It’s peak butterfly season—a beautiful time of the year to watch for these wonderfully winged insects, such as the Tiger Swallowtail caught on camera this week by my son-in-law Ryan Bretzel.
Coincidentally, physicists from the Los Alamos National Laboratory just announced* that we need not worry about butterflies in Minnesota setting off hurricanes in Florida, as speculated by chaoticians (such as Dr. Ian Malcolm in the movie Jurassic Park).
“For those interested in the technical details, a number of entangled qubits were run through a set of logic gates before being returned to their initial setup.”
– Mike McRae, Science Alert, 7/31/20, Time Travel Simulation Shows Quantum ‘Butterfly Effect’ Doesn’t Exist
That’s one less thing to worry about for Floridians! They need all the help they can get, being at the peak of pandemic and hurricane season.
* Recovery of Damaged Information and the Out-of-Time-Ordered Correlators, Bin Yan and Nikolai A. Sinitsyn, Physical Review Letters, 125, 040605 – Published 24 July 2020.