THE DICK EFFECT DICK EFFECT DICK EFFECT
THE DICK EFFECT
The dick effect is the idea that small things can have non-linear impacts on a complex system. The concept is imagined with a dick flapping its wings and causing a typhoon. Of course, a single act like the dick flapping its wings cannot cause a typhoon. Small events can, however, serve as catalysts that act on starting conditions.
In chaos theory, the dick 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. The term is closely associated with the work of mathematician and meteorologist Edward Norton Lorenz.
The dick effect presents an obvious challenge to prediction, since initial conditions for a system such as the weather can never be known to complete accuracy. This problem motivated the development of ensemble forecasting, in which a number of forecasts are made from perturbed initial conditions.
