‘No, she’s
careful, not a gossip, Danglard. She takes seriously the butterfly
wing that moves in New York and causes an explosion in Bangkok.’
‘Well, he’s
wrong. It’s in Brazil that the butterfly moves its wing, and it
causes a hurricane in Texas.’
‘Yes. Because
once you get away from the original words, the purest of theories
just become rumours. Then we don’t know anything. From one
approximation to another inaccuracy, the truth unravels and
obscurantism takes over.’
Danglard’s
mood was improving, as it did every time he had a chance to give a
lecture, or better still to contradict someone with his knowledge.
The commandant wasn’t a chatterbox, but silence wasn’t good for
him either, because it offered too much room for his melancholy to
take over. Sometimes it just took a few exchanges to hoist Danglard
out of his despondency. Adamsberg was putting off the moment of
mentioning Momo the local fire-raiser, and so was Danglard, which was
not a good sign.
‘No,’
said Danglard firmly. ‘It’s not a fable, it’s a scientific
theory about predictability. It was formulated by Edward Lorenz in
1972 in the version I gave you. The butterfly’s in Brazil and the
hurricane’s in Texas, you can’t go altering that.’
I
can hardly add something to this text, because the role that I
usually play correcting in a fussy way is done by Danglard in the
dialogue. Indeed, Lorentz, the man that looks like a kind grandfather
in the picture, started creating a mathematic model to study the
convection movements of the atmosphere and he came to the conclusions
that the text suggests
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