And yet audiences couldn’t get enough. The movie earned $96 million against its $13 million budget, its ambiguous ending prompting all kinds of theories. Did Kayleigh recognize him? Was she truly better off? Would Evan tempt fate and still try to get together again?

Two months later, the directors experienced the new ending’s power firsthand. Before the movie’s debut at the Brussels International Fantastic Film Festival, a journalist warned Bress and Gruber that the audience would be raucous, screaming, and throwing objects at the screen. “I’m like, ‘This is gonna be a shit show, and I’ve invited my family,’” Gruber says. The two of them started drinking. However, around halfway through the movie, the crowd went dead silent, shushing anyone who raised their voice. “It dawns on me that ‘No, they’re really into the movie, and they don’t want anyone to fuck it up for them by yelling something stupid,’” Bress says. When Evan and Kayleigh eventually passed each other and the credits rolled, the filmmakers became rock stars. “There’s a fucking eruption, like a standing ovation,” Bress says. “People were reaching to find us and touch us. It’s like we’ve made the greatest film of all time.”

That summer, when the director’s cut DVD was released, people finally got the full Butterfly Effect experience. In addition to absorbing Evan’s devastating choice to kill himself, fans were drawn to a deleted scene in which Evan’s mother remarks that she’d had a few miscarriages before giving birth to him. Another dark and depressing wrinkle emerged: Did Evan have previous siblings who had similarly tried to alter the past and killed themselves like him? “How many other possible times has this come full circle before?” Bress says. “We knew that we could drop the hints that this [decision] is coming.” The extra details provided more devastating mythology to Evan’s sacrifice and a better argument for its theatrical inclusion—and it has only continued to feed Reddit board debates full of surprised first-time watchers . In what might otherwise have been a forgotten B-movie thriller with bungled logic , the extreme notes and controversial sequences have kept The Butterfly Effect in the collective memory as one of the most visceral cinematic attempts to tackle chaos theory.

Over time, Gruber has mellowed, seeing the merits of both endings. Bress does too, though after rewatching the movie recently, he’s struck by how much they punished moviegoers. “It does not take its foot off the gas pedal,” he says. “At one point, there’s no more humor. It just goes from bad to worse.” That realization has made him want to return to the past again. Even though the meet-cute contradicts the point of Evan’s entire sacrifice, Bress still thinks about taking a time machine to test the alternate romantic ending. “I’d be really curious to see how that would affect them,” he says of their audience. “I bet a lot of people would watch that and think even higher of the film.”

This provokes another debate between them.

“If we went with a traditional ending, would we have the almost-cult status of the movie?” Gruber asks. “Or would that have ruined it?”

Bress concedes his point. “I’d be like, ‘You fool, why did you go back in time?’”

Jake Kring-Schreifels is a sports and entertainment writer based in New York. His work has also appeared in Esquire.com, GQ.com, and The New York Times .

“Think of Chaos”

The 1999 movie draft, ‘magnolia’ with bill simmons, chris ryan, and sean fennessey.

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What Is the Butterfly Effect and How Do We Misunderstand It?

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If you thought the butterfly effect was just a terrible 2004 movie starring Ashton Kutcher and Amy Smart, think again. The film was just a new take on a much older concept.

The butterfly effect is the idea that small, seemingly trivial events may ultimately result in something with much larger consequences – in other words, they have non-linear impacts on very complex systems. For instance, when a butterfly flaps its wings in India, that tiny change in air pressure could eventually cause a tornado in Iowa.

In the aforementioned film, Kutcher's character finds a way to travel back in time to his childhood. Every time he makes this journey, he does small things differently – but those tiny changes wind up having major (and horrifying) effects on his adult life.

The term "butterfly effect" was coined in the 1960s by Edward Lorenz , a meteorology professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who was studying weather patterns. He devised a model demonstrating that if you compare two starting points indicating current weather that are near each other, they'll soon drift apart – and later, one area could wind up with severe storms, while the other is calm.

At the time, weather statisticians thought you should be able to predict future weather based on looking at historical records to see what had happened when conditions were the same as they are now. Lorenz was skeptical. He was running a computer program to test various weather simulations and he discovered that rounding off one variable from .506127 to .506 dramatically changed the two months of weather predictions in his simulation.

His point was that long-range weather forecasting was virtually impossible, in large part because humans don't have the ability to measure nature's incredible complexity. There are simply too many minute variables that can act as pivot points, cascading into much bigger consequences.

As science journalist Peter Dizikes wrote in the Boston Globe :

So, while people often think the butterfly effect means that tiny changes can have big consequences (and we can track this progression to see what change caused what), Lorenz was trying to say that we can't track these changes. We don't really know exactly what would cause a weather pattern to go one way over another.

Lorenz called this "sensitive dependence on initial conditions" when he introduced his work to the public in a 1963 paper titled, " Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow ." (The term "butterfly effect" he coined in later speeches about the topic.) The paper was rarely cited by other researchers – at least, at first.

The Butterfly Effect and Chaos Theory

Later, other scientists realized the importance of Lorenz's discovery. His insights laid the foundation for a branch of mathematics known as chaos theory , the idea of trying to predict the behavior of systems that are inherently unpredictable .

You can see instances of the butterfly effect every day. Weather's just one example. Climate change is another. Because, as it turns out, warming climates are impacting – appropriately enough – species of alpine butterflies in North America.

"Climate change is expected to have some large impacts, such as too hot for some species or too dry for others, but there are a nearly infinite amount of smaller, indirect effects that will also occur," emails Alessandro Filazzola, a community ecologist and data scientist, and post-doctorate fellow at the University of Alberta.

"In our research , we looked at one of those indirect effects and saw how future climate will slowly cause mismatch in spatial location of a butterfly and its host plant. As a caterpillar, this butterfly only feeds on this type of plant species so any mismatch in range will cause a decline in the butterfly."

He adds that if we were to pause for a moment and think of all the other species in a food web, suddenly there is the potential of many species being affected – not just one small butterfly. That's the butterfly effect in action, on a large scale.

"For instance, the animals that feed on that butterfly and the animals that feed on those animals, or what about other insect species all together, or even other butterflies? Our project was quite controlled because our butterfly species only eats the one type of plant, but the logic is maintained when you consider the entire ecosystem (just trickier to measure)."

When we start to consider how one small change can quickly result in a lot of unintended consequence, there's naturally cause for concern.

