The lecture of scientist and artist from Barcelona – Pep Vidal. This lecture explores the concept of the butterfly effect, emphasizing how infinitesimal, often imperceptible changes in complex systems can lead to significant outcomes, and how our understanding of these systems depends on the precision of our measurements and the limits of our perception.

Date: 11.10.2024, 19:00

Lecture

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Place: Barcelona, Carrer de Sant Pere Mes Alt, 39

About the Lecture

Pep Vidal: "My work is based on infinitesimal changes that are extremely small and invisible to the eye until a bigger change happens. For example, a book that we’ve placed on a shelf, one day, unexpectedly falls. This happens in a precise moment, not before, not after. Everything necessary for this to happen in this moment and not other, is a chain of events partially chaotic and above all, invisible. Whatever has happened between putting the book on the shelf and the moment it falls, is what interests me. This invisibility of events is basically due to a lack of information, to our limitation to perceive things that could occur."

Once I had a professor who, in order to demonstrate that between 0 and 1 exist infinite numbers, drew a line on the wall writing 0 on one end, and 1 on the other. This line represents the distance between 0 and 1 - he said. But if I get very close to the blackboard – and he did it so that he stained his nose white – now this line is not the distance between 0 and 1, but between 0 and 0.1. He repeated this action several times, changing to 0.01, 0.001, 0.0001, … and so on.
0 ---------- 1
0 ---------- 0.1
0 ---------- 0.01
0 ---------- 0.001
0 ---------- 0.0001
0 ---------- 0.00001
0 ---------- 0.000001
It was really clear to me with this example that everything is a matter of precision. The more precision you have when measuring or controlling something (a system), the bigger would be your knowledge about it (that system). For example, is not the same precision required when measuring some distance in a highway, that the distance covered by neutrinos travelling through the LHC (Large Hadron Collider). Therefore, according to the precision that we need, these two systems will be equal, indistinguishable or radically different. Most of the times, however, we cannot measure things with precision. Consequently, for an effective interaction with other systems (other elements, for example), we need intuition (previously acquired knowledge) to measure/gauge a system in a more or less fast/effective way.