How a Single Star Can Rewrite an Entire Galaxy

What I wonder is: if they ran the same simulation twice, with no changes, would it produce the same results both times? I suppose it depends on how the simulation has been coded.

I'm hopeful for our Sun. I feel it is talented and has great potential in this respect.

@whatdamath You have a great introduction... I was at church, during service, when it was super quiet, and I accidentally clicked on your video, with my volume all the way up...😬😬😬 It was very pleasant to hear, " Hello Wonderful person..."... It made the whole church laugh...😂🤣 Keep being you bro..

"The Butterfly Effect" dates to a classic science fiction story, A Sound of Thunder, by Ray Bradbury. A big game hunter, travelling back to kill a dinosaur that was just about to die anyway, on any elevated walkway that touches nothing, panics and steps off, killing only a butterfly. When they get back to the present, everything has changed, they now live in a fascist dystopia. All because he killed that butterfly that should have lived.

I feel vindicated! When I did my undergrad research, it was modeling star clusters. I had limited time on the campus computer cluster to run the "real" simulations, so I used a computer at home to run simulations for days at a time at much higher time and spatial resolutions. I was seeing similar results as this study, where minor perturbations (take a single star out, for example) had a noticeable impact even on huge clusters. I was told it was an artifact of the software and to ignore it.

That difference in predictability between our galaxy and our solar system shouldn't be that surprising. Our solar system is overwhelmingly a central mass surrounded by a smattering of much, much less massive objects that only slightly tug on each other compared with the central pull. Our galaxy's mass is much more evenly distributed, without such an overwhelming dominance from the center. On another topic it's also worth noting that the butterfly effect just assumes a change in conditions. That butterfly could just as easily have prevented a tornado as caused one. Or maybe just changed when and where one appeared.

Well _my_ take away from all this is _"It's all terribly complicated"_ ..... Who knew? 🤔

“I designed my computer model to prove something. And when I ran a simulation based on the model, I proved that I designed it properly.”

The butterfly effect is in everything, grandfather paradox, everything is interconnected. We are self observing instruments of the universe!

The 100 billion body problem