time travel 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

The theory of time travel, the possibility of time travel, the grandfather paradox, output with sentence transition into subsequent section:, the butterfly effect in time travel, the multiverse theory, the idea of multiple universes, how the butterfly effect fits in, implications for our understanding of the universe, frequently asked questions, how does the butterfly effect relate to chaos theory, can the butterfly effect be observed in everyday life, are there any practical applications for understanding the butterfly effect, how does the butterfly effect impact our understanding of determinism, is there any evidence to support the multiverse theory.

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.

Simulating quantum ‘time travel’ disproves butterfly effect in quantum realm

Evolving quantum processes backwards on a quantum computer to damage information in the simulated past causes little change when returned to the ‘present’.

July 28, 2020

LOS ALAMOS, N.M., July 28, 2020 —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 – measures 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.

Paper: Bin Yan and Nikolai A. Sinitsyn. Recovery of Damaged Information and the Out-of-Time-Ordered Correlators, Phys. Rev. Lett. 125, 040605 (2020); available online at https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.125.040605 . Authors: Bin Yan and Nikolai Sinitsyn.

Funding : This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science.

About Los Alamos National Laboratory

Los Alamos National Laboratory, a multidisciplinary research institution engaged in strategic science on behalf of national security, is managed by Triad, a public service oriented, national security science organization equally owned by its three founding members: Battelle Memorial Institute (Battelle), the Texas A&M University System (TAMUS), and the Regents of the University of California (UC) for the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration.

Los Alamos enhances national security by ensuring the safety and reliability of the U.S. nuclear stockpile, developing technologies to reduce threats from weapons of mass destruction, and solving problems related to energy, environment, infrastructure, health, and global security concerns.

Charles Poling (505) 257-8006 [email protected]

Butterfly Effect in Quantum Realm Disproven by Simulating Quantum ‘Time Travel’

By Los Alamos National Laboratory August 2, 2020

Researchers have successfully employed a quantum computer to simulate time travel, revealing that quantum mechanics does not exhibit the butterfly effect.

Evolving quantum processes backwards on a quantum computer to damage information in the simulated past causes little change when returned to the ‘present.’

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.

In research by a team at Los Alamos National Laboratory, Alice prepares her qubit and applies the information scrambling unitary U to this and many other qubits altogether. Bob measures her qubit in any basis, flipping the qubit to the state not known to Alice. Alice still can reconstruct her information via a single decoding unitary U†. Credit: Los Alamos National Laboratory

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.

“On a quantum computer, there is no problem simulating opposite-in-time evolution, or simulating running a process backwards into the past.” — Nikolai Sinitsyn

Presto, a quantum time-machine simulator.

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

Reference: “Recovery of Damaged Information and the Out-of-Time-Ordered Correlators” by Bin Yan and Nikolai A. Sinitsyn, 24 July 2020, Physical Review Letters . DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.125.040605

This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science.

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5 comments on "butterfly effect in quantum realm disproven by simulating quantum ‘time travel’".

… Now I wonder, is causality casualty of the speed of light. In another words, is there a reason for that time thing, on an atom scale, to behave strange just because there is a speed close to the speed of light. Therefore, causality might just fly of the window….

I think that one dimension has many different realities…to be specific even if we go back in time to change the past,it still won’t affect the present because we’ll be creating a different reality or a new future…and the past it will be like ..you will experience two realities I.e you would have experienced the past past and the present and the future present …it won’t erase the past but cause the past to replay itself with a new, different outcome!! Although that’s just me guessing a new theory..

Leni, a new theory… really? That’s the entire plot of Marvel’s Avengers Endgame.

Best regards I think that I have understand the time immunization in Lucy movie.

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.

"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.

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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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 Butterfly Effect Evan, Kayleigh, and Lenny talk with Tommy before the prank

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.

The Butterfly Effect Evan writes in his journal

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.

The Butterfly Effect Kayleigh and Evan share a booth at the diner

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.

The Butterfly Effect Evan tries to look innocent in the exam room

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.

The Butterfly Effect Evan walks away from Kayleigh

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

Evolving quantum processes backwards on a quantum computer to damage information in the simulated past causes little change when returned to the 'present'.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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Journal Reference :

Bin Yan, Nikolai A. Sinitsyn. Recovery of Damaged Information and the Out-of-Time-Ordered Correlators . Physical Review Letters , 2020; 125 (4) DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.125.040605

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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.

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A Sound of Thunder

A single mistake in the past, by a time travel company in the future, has devastating and unforeseen consequences. A single mistake in the past, by a time travel company in the future, has devastating and unforeseen consequences. A single mistake in the past, by a time travel company in the future, has devastating and unforeseen consequences.

