Why does the toasted bread always fall upside down, but meteorologists ever nail their predictions? Is the Butterfly Effect real?
A butterfly flapped its wings in Japan, and a hurricane unleashed in Mexico, yes, but my frikkin' toasted bread keeps falling upside down.
It is weird to see that physics hasn't searched for a unified theory in a loaf of bread and that the string theory does not include a paragraph that is explained by the process of spreading butter over a piece of it. The power of flours is such that it does not only makes us want about its biology and chemistry, but also its physics. Newton had a fetish for apples, Galileo for cannon bullets, but what really gets me going is a nice loaf of bread.
There, where a Physics' law or Murphy's law is missing to cover the hole: Murphy's toasted bread fell just like it does to us, with the worst possible result.
The question is: "where is the difference?"
Where is the line that separates my deterministic toast from from the storm-generating butterfly. First, we need to know both thing's history.
Understanding the origin of the predictable aerodynamics of bread is setting ourselves in a journey to the past: Huron Reflector (Norwalk, Ohio), 23 Nov. 1841
I never had a slice of bread,
Particularly large and wide,
That did not fall upon the floor,
And always on the buttered side!
Despite the absolute and clear lack of artistic value of this piece, we may observe it as the first approach to what we may call from now on the Theory of Differential Gravitational Attraction by a Hydrophobic Surface Over Crunchy Bread (TDAHSOCB, for short).
To test this theory, Robert Matthews (the scientist, not the terrorist) asked to a couple of thousands of students to let their toasted bread fall (around 21000 times, in total) and proved that 62% of the times the bread fell on the side that had butter in it (and climber up to 80% when the bread was gently pushed over the edge of the table). This event contradicted the fact that if you threw the same object into the air making it flip freely: It would fall at a 50/50 ratio on each side.
There was a pattern. An invisible hand that forced the bad luck! The Universe plotting against our breakfasts!!!
When Edward Lorenz observed these results he understood chaos not as randomness, but as difficulty. For him chaos was the shape in which the present determines the future, while the near present does not determine the near future.
Chaos wasn't the disconnection between cause and consequence, it was more of a stacking of causes and consequences that lead into a dramatic end: Drastically different than the one expected by observing separate event. That dreaded butterfly is not magic, it is just too damn hard to predict as more events add up to the pile.
But bread is not supposed to be hard! The slice does pretty much the same thing every time, there had to be a pattern! A pattern to explain why did it always fall as it did, the common factor: US and our tables.
Our 80 cm (31.5 Inches) high tables, made the bread fall pretty much from the same height. Our subtle and natural clumsiness made it fall off the edge.
This edge was the key.
Knowing that the cordless bungee jumping started pretty much in the same way, with half of the bread in the table and the other half in the air, established a rotation speed. Just like a skilled cook can flip food in a pan making it land as he pleases:
The same movement unleashes predictable results (as long as there's not a stack of subtle variables in between). My breakfast is not "weather", a multiple pendulum is not Chaos.
It is not the Universe's fault, it is... predictable. So, SO predictable that you can make it fall on its "right" side by applying one of the following two conditions: Launching off the table at 1.6 meters/s making it glide to the floor (like a paper plane), or fall slowly from a table that is 3 meters high (almost 10 ft).
I've just created a rotatively consistent toasted bread that obeys the pull of gravity in a vertical freefall that will be repeated a thousand times; totally independent to the butterflies that flap their wings in Asia.