Roger Vaughan Carr (1937–2013)

I was captivated by the beautiful watercolours in this book before knowing anything about the story. The story itself is really about small initial effects having large long term outcomes. It is a development of Edward Lorenz's short paper of 1972 titled "Does the flap of a butterfly's wing in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?" This has captured a lot of attention over the years especially with the growth of chaos theory and work on fractals. Doubtless small changes in initial conditions can lead to very different outcomes but there has been some suggestion (by Steven Wolfram...the chief designer of Mathematica) that Lorenz did not include provision for viscous flow into his equations....essentially his model was oversimplified...and if this provision was made then the initial small perturbations would probably be dampened out. Enough of spoiling a good kid's story. Oh..well not quite! I was a bit disappointed by the rather unscientific way the story of the great wind developed from a wind....presumably in India which sweeps westward across Africa...and then somehow sweeps down into the Southern Hemisphere and across to Australia ....then over the indian Ocean and presumably northwards to India again where it reappears as a tornado. (Though they are not called tornados in Asia). Of course typhoons or cyclones that effect Asia tend to have their origins in the mid Pacific and the main driver is warm water and low atmospheric pressure. OK.....I'm being a bit difficult and a bit unreasonable expecting a kids story to be scientifically accurate. and as the author points out ...the butterfly effect encapsulates a universal truth about minute changes possibly having a big impact on results. And kids get this.
And yes the watercolours are superb and very powerful. I especially liked the one of the storm breaking huge trees and the lovely one of the butterfly itself (used as the cover shot) ...being swept up by the tornado. (A bit sad I thought). And loved the one of the elephant on page? (pages not numbered) but the one with Malani and her father seeking shelter from the "tornado". Ok, despite my criticism of the science, I liked the book...and the illustrations make up for shortcomings in other respects. So four stars from me.… (mehr)