For example, limiting the construction of hydroelectric dams might reduce certain types of environmental damage. But in eliminating this potential source of clean energy, we tend to fall back on fossil fuels that accelerate global warming. Biofuel subsidies , meant to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, have increased rainforest destruction, freshwater waste and food price increases that have affected the poorest segments of the human population.

How can we possibly do much of anything in our lives, then, without fear of causing harm? Filazzola returns to the butterflies as an example.

"Better understanding of indirect effects is probably one of the most important steps in trying to mitigate these effects. More simply though, just keeping nature as close to its original state is really the most important thing," he says. "Ecosystems are vastly complex, and the loss of a single species might not have a perceived effect, but it could have cascading effects on the entire system." For instance, re-introducing the wolf to Yellowstone Park increased beaver populations, increased the numbers of willow and aspen plants and provided food for birds, coyotes and bears, among other benefits.

Then, we consider how the butterfly effect can play into our individual lives. With nearly 8 billion humans on the planet, can just one person make changes that echo around Earth?

Filazzola says that he does wonder about the indirect effects of his personal actions.

"The items I buy, the people I interact with, the things I say, I believe can each have their cascading effects that ripple through society," he says. "That is why it is important to try and be a good person, to create a positive influence. One thing I also think about is how these indirect effects are often not as small and removed as I believe many would think."

NASA leverages the butterfly effect to guide spacecraft . Launched in 1978, the International Cometary Explorer became the first spacecraft to intercept a comet, passing through the tail of comet Giacobini-Zinner and collecting valuable data. They harnessed chaotic systems, calculating that just a tiny bit of fuel, used at an exact moment, would zip the craft at high speed to the right place at the right time – and it worked perfectly.

Frequently Answered Questions

What is the butterfly effect.

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Ashton Kutcher, Of All People, Made a Hugely Underrated Time-Travel Thriller

Are you brave enough to revisit the horrors of... 2004 ?

The Butterfly Effect may not go down as one of sci-fi’s most impactful and intense tragedies of circumstance, but it deserves better than the critical drubbing it received in 2004. Today, free of the mockery star Ashton Kutcher tended to attract, it can be appreciated as a heartbreaking gut-punch. Between Kutcher’s surprisingly inspired dramatic performance, the film’s unfettered willingness to push boundaries and present unsettling realities, and its raw emotional core — one of the best examples of “it’s better to have loved and lost” in genre cinema — the singular experience it provides withstands the test of time better than one would assume.

Say what you will of him nowadays, but in 2004, Kutcher was beloved... for being a funny, light-hearted guy. He was doing Punk’d and starring in rom-coms and wacky comedies, at least until Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber’s The Butterfly Effect came along. It’s always satisfying when a performer known for their levity is given something dramatic to chew on: think Jim Carey in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind , or Will Farrell in Stranger Than Fiction . Kutcher may not have felt like an actor capable of pulling that transition off, but despite doubts, he was a natural at tapping into the nuances of Evan Treborn.

Treborn finds himself dealing with personal demons as a result of once-blacked-out periods of his life starting to return to him as harrowing memories. The movie follows his attempts to relive these muddled moments to gain clarity, only to realize he can travel back in time and change events that made the lives of him and his loved ones a living hell. But good intentions can take us to bad places, and Treborn soon learns the cost of meddling with time.

Kutcher’s layered performance proved he understood the innocent, yearning heart of a complicated young man, but also that Evan’s impulses to change the course of his life and those of his friends were ultimately selfish. It’s the central harsh reality in a film full of harsh realities, and it’s what makes the crushing director’s cut ending — where everything is so much better for everyone in a world where Evan never existed — work.

Much of that is owed to Kutcher’s ability to meet each tragic scenario at the height of its stakes. This is an outlier opinion; contemporary critics weren’t sold on Kutcher’s turn, believing he should have stuck to comedy. But in rewatching this movie with older, more mature eyes, it’s striking how well Kutcher’s panicked efforts and dark impulses bolster the overall narrative, even if some moments make the movie feel like the early 2000s come to life. In 2009, The Guardian ’s Peter Bradshaw even argued that he and others had been a little too harsh on The Butterfly Effect, largely because of Kutcher’s reputation for immaturity. Time, ironically, continues to be kind to it.

Kutcher, seen here studying up on the finer effects of time travel.

In order for Kutcher’s performance to truly serve the story, the movie can’t hold back. The Butterfly Effect is an assault of devastation after devastation, and each catastrophe seems to spin out far beyond its reach to torch everything the eye can see. These events are life-changing and life-ruining for the characters, but the stakes are everything, so the film has to go there. Murder, sexual assault, incest, animal cruelty... it seems excessive, and on one hand, it is. The movie is memorable for tackling the worst the world has to offer, but to successfully tell a tragic parable, exaggeration helps drive the lesson home.

But for all the ugliness, the film’s most crucial element is its emotional core. “It is better to have loved and lost” is a concept that’s permeated pop culture since Tennyson wrote the famous phrase, but no film truly defines the mantra the way The Butterfly Effect does. Evan’s actions are driven by self-preservation, but his interpretation of safety always includes his childhood sweetheart Kayleigh (Amy Smart) coming out unscathed.

Part of the tragedy, of course, is that he can’t actually prevent her from meeting the horrors of life. Whenever he thinks he has, something else comes barreling along to torment her. Evan’s storyline as a frat boy happily dating Kayleigh that ends in the slaying of her sadistic brother Tommy (William Scott Leigh) is a perfect example of this perpetual doom. But no matter which ending you watch, the moral always comes back to Tennyson. Evan was always going to have to give Kayleigh up to save her, and that core is where the film’s timelessness lives.

The Butterfly Effect , regardless of its genre leanings and poor reviews, has a universal message. Everyone can relate to Evan’s relentless pursuit of harmony for his friends and family, and his unwillingness to settle for less than peace for the woman he loves. But they can also relate — some more literally than others — to the relentless obstacles he faces, and how those towering blockades can feel like an unstoppable dark destiny. Only a few special films have faced reality with such open eyes, yet so clearly reaffirmed the complexities of love and loss in their wake.

This article was originally published on Jan. 23, 2024

• Science Fiction

What is the Butterfly Effect in Time Travel?

In 1972, during the 139th meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Edward Lorenz posed the question :- Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas ?

