Contingency, Chaos and Near Misses

Throughout history there have been many famous instances of tiny events that have changed the course of history. This post looks at just a few.

Sliding door moments occur when minor, seemingly inconsequential incidents have massive effects on future events. The 1998 film Sliding Doors is based on two parallel stories that follow when a woman catches, or doesn’t catch a train.

In chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state.

The name of this theory derives from the image of the tiny atmospheric perturbations caused by a butterfly’s wing can later affect the development and path of a tornado thousands of kilometres away.

In December 1931 Winston Churchill was struck by a car while crossing Fifth Avenue in New York. He was suffered a serious head injury and was hospitalised.

Had he not survived this accident, the course of the Second World War, less than a decade away, would have played out differently.

In July 1944, by the coincidence of a number of small chance factors, Adolf Hitler survived an assassination attempt.

A bomb in a briefcase was placed near Hitler at a conference. One of the attendees at the meeting unwittingly moved