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Trivia One major reason for this movie's long delay is that the original production company went bankrupt during post-production, and there simply wasn't money to finish the movie.
Goofs The men go back in time 65 million years, where they are attacked by an Allosaurus. However, Allosaurus lived during the Jurassic Period, which ended 145 million years ago.

Sonia Rand : I don't have time for stupid idiots.

Travis Ryer : Well, why don't you make some time. How about we stop with the insults, because it is starting to get on my nerves.

Sonia Rand : You think I devoted my career to designing an amusement park ride for rich men to compensate for their little willies by shooting prehistoric animals, is that what you really think?

Travis Ryer : No, what I think is that if you were a guy, someone would have probably knocked you on your ass a long time ago.

Crazy credits Opening Card: In the year 2055, A new technology was invented that could change the world... or destroy it. a man named Charles Hatton used it to make money.
Alternate versions For the Dutch DVD release the aspect ratio was changed from 2,35:1 to 1,78:1.
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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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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.

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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 .

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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

Screen Rant

Butterfly effect time travel rule-breaking scene is still bothering fans.

Many years after its release, one scene in The Butterfly Effect which breaks the movie's own time travel rules is still bothering fans to this day.

One scene in The Butterfly Effect is still bothering fans to this day. Released in 2004, the sci-fi thriller stars Ashton Kutcher as Evan Treborn who, as a child, has a history of blackouts and memory loss. Later, as a 20-year-old college student, Evan discovers that by reading his childhood journals, he can transport himself back in time to inhabit his former self during those blackouts. Kutcher's character decides to use his ability to correct the past, soon discovering that even the slightest change comes with major unintended consequences. However, the film doesn't always follow its own time travel rules.

A recent Reddit thread posted by u/KillerQ97 posed the question, " Which continuity error or plot hole in a movie always sticks out in your mind? " and u/BionicTriforce replied with the infamous prison scene from The Butterfly Effect , the comment reaching the top of the thread. A string of users sharing his sentiment replied to the comment, demonstrating how, nearly twenty years after its release, this illogical scene from The Butterfly Effect is still bothering fans. Check out the thread below:

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The Butterfly Effect's Time Travel Rules Explained

Early on in The Butterfly Effect , the film establishes its titular principle – every time Evan travels back in time and makes changes to the past, it results in various unintended consequences. When he returns to the present, Evan effectively creates a new timeline, and he's the only person aware of the changes. Using the same example as the Reddit user, when Evan's arms are blown off by an explosion, he wakes up in a new reality and is shocked to find he has no arms, which his roommates are already aware of.

At another point, Evan accidentally kills Kayleigh's unhinged brother Tommy and goes to prison for the crime. There, to try and convince a fellow prisoner he possesses the power of time travel, Ashton Kutcher's character travels back to his childhood and violently stabs his hands on some pointed objects in school, only to end up right back in prison in the present, with some scars magically appearing on his hands. The puzzling scene defies the very logic of the film's title and all the time travel rules it establishes.

Following the time travel rules presented by the film, Evan's actions should have resulted in the creation of an alternate timeline in which his scars were there the whole time with Evan being aware he didn't have them before. Using The Butterfly Effect 's own logic, Evan stabbing his own hands in school would have caused ripple effects that drastically altered the trajectory of his life, meaning he never would have killed Tommy and ended up in prison. This scene in The Butterfly Effect is the only one that defies its own time travel rules, though it's been driving viewers crazy for years.

More: The Butterfly Effect 3 Is (Shockingly) The Franchise's Best

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Midwest tornadoes cause severe damage in Omaha suburbs

The Associated Press

Gopala Penmetsa walks past his house after it was leveled by a tornado near Omaha, Neb., on Friday. Chris Machian/Omaha World-Herald via AP hide caption

Gopala Penmetsa walks past his house after it was leveled by a tornado near Omaha, Neb., on Friday.

OMAHA, Neb. — A tornado plowed through suburban Omaha, Nebraska, on Friday afternoon, damaging hundreds of homes and other structures as the twister tore for miles along farmland and into subdivisions. Injuries were reported but it wasn't yet clear if anyone was killed in the storm.

Multiple tornadoes were reported in Nebraska but the most destructive storm moved from a largely rural area into suburbs northwest of Omaha, a city of 485,000 people.

Photos on social media showed heavily damaged homes and shredded trees. Video showed homes with roofs stripped of shingles, in a rural area near Omaha. Law enforcement were blocking off roads in the area.

Hundreds of houses sustained damage in Omaha, mostly in the Elkhorn area in the western part of the city, police Lt. Neal Bonacci said.

Police and firefighters are now going door-to-door helping people who are trapped.

Omaha Fire Chief Kathy Bossman said crews had gone to the "hardest hit area" and had a plan to search anywhere someone could be trapped.