It wasn't the first time that this question had been posed but it was when people sat up and began to take notice. In 1800, Gernan philospher Johann Gottlieb Fichte wrote in "The Vocation of Man", "you could not remove a single grain of sand from its place without thereby ... changing something throughout all parts of the immeasurable whole"

It is part of a larger Chaos Theory in that apparently random states of disorder and irregularities are often governed by deterministic laws that are highly sensitive to initial conditions. Wiki

The whole point is to say whether something so innocuous can have wide and reaching consequences of a much larger event. The innocuous event in the first was the flap and the minor wind that is caused by the flapping of the wings could have a knock on effect. The result of the event might not have an effect at all, we just don't know.

If you change something in the past, it could have knock off effect for you in the future . A minor change you caused in the past could result in the Grandfather Paradox meaning you couldn't be born and therefore you wouldn't have been able to travel back into the past to cause you to not be born.

If you took a dinosaur out of time, you'd probably think it might not cause a reaction over 65 million years later. That dinosaurs fossil could be the fossil that an archaeologist discovered and had he not discovered it would have an effect on his life and that change could ripple through to you.

If you do travel back into history, you might have done so to possibly change the course of history so any change you do will have an effect on the future. The change you make will have a domino affect of effecting things you had not planned for.

Butterfly Effect doesn't just apply to time travel , it can refer to the here and now. Do you go right or left, would there be an effect on your future. There's no way of actually knowing. Its about tiny things affecting much larger things.

If you could go back in time, what would you change. Would you have prevented both World Wars by preventing the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Ferdinand was killed by Gavrilo Princip who happened to be in the right place due to a very simple error. The driver of Ferdinands car thought he was to turn due to a misunderstanding. If the driver had gone the right way, Princip would not have been in position to assassinate Ferdinand. As a result of the assassination, Germany invaded Serbia and the war started. History

Imagine a time-traveller going back into the past and prevented the driver from going the wrong way. Ferdinand would not have been killed and Germany would not have invaded Serbia sparking the First and then Second World War.

Its not possible to say that World War I would never have been as there could have been a second attempt on Ferdinand's life and that one would have been successful. Princip's colleagues could have carried out another attempt. A time traveller may only have postponed the inevitable.

In the Doctor Who series, The Doctor tells of events that are fixed and therefore can't be changed, the World War could be an example of one of those events. You'd only probably be able to postpone the war, you couldn't probably ever prevent it as another incident could kick it off.

Butterfly Effect Movie

In 2004, a film starring Ashton Kutcher was released. In the film, the main lead, Evan was able to travel back in time and alter his time line ever so slightly. Every time he went back, the result had a major effect on his life In one turn of events, he would end up in prison for murder. Only when he told his close female friend at the time, Kayleigh to get lost does everything pan out properly.

Winning the Lottery

Lets say you've got the numbers for the mega roll-over and decided to travel back into the past to either buy a ticket with those numbers or buy the ticket which the winner bought presuming he won via lucky dip, assuming that was how that person got the numbers. By buying the ticket the winner won, you could effectively make him not a winner and therefore you win all the money.

Let say you brought a ticket with the winning numbers to share. You expect to win but when the numbers are drawn, they are not the numbers you were expecting. By buying the numbers has caused a ripple causing a new set of numbers to be generated.

If you attempted to buy the winners ticket before he did it, you'd probably need pin point accuracy of the time when the winners numbers were drawn presuming that the winner did it via lucky dip. You might prevent the real winner from getting those numbers but there's no guarantee you'd get them and if you didn't the numbers might therefore be generated for someone else and you end up sharing even if you planned not to.

Other Articles of Interest

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Last Modified : 1st April 2024

Date Published : 15th March 2020

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5 Bizarre Paradoxes Of Time Travel Explained

December 20, 2014 James Miller Astronomy Lists , Time Travel 58

There is nothing in Einstein’s theories of relativity to rule out time travel , although the very notion of traveling to the past violates one of the most fundamental premises of physics, that of causality. With the laws of cause and effect out the window, there naturally arises a number of inconsistencies associated with time travel, and listed here are some of those paradoxes which have given both scientists and time travel movie buffs alike more than a few sleepless nights over the years.

Types of Temporal Paradoxes

The time travel paradoxes that follow fall into two broad categories:

1) Closed Causal Loops , such as the Predestination Paradox and the Bootstrap Paradox, which involve a self-existing time loop in which cause and effect run in a repeating circle, but is also internally consistent with the timeline’s history.

2) Consistency Paradoxes , such as the Grandfather Paradox and other similar variants such as The Hitler paradox, and Polchinski’s Paradox, which generate a number of timeline inconsistencies related to the possibility of altering the past.

1: Predestination Paradox

A Predestination Paradox occurs when the actions of a person traveling back in time become part of past events, and may ultimately cause the event he is trying to prevent to take place. The result is a ‘temporal causality loop’ in which Event 1 in the past influences Event 2 in the future (time travel to the past) which then causes Event 1 to occur.

This circular loop of events ensures that history is not altered by the time traveler, and that any attempts to stop something from happening in the past will simply lead to the cause itself, instead of stopping it. Predestination paradoxes suggest that things are always destined to turn out the same way and that whatever has happened must happen.

Sound complicated? Imagine that your lover dies in a hit-and-run car accident, and you travel back in time to save her from her fate, only to find that on your way to the accident you are the one who accidentally runs her over. Your attempt to change the past has therefore resulted in a predestination paradox. One way of dealing with this type of paradox is to assume that the version of events you have experienced are already built into a self-consistent version of reality, and that by trying to alter the past you will only end up fulfilling your role in creating an event in history, not altering it.

– Cinema Treatment

In The Time Machine (2002) movie, for instance, Dr. Alexander Hartdegen witnesses his fiancee being killed by a mugger, leading him to build a time machine to travel back in time to save her from her fate. His subsequent attempts to save her fail, though, leading him to conclude that “I could come back a thousand times… and see her die a thousand ways.” After then traveling centuries into the future to see if a solution has been found to the temporal problem, Hartdegen is told by the Über-Morlock:

“You built your time machine because of Emma’s death. If she had lived, it would never have existed, so how could you use your machine to go back and save her? You are the inescapable result of your tragedy, just as I am the inescapable result of you .”

• Movies : Examples of predestination paradoxes in the movies include 12 Monkeys (1995), TimeCrimes (2007), The Time Traveler’s Wife (2009), and Predestination (2014).
• Books : An example of a predestination paradox in a book is Phoebe Fortune and the Pre-destination Paradox by M.S. Crook.

2: Bootstrap Paradox

A Bootstrap Paradox is a type of paradox in which an object, person, or piece of information sent back in time results in an infinite loop where the object has no discernible origin, and exists without ever being created. It is also known as an Ontological Paradox, as ontology is a branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of being or existence.

