Welcome to the happiness podcast. I'm Dr. Robert Puff. This is a story that's been circulating in the physics world for many years,

and now I think it's also circulated down to the general public too. And it goes like this.

There was a butterfly flapping his wings in Peru, and six months later, the

butterfly slapping led to a tornado in Texas. And at its core, what it basically means is small changes in the past can add up to huge changes in the future.

And they really can't be predicted because of the chaos that these

small changes create. Chaos theory has been around quite a while and one of the ways it

manifested in the scientific world was in observing planets.

For example, when astronomers look at the Earth and Moon, they can make predictions about how often the moon goes around the Earth

in what orbit and when things will happen.

But when you include a third body, like the Sun,

things get a lot more complicated.

It's called the three body problem.

And when you add three things and want to make predictions based upon three factors,

it's incredibly difficult to make predictions. And this has been known for

a very long time. But then in 1961, Edward Lorenz, who was studying weather, realized that as he made models of weather, that if he just made a small change in one factor that was part of his model, that it would totally create chaos in the predictions of the future model.

In other words, small changes can have big impacts, like a butterfly flapping his wings in Peru. So how does this relate to us and happiness? Well obviously

there are more, far more than two things that contribute to our outcome, contribute to our future, to contribute to our future, to how our lives are going to turn out.

There are many, many factors.

Some of them we have control over, some of them we don't at all. But there are so many factors. It is very

difficult to predict how our lives are going to turn out. I remember once working with a very successful man who had made his living in the

financial world and he was probably one of the most successful clients I ever worked with. And in his world he said, I don't quite understand it. He was a very

intelligent man. But he said, I don't understand it. There were so many people doing what I did,

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