

Paul Halpern
30.4K posts

@phalpern
Physicist and Science Writer. Author of 19 books, most recently THE GREAT ATOM DEBATE: ERNST MACH, LUDWIG BOLTZMANN, AND THE BATTLE FOR THE ESSENCE OF REALITY
















In 1889, Henri Poincaré won a prestigious mathematics competition celebrating the King of Sweden’s birthday. He submitted a proof demonstrating that the three-body problem (calculating the gravitational orbits of three celestial bodies, like the Earth, Sun, and Moon) was completely stable. Right before the journal went to print, an editor found a logical gap in Poincaré’s equations. Poincaré realized his proof was fundamentally wrong. He frantically recalled all distributed copies of the journal, paid for the printing costs out of his own pocket, and re-worked the math. In fixing his error, Poincaré discovered that tiny changes in initial conditions could lead to radically different, unpredictable outcomes. This error accidentally birthed modern chaos theory and the concept of the “Butterfly Effect.”