– Information : George Lucas traveling back in time and giving himself the scripts for the Star War movies which he then goes on to direct and gain great fame for would create a bootstrap paradox involving information, as the scripts have no true point of creation or origin.

– Person : A bootstrap paradox involving a person could be, say, a 20-year-old male time traveler who goes back 21 years, meets a woman, has an affair, and returns home three months later without knowing the woman was pregnant. Her child grows up to be the 20-year-old time traveler, who travels back 21 years through time, meets a woman, and so on. American science fiction writer Robert Heinlein wrote a strange short story involving a sexual paradox in his 1959 classic “All You Zombies.”

These ontological paradoxes imply that the future, present, and past are not defined, thus giving scientists an obvious problem on how to then pinpoint the “origin” of anything, a word customarily referring to the past, but now rendered meaningless. Further questions arise as to how the object/data was created, and by whom. Nevertheless, Einstein’s field equations allow for the possibility of closed time loops, with Kip Thorne the first theoretical physicist to recognize traversable wormholes and backward time travel as being theoretically possible under certain conditions.

• Movies : Examples of bootstrap paradoxes in the movies include Somewhere in Time (1980), Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989), the Terminator movies, and Time Lapse (2014). The Netflix series Dark (2017-19) also features a book called ‘A Journey Through Time’ which presents another classic example of a bootstrap paradox.
• Books : Examples of bootstrap paradoxes in books include Michael Moorcock’s ‘Behold The Man’, Tim Powers’ The Anubis Gates, and Heinlein’s “By His Bootstraps”

3: Grandfather Paradox

The Grandfather Paradox concerns ‘self-inconsistent solutions’ to a timeline’s history caused by traveling back in time. For example, if you traveled to the past and killed your grandfather, you would never have been born and would not have been able to travel to the past – a paradox.

Let’s say you did decide to kill your grandfather because he created a dynasty that ruined the world. You figure if you knock him off before he meets your grandmother then the whole family line (including you) will vanish and the world will be a better place. According to theoretical physicists, the situation could play out as follows:

– Timeline protection hypothesis: You pop back in time, walk up to him, and point a revolver at his head. You pull the trigger but the gun fails to fire. Click! Click! Click! The bullets in the chamber have dents in the firing caps. You point the gun elsewhere and pull the trigger. Bang! Point it at your grandfather.. Click! Click! Click! So you try another method to kill him, but that only leads to scars that in later life he attributed to the world’s worst mugger. You can do many things as long as they’re not fatal until you are chased off by a policeman.

– Multiple universes hypothesis: You pop back in time, walk up to him, and point a revolver at his head. You pull the trigger and Boom! The deed is done. You return to the “present,” but you never existed here. Everything about you has been erased, including your family, friends, home, possessions, bank account, and history. You’ve entered a timeline where you never existed. Scientists entertain the possibility that you have now created an alternate timeline or entered a parallel universe.

• Movies : Example of the Grandfather Paradox in movies include Back to the Future (1985), Back to the Future Part II (1989), and Back to the Future Part III (1990).
• Books : Example of the Grandfather Paradox in books include Dr. Quantum in the Grandfather Paradox by Fred Alan Wolf , The Grandfather Paradox by Steven Burgauer, and Future Times Three (1944) by René Barjavel, the very first treatment of a grandfather paradox in a novel.

4: Let’s Kill Hitler Paradox

Similar to the Grandfather Paradox which paradoxically prevents your own birth, the Killing Hitler paradox erases your own reason for going back in time to kill him. Furthermore, while killing Grandpa might have a limited “butterfly effect,” killing Hitler would have far-reaching consequences for everyone in the world, even if only for the fact you studied him in school.

The paradox itself arises from the idea that if you were successful, then there would be no reason to time travel in the first place. If you killed Hitler then none of his actions would trickle down through history and cause you to want to make the attempt.

• Movies/Shows : By far the best treatment for this notion occurred in a Twilight Zone episode called Cradle of Darkness which sums up the difficulties involved in trying to change history, with another being an episode of Dr Who called ‘Let’s Kill Hitler’.
• Books : Examples of the Let’s Kill Hitler Paradox in books include How to Kill Hitler: A Guide For Time Travelers by Andrew Stanek, and the graphic novel I Killed Adolf Hitler by Jason.

5: Polchinski’s Paradox

American theoretical physicist Joseph Polchinski proposed a time paradox scenario in which a billiard ball enters a wormhole, and emerges out the other end in the past just in time to collide with its younger version and stop it from going into the wormhole in the first place.

Polchinski’s paradox is taken seriously by physicists, as there is nothing in Einstein’s General Relativity to rule out the possibility of time travel, closed time-like curves (CTCs), or tunnels through space-time. Furthermore, it has the advantage of being based upon the laws of motion, without having to refer to the indeterministic concept of free will, and so presents a better research method for scientists to think about the paradox. When Joseph Polchinski proposed the paradox, he had Novikov’s Self-Consistency Principle in mind, which basically states that while time travel is possible, time paradoxes are forbidden.

However, a number of solutions have been formulated to avoid the inconsistencies Polchinski suggested, which essentially involves the billiard ball delivering a blow that changes its younger version’s course, but not enough to stop it from entering the wormhole. This solution is related to the ‘timeline-protection hypothesis’ which states that a probability distortion would occur in order to prevent a paradox from happening. This also helps explain why if you tried to time travel and murder your grandfather, something will always happen to make that impossible, thus preserving a consistent version of history.

• Books:  Paradoxes of Time Travel by Ryan Wasserman is a wide-ranging exploration of time and time travel, including Polchinski’s Paradox.

Are Self-Fulfilling Prophecies Paradoxes?

A self-fulfilling prophecy is only a causality loop when the prophecy is truly known to happen and events in the future cause effects in the past, otherwise the phenomenon is not so much a paradox as a case of cause and effect.  Say,  for instance, an authority figure states that something is inevitable, proper, and true, convincing everyone through persuasive style. People, completely convinced through rhetoric, begin to behave as if the prediction were already true, and consequently bring it about through their actions. This might be seen best by an example where someone convincingly states:

“High-speed Magnetic Levitation Trains will dominate as the best form of transportation from the 21st Century onward.”

Jet travel, relying on diminishing fuel supplies, will be reserved for ocean crossing, and local flights will be a thing of the past. People now start planning on building networks of high-speed trains that run on electricity. Infrastructure gears up to supply the needed parts and the prediction becomes true not because it was truly inevitable (though it is a smart idea), but because people behaved as if it were true.