"They're going to be putting together a strategic plan for a detailed search of the area, starting with the properties with most damage," Bossman said. "We'll be looking throughout properties in debris piles, we'll be looking in basements, trying to find any victims and make sure everybody is rescued who needs assistance."

Damaged houses are seen after a tornado passed through the area near Omaha, Neb., on Friday. Chris Machian/Omaha World-Herald via AP hide caption

Damaged houses are seen after a tornado passed through the area near Omaha, Neb., on Friday.

Omaha police Lt. Neal Bonacci said many homes were destroyed or severely damaged.

"You definitely see the path of the tornado," Bonacci said.

In one area of Elkhorn, dozens of newly built, large homes were damaged. At least six were destroyed, including one that was leveled, while others had the top half ripped off.

There were dozens of emergency vehicles in the area.

"We watched it touch down like 200 yards over there and then we took shelter," said Pat Woods, who lives in Elkhorn. "We could hear it coming through. When we came up our fence was gone and we looked to the northwest and the whole neighborhood's gone."

His wife, Kim Woods added, "The whole neighborhood just to the north of us is pretty flattened."

Dhaval Naik, who said he works with the man whose house was demolished, said three people, including a child, were in the basement when the tornado hit. They got out safely.

KETV-TV video showed one woman being removed from a demolished home on a stretcher in Blair, a city just north of Omaha.

Omaha Police Chief Todd Schmaderer said there appeared to be few serious injuries, in part because people had plenty of warning that storms were likely.

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"We not upon by a sudden storm," Schmaderer said. "People had warnings of this and that saved lives."

The tornado warning was issued in the Omaha area on Friday afternoon just as children were due to be released from school. Many schools had students shelter in place until the storm passed. Hours later, buses were still transporting students home.

Another tornado hit an area on the eastern edge of Omaha, passing directly through parts of Eppley Airfield, the city's airport. Officials closed the airport to aircraft operations to access damage but then reopened the facility, Omaha Airport Authority Chief Strategy Officer Steve McCoy said.

Severe weather damage to Eppley Airfield in Omaha, Neb., can be seen from the Lewis and Clark Monument in Council Bluffs, Iowa on Friday Anna Reed/Omaha World-Herald via AP hide caption

Severe weather damage to Eppley Airfield in Omaha, Neb., can be seen from the Lewis and Clark Monument in Council Bluffs, Iowa on Friday

The passenger terminal wasn't hit by the tornado but people rushed to storm shelters until the twister passed, McCoy said.

Flight delays are expected Friday evening.

After passing through the airport, the tornado crossed the Missouri River and into Iowa, north of Council Bluffs.

Nebraska Emergency Management Agency spokesperson Katrina Sperl said damage is just now being reported. Taylor Wilson, a spokesperson for the University of Nebraska Medical Center, said they hadn't seen any injuries yet.

Before the tornado hit the Omaha area, three workers in an industrial plant were injured Friday afternoon when a tornado struck an industrial plant in Lancaster County, sheriff's officials said in an update on the damage.

The building just northeast of the state capital of Lincoln had collapsed with about 70 employees inside and several people trapped, sheriff's officials said. Everyone was evacuated, and three people had injuries that were considered not life-threatening, authorities said.

Sheriff's officials say they also had reports of a tipped-over train near Waverly, also in Lancaster County.

Two people who were injured when the tornado passed through Lancaster County were being treated at the trauma center at Bryan Medical Center West Campus in Lincoln, the facility said in a news release. It said the patients were in triage and no details were released on their condition.

The Omaha Public Power District reported that nearly 10,000 customers were without power in the Omaha area.

Daniel Fienhold, manager of the Pink Poodle Steakhouse in Crescent, Iowa, said he was outside watching the weather with his daughter and restaurant employees. He said "it looked like a pretty big tornado was forming" northeast of town.

"It started raining, and then it started hailing, and then all the clouds started to kind of swirl and come together, and as soon as the wind started to pick up, that's when I headed for the basement, but we never saw it," Fienhold said.

The Weather Service also issued tornado watches across parts of Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma and Texas. And forecasters warned that large hail and damaging wind gusts were possible.

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the quantum butterfly effect. /. 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 ...
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In chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state. ... "A Sound of Thunder" features time travel. More precisely, though, almost the exact idea and the exact phrasing —of a tiny insect ...
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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
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The butterfly effect says that because the qubit is tied to so many variables, Bob's small interference should completely change the system by the time we get back to the future (or present, to ...
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However, Bradbury's concept of how the death of a butterfly in the past could have drastic changes in the future is a representation of the butterfly effect and is used as an example of how to consider chaos theory and the physics of time travel. See also "A Gun for Dinosaur" - Short story by L. Sprague de Camp; References
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