It even works on a smaller scale – the scale of individuals. The basic methodology for all those “self-help” books out in the world is that if you modify your thinking that you are successful (money, career, dating, etc.), then with the strengthening of that belief you start to behave like a successful person. People begin to notice and start to treat you like a successful person; it is a reinforcement/feedback loop and you actually become successful by behaving as if you were.

Are Time Paradoxes Inevitable?

The Butterfly Effect is a reference to Chaos Theory where seemingly trivial changes can have huge cascade reactions over long periods of time. Consequently, the Timeline corruption hypothesis states that time paradoxes are an unavoidable consequence of time travel, and even insignificant changes may be enough to alter history completely.

In one story, a paleontologist, with the help of a time travel device, travels back to the Jurassic Period to get photographs of Stegosaurus, Brachiosaurus, Ceratosaurus, and Allosaurus amongst other dinosaurs. He knows he can’t take samples so he just takes magnificent pictures from the fixed platform that is positioned precisely to not change anything about the environment. His assistant is about to pick a long blade of grass, but he stops him and explains how nothing must change because of their presence. They finish what they are doing and return to the present, but everything is gone. They reappear in a wild world with no humans and no signs that they ever existed. They fall to the floor of their platform, the only man-made thing in the whole world, and lament “Why? We didn’t change anything!” And there on the heel of the scientist’s shoe is a crushed butterfly.

The Butterfly Effect is also a movie, starring Ashton Kutcher as Evan Treborn and Amy Smart as Kayleigh Miller, where a troubled man has had blackouts during his youth, later explained by him traveling back into his own past and taking charge of his younger body briefly. The movie explores the issue of changing the timeline and how unintended consequences can propagate.

Scientists eager to avoid the paradoxes presented by time travel have come up with a number of ingenious ways in which to present a more consistent version of reality, some of which have been touched upon here,  including:

• The Solution: time travel is impossible because of the very paradox it creates.
• Self-healing hypothesis: successfully altering events in the past will set off another set of events which will cause the present to remain the same.
• The Multiverse or “many-worlds” hypothesis: an alternate parallel universe or timeline is created each time an event is altered in the past.
• Erased timeline hypothesis : a person traveling to the past would exist in the new timeline, but have their own timeline erased.

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Screen Rant

How the butterfly effect violates its own time travel rules.

2004 sci-fi/horror movie The Butterfly Effect has its lead character repeatedly travel through time, but at one point breaks its own rules.

2004 sci-fi/horror movie The Butterfly Effect has its lead character repeatedly travel through time, but at one point breaks its own rules. Time travel stories are inherently difficult to keep straight, if only because time travel isn't a thing we can actually do, at least that anyone knows of. Thus, writers are forced to rely either on existing scientific theories, or make up their own rules for time travel out of whole cloth, sometimes combining both methods.

It's become a bit of a running joke over the years among movie fans just how jumbled and hard to follow some time travel tales can become, especially if told over the course of a franchise. When things get too confusing, some viewers just choose to throw up their hands and accept what they're being given at face value, but others find it hard to suspend their disbelief when events happen in a time travel story that just don't make any sense, even by the rules established in that very film.

Related: The Butterfly Effect’s Director's Cut Changes Explained

The Butterfly Effect is no different in that respect. Although a commercial hit at the time of its release, and a popular enough film to warrant a series of direct to video sequels, writers/directors Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber didn't quite succeed in making The Butterfly Effect a logically consistent movie.

In The Butterfly Effect, lead character Evan Treborn ( Ashton Kutcher ) discovers that by reading his childhood journals, he can transport himself back through time into those same memories. Evan discovers he can use this to change the past, and tries to make the present better for himself and those he cares about. The problem is, as per the title, every change he makes comes with unintended consequences. Throughout the film, it's shown that when Evan returns to the present after changing the past, he's now created a new timeline of events that resulted from those changes. Thus, he's the only one aware anything is different.

During one such altered timeline, Evan accidentally murders his girlfriend's unstable brother Tommy in a fit of rage, and goes to prison for the crime. To gain access to his journals and try to once again fix the present, Evan must convince a religious fellow prisoner to help him out. He does this by using a childhood drawing to return to the past, and violently stab his hands onto pointed document holders in the classroom. Scars then are shown to magically appear on Evan's hands in the present. The thing is, that makes absolutely no sense.

By the rules of The Butterfly Effect, Evan's actions should've created another alternate timeline, and when he gets back to the present, the scars should've already been there the whole time, with only Evan being aware he didn't used to have them. Additionally, doing such a grotesque action as a child likely would've drastically altered Evan's life in the near term, and the ripple effects from that could've easily led to a reality in which Evan never got to the point where he killed Tommy, and thus never went to prison. It's an inexplicably dumb moment in an otherwise pretty good film.

More: 10 Things You've Never Noticed From The Butterfly Effect

‘The Butterfly Effect’ (2004): 20 Facts And Trivia About The Time Travel Thriller

“It has been said something as small as the flutter of a butterfly’s wing can ultimately cause a typhoon halfway around the world.”

Evan has blackouts. He seems to miss stretches of time during important events, like an act of vandalism that maims innocent people, or an unfortunate incident in a basement. Parts of his childhood and teen years are missing, but his therapist suggests he writes everything down to help him remember. In college, he reads some of his hold journal allowed, which transports him back in time to the moments that he’d missed. And when he realizes he can change the present by what he does in the past, he quickly learns the far-reaching consequences that can have for everyone around him–including the girl that he loves.

The Butterfly Effect (2004) didn’t exactly get good reviews from critics when it came out, but that didn’t stop fans from loving the dark atmosphere, clever time travel dynamics, and stellar acting from Ashton Kutcher. It quickly became a fan favorite, and for good reason. Even though the sometimes forgotten ’00s film is now almost two decades old, it’s still a favorite among diehard fans. If you’re feeling nostalgic, read on for The Butterfly Effect facts and trivia, including a look at the much darker original ending you probably don’t know about.

Behind the Scenes of The Butterfly Effect

1. The title of the film is a nod to mathematician and meteorologist Edward Norton Lorenz’s contributions to chaos theory. He stated that the flap of a butterfly’s wings could have far reaching consequences that can’t be predicted. Or, to quote Jeff Goldblum’s Ian Malcom in Jurassic Park (1993):

It simply deals with unpredictability in complex systems. The shorthand is ‘the butterfly effect.’ A butterfly can flap its wings in Peking, and in Central Park, you get rain instead of sunshine. Jurassic Park (1993)

2. Ray Bradbury’s short story, “A Sound of Thunder” involves a time travel plot that gets foiled when someone steps on a butterfly in the past. Evan can be heard reading this story during one of the flashbacks.

3. When Evan wakes up in the sorority, you can see a Bradbury University pennant in the background. This is a reference to Ray Bradbury and his aforementioned short story.

4. The script had been floating around Hollywood for years without ever getting picked up. It took Ashton Kutcher signing on as an executive producer for The Butterfly Effect to finally get made.

5. Evan’s name is a play on words. When the T is moved to his first name, Evan Treborn becomes “Event Reborn,” alluding to the time travel and relived memories of the plot. The character had originally been named Chris Treborn which would be moved to “Christ Reborn.”

6. The mailbox prop had to be custom made to look exactly like the house it stood in front of. Because of this, they only had three made. They blew up each one and it wasn’t until the third take that the shot came out right.

7. Did you notice the lights flickering when teen Evan is attempting to relive his memories in a hypnotized state at his psychiatrist’s office? This was an accident on-set, but they decided to keep it in since it fit the scene.

8. Eric Stolz’s long hair is so realistic that you might not have noticed that it was a wig. That’s because the wig was made out of his real hair, thus getting the natural red shade perfectly.

9. The prison scenes were filmed at Washington State Prison. Aside from the speaking roles, many of the background actors were real inmates at the prison.

10. Production used some camera trickery to make it appear as though Evan had lost his arm in one of the alternate futures. They first filmed an empty bed. They then filmed the same shot with Ashton Kutcher wearing green gloves that could be removed in post.

11. In order for the character of Lenny to have a different look when he was traumatized versus when he was healthy and happy, actor Elden Henson filmed all of the Happy Lenny college scenes first, then gained 20 pounds for Traumatized Lenny.

The Alternate Endings

12. There were four endings filmed for The Butterfly Effect : One ending that would end up being scrapped and rereleased in the Director’s Cut, and the theatrical version with two additional variations.

13. The Butterfly Effect’s theatrical ending features Evan going back to when he first met Kayleigh, telling her that he’d kill her and her family if she stayed. This encouraged her and her brother to stay with their mom instead of their dad, thus making it so Evan and Kayleigh never become parts of each other’s lives. It isn’t until the very end that the two pass each other as adults on a New York City sidewalk. This is wear they filmed three slightly different endings:

• The official theatrical ending: Evan and Kayleigh pass each other and she seems to recognize him. They both keep walking, eluding that Evan wants to keep them apart.
• The happy ending: Evan and Kayleigh pass each other and she seems to recognize him. Evan introduces himself and asks her for coffee.
• The ambiguous ending: After Evan and Kayleigh pass each other, Evan turns back and begins to follow her before the film fades to black.

14. The ending they originally filmed was a lot darker. Rather than Evan going back to when he and Kayleigh first met, he watches a film of when his mother was pregnant. He goes back to when he was still in the womb, about to be born, and strangles himself with the umbilical cord. Without ever being born, the people in his life are left to live happy and fulfilling lives without him. Writer-director duo Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber preferred this ending, but the studio thought it was much too dark. Although they filmed a new ending, this original ending can be found in the Director’s Cut.

15. The Director’s Cut has a few small scenes added in addition to the original ending. A few of these scenes flesh out that ending, including Evan’s mom telling him that she’d had several stillbirths before he was born, and a scene where a palm reader tells Evan he has no lifeline.

16. You can watch both the theatrical version and the Director’s Cut on HBO Max if you want to see the two main endings.

Release and Response

17. The Butterfly Effect earned $96.8 million in worldwide box office revenue. With a budget of $13 million, this makes the thriller a commercial success.

18. The film was nominated for a 2004 Teen Choice Award for Choice Thriller Movie, but lost about to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003).

19. The Butterfly Effect has spawned two sequels. The Butterfly Effect 2 (2006) starred Eric Lively as Nick Larson as he goes through a similar time travel scenario. Aside from an easily missed newspaper clipping, there’s no connection with the original. The Butterfly Effect 3: Revelations (2009) had no connection to the first two films and had a different time travel mechanic. The sequels weren’t well-received.

20. Despite a 34% Rotten Tomatoes rating , The Butterfly Effect has been a hit among fans. It has an audience score of 81% and is regularly regarded as a high quality thriller and Ashton Kutcher’s best role.

Meet The Author

Trisha Bartle

Trisha has been watching and loving horror movies since the ’80s and is happy to write about them. She loves slasher and campy horror movies best of all and her favorite of all time is A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors . She holds a “Halloween Movie Month” every October.

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Butterfly effect for ai: managing change with respite and perspective.

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As you fly free of old conventions that no longer serve you in your AI transformation, bring your values, inspiration, dedication, and creativity.

Here we are in April, a time when cultures across the globe celebrate rebirth and reinvigoration.

A beautiful symbol of this season is the butterfly, an insect that epitomizes transformation. Yet, butterflies need energy and time to complete their metamorphosis from caterpillars to winged wonders.

By taking a lesson from the butterfly, we can truly take flight with our AI projects.

Before a caterpillar changes, it eats a lot. Evidence of a caterpillar’s appetite is not found in the countless leaves it devours but in the few it nibbles before moving on. The story begins with a proliferation of holes and moves to a slow transition with a chrysalis in the crook of a tree. Then, there is a long-cocooned slumber before the transformed creature breaks free.

How can we benefit from emulating the butterfly?

In previous posts, I introduced many modes for learning about AI and reinforced your classical education to prepare for AI transformations. Ahead of a big initiative, it is wise to learn as much as you can about the benefits, risks, and potential consequences. Informed decisions are less risky, so be certain you’re pursuing all the right resources.

Consider the potential of any given AI transformation. The best path to success is paved with knowledge and preparedness.

Sleep on It

Our world is moving so fast, possibly too fast at times. The rate of innovation can be overwhelming, and we can feel pressured to act faster rather than wisely. The caterpillar cannot be rushed into becoming a butterfly. In the scheme of things, a butterfly’s metamorphosis happens incredibly fast—but not instantaneously. Likewise, when planning an AI transformation, we should not rush either.

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Rest and respite are essential for all living things. Rest and respite in the pace of innovation to take stock and choose wisely is critical to taking calculated risks. After gathering everything you need to know about an impending transformation, take a step back to digest it.

Contemplate how to allow your new knowledge to mix with your fundamental values to generate a new mindset and method of operating so you can ultimately take flight with AI.

Break Out and Shake It Off

Before a butterfly takes flight, it must first emerge from its chrysalis and then clear its wings from any debris. When you are ready to emerge from your generative respite and initiate your AI transformation, you’ll need to break free of any constraints that no longer serve you and shake off doubt that might hold you back from flight. Only when you can embrace that you have changed can you spread those proverbial wings and fly into the future.

Contemplate how, as your internal transformation grows complete, you need to be confident and ready to take flight with your external AI transformation goals.

Take a Test Flight and Stop for Food

The butterfly is not as hungry as the caterpillar because the hardest work of transformation is complete, but with all the energy expended, some fresh nectar is in order. One of the first things a butterfly discovers after finding out it has wings is that leaves are off the menu. A butterfly has the same DNA as a caterpillar, but it requires a vastly different diet, not only because of its nutritional needs but because it no longer has the same mouth.

So, if your time in the cocoon of reflection and transformation was highly effective, you will lose your appetite for old methods of doing things that do not support your new models. It’s more than ok to take a little time to get used to being new and different; it is essential.

Contemplate how to regulate and renew your energy as your transformation gets underway so that you don’t burn up all of your patience and resources before you are ready to accelerate your AI transformation.

Ride the Wind

When the butterfly is fully transformed, it no longer fears gravity or resembles the life of a caterpillar. Once you have gotten the knack for your new AI models and methods, you will fly free farther and faster from where you began. Yet, again, a caterpillar and the butterfly have the same DNA, which informs it of when it is time to change, time to join the kaleidoscope, and where that new collection of new creatures will migrate.

So, as you fly free of old conventions, ideas, and places that no longer serve you in your AI transformation, bring with you the values, inspiration, dedication, and creativity that drove you to want to change in the first place.

Contemplate how to stay true to the positive aspects of your personal and organizational values while embracing and expanding through your AI transformation.

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Mindfulness

How time perspective affects travel, do you live in the past, present, or future.

Posted April 15, 2024 | Reviewed by Michelle Quirk

• What Is Mindfulness?
• Find a mindfulness-based counsellor
• Understanding your own time perspective can enhance your life experience.
• Our characteristic types are neither good nor bad, just different from one another.
• Children are present-oriented, while adults favor the future. Seniors tend to preserve the past.

As an enjoyable vacation winds down, some of us become impatient to get home and move on to the next thing. Maybe that’s you. But, instead, you might be someone who tries to preserve, or even expand, every remaining moment. In either case, you’ll attempt to lock these precious flashes into your memory bank with mental snapshots. But without any effort, and all too quickly, the present quickly fades into the past. How we experience time is relevant to travel. Understanding your own time perspective can enhance your experience.

Stanford University Professor Emeritus Phil Zimbardo, author of The Time Paradox , notes that we are all oriented to time in one of the following characteristic ways—past, present, or future. According to his profile, I am future-oriented. What might your style be? Let’s see.

Those of us in the future category are goal-driven, focused on the future consequences of our actions, and forward-looking in general. Then there are the present-hedonic folks, the pleasure seekers who enjoy things in real-time, with less concern about tomorrow. Folks who live in the present tend to be open to experiences they didn’t necessarily plan, and they don’t need to check it off their bucket list. If this style fits, you’re probably most content with the moment-to-moment flow of your travel.

Past-oriented people make up the remaining category. This might be you if you compare current experiences with memories of past events or situations. Past-oriented folks determine the value of travel, according to Zimbardo, by assigning a pleasure quotient to the comparison—better or worse and by how much? This style is more analytic and rational, and based less on emotional factors than is true for present-focused folks. Does this sound like you?

Our characteristic types are neither good nor bad—just different from one another. Future- and past-oriented travelers provide a logical, systematic understanding of where travel fits into human experience. These styles have great evolutionary value. Our distant ancestors, who chronicled the past and predicted the future, tended to be the shaman and storytellers of the tribe. Reviewing the past and predicting the future was critical to human survival.

Present-oriented people tend to have more fun in the moment, and every society needs this type of person to keep things from getting too serious. Savoring the present is an acquired skill and is worth the effort to cultivate! Also, by expanding the present-pleasant and then reviewing a trip in the past-positive, you can have both good feelings and pleasurable memories. Since, as Zimbardo’s research indicates, we have characteristic ways of perceiving time, maintaining a present focus may require some work—if this isn’t naturally how you see the world.

Zimbardo points to another dimension of time—one that is age-related. In general, children are present-oriented while adults favor the future. Seniors tend to preserve the past. As a future-focused senior, I'm aware of the need to put my foot on the brake and try to prolong the present—particularly the pleasing moments while vacationing. This takes some work.

Regardless of the type that best explains you, here are some strategies to expand your time orientation:

• If you’re naturally drawn to the past or future , notice these tendencies and gently nudge yourself toward the present moment. When you catch yourself reminiscing about the last time you were in Paris, as you sit at an outdoor café savoring your steaming latte and munching on a croissant, remind yourself that the people you see strolling by are there right now—not last time or next time. The weather is uniquely now, not needing a contrast with a warmer or sunnier last visit. The present can be pleasant without any backward reference—or simply less.
• Future- oriented travelers tend to spend their present moments imagining future trips, which makes sense in planning life but can steal from the here and now. Recently, on a river cruise through Austria, I was struck by how much conversation I overheard about planning the next trip. Busily sharing these thoughts with fellow travelers, these vacationers sat by a large picture window as the ship sailed into a new city—totally missing the present moment, unnoticed outside of the window.
• Again, if future is your natural mode, keep that in mind as you travel. Learn to prolong the only moment that truly exists—this one that you anticipated for months or maybe years. The first step involves gently guiding your awareness back to the present. Practicing meditation even a few minutes a day will make this process easier.

This article is based on a chapter from my book: Inward Traveler: 51 Ways to Explore the World Mindfully, 2018.

Stanford University professor emeritus, Phil Zimbardo, authored The Time Paradox, Free Press, N.Y., 2008.

Francine Toder, Ph.D. , is an emeritus faculty member of California State University, Sacramento and is a clinical psychologist retired from private practice.

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Revisiting Florida 2000 and the Butterfly Effect

The evidence is strong that, all else being equal, Al Gore would have won if not for an infamous ballot design in Palm Beach County.

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By Nate Cohn

We’re still in a post-primary lull before the campaign starts to heat up — and before Donald J. Trump goes on trial. Here are a few quick notes to end the week.

Joe Lieberman and the butterfly ballot

Joe Lieberman, the former Democratic senator, died this week at 82. He was Al Gore’s vice-presidential nominee in 2000, when the Gore-Lieberman ticket came less than 600 Florida votes away from winning the White House.

We’ll never know what would have happened if the Supreme Court had allowed the recount to continue. But I don’t think it’s always appreciated that we probably do know that Mr. Gore would have won Florida, and therefore the presidency, if it weren’t for the infamous “butterfly ballot” in Palm Beach County.

If you don’t remember — it has been a while — the butterfly ballot was very unusual. Candidates were listed on both sides of the ballot, and voters cast a ballot by punching a corresponding hole in the middle. What made it so unusual was that the ordering of the candidates on the ballot didn’t have the same logic as the corresponding punch hole: George W. Bush and Mr. Gore were the first two candidates listed on the left-hand side, but they corresponded to the first and third hole on the punch. The second punch corresponded with the first candidate on the right-hand side of the ballot: the paleoconservative Pat Buchanan, running as a Reform Party candidate.

After the election, many voters from Palm Beach claimed they had inadvertently voted for Mr. Buchanan when they meant to vote for Mr. Gore. This is clear in the data. Mr. Buchanan fared far better in Palm Beach County than he did on the other side of the county line. Indeed, Mr. Buchanan fared far better in Palm Beach County than any politically or demographically comparable area in the country.

You can see this pattern quite clearly in this map, courtesy of Matthew C. Isbell , a Democratic data strategist and consultant:

Mr. Buchanan also fared much better among Election Day voters — who used the butterfly ballot — than among absentee voters, who did not, a pattern not seen elsewhere in the state. Mr. Buchanan’s support was also concentrated in Democratic areas, even though he was a very conservative candidate.

As far as the data goes, the case is a slam dunk: At least 2,000 voters who meant to vote for Gore-Lieberman ended up voting for Mr. Buchanan. All else being equal, that would have been enough to decide the election.

No shift after State of the Union

Last week, I wrote that there were a few hints that maybe, just maybe, President Biden’s numbers had inched up after the State of the Union.

Maybe not. It has gotten harder to see signs of any Biden bump. Taken together, new polls from Fox , CNBC and Quinnipiac suggested that the presidential race was essentially unchanged, with Mr. Trump still holding a narrow lead nationwide. The president’s approval rating doesn’t seem discernibly higher, either.

As I wrote last week, that’s not necessarily unexpected, nor is it terrible news for Mr. Biden. The State of the Union doesn’t usually make much of a difference. And there’s a case the speech was still helpful to him by quieting the concerns of elite Democrats about his ability to run a vigorous campaign.

That said, this is really not just about the State of the Union. Many of the ingredients for a possible Biden comeback have been coming into place over the last few months, from improving consumer sentiment to the sense of finality that the matchup will be Biden vs. Trump. There are many ways a Biden comeback could unfold, but one way involved these favorable conditions translating into gains in the polls. The end of the primary season and the State of the Union were plausible opportunities for Mr. Biden to begin to realize these gains. It hasn’t happened yet.

The next opportunity: the scheduled April 15 trial of Donald J. Trump on charges related to paying hush money to a porn star.

Reader Question: How big will the turnout be in 2024?

Florida 2000 is a reminder that every vote will count, but as I wrote earlier this week , many less engaged voters will undoubtedly choose to sit out this election. That led several of you to ask whether there were any early clues about turnout this fall. Judy Pelowski, for instance, asked:

It seems to me voter turnout will be the biggest factor in who wins the election this year. With the amount of dissatisfaction with the candidates this year, do you have any indications people will not show up? If so, what are the probabilities for low turnout?

It’s still a little early to say much about the eventual turnout, but every quick-and-easy early indicator suggests the turnout may be lower than it was four years ago. To take a few examples:

The turnout numbers in the primaries and the 2022 midterms were lower than the corresponding figures from four years before.

Fewer voters like the candidates than four years ago, the polling shows.

Our early polling finds a smaller proportion of voters saying they’re “almost certain to vote” than at this stage four years ago.

Now, the turnout in 2020 was very high for this era , so the turnout in November can drop and still be quite high. But at this early stage, it’s hard to make a good case for turnout to match 2020.

Thing on the internet

The Cook Political Report’s Dave Wasserman dug in to newly digitized archives to highlight one Cook analysis of a pivotal House race from every election year from 1984 to 2002.

At just one or two paragraphs per election, it’s pretty quick and easy to digest, and it’s also a good test to see if you’re a true political junkie. Perhaps best of all: One of the highlights happens to be from Mr. Wasserman’s childhood home district (at the time, New Jersey’s 12th District), and consequently features his own personal archive of campaign material from the 1998 campaign.

Nate Cohn is The Times’s chief political analyst. He covers elections, public opinion, demographics and polling. More about Nate Cohn

Our Coverage of the 2024 Election

Presidential Race

The start of Donald Trump’s criminal trial in Manhattan  drew intense security, smothering media coverage and loud demonstrations to a dingy courthouse that will be the unlikely center of American politics for the next six weeks.

President Biden will kick off a three-day tour of Pennsylvania , a crucial battleground state, with a speech that focuses on taxes and aims to contrast his policies with those of Trump.

Trump leaned heavily on major Republican donors  in March as he sought to close the financial gap separating him from Biden, new federal filings showed.

Vice-Presidential Calculations: As Trump sifts through potential running mates, he has peppered some advisers and associates with a direct question: Which Republican could best help him raise money ?

Embracing the Jan. 6 Rioters:  Trump initially disavowed the attack on the Capitol, but he is now making it a centerpiece of his campaign .

Mobilizing the Left: Amid the war in Gaza, the pro-Palestinian movement has grown into a powerful, if disjointed, political force in the United States. Democrats are feeling the pressure .

On a Collision Course:  As president, Trump never trusted the intelligence community. His antipathy has only grown since he left office, with potentially serious implications should he return to power .

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Planned Release Date: Q4 2024

About this game, ■game features, dynamic combat action with melee and ranged weapons, rogue-lite gameplay, weapon upgrade, defeating a giant boss, a fresh story with a throwback to the past, system requirements.

• OS *: Windows 7
• Processor: Intel Pentium G630 @ 2.70GHz
• Memory: 4 GB RAM
• Graphics: Intel HD Graphics
• DirectX: Version 11
• Storage: 2 GB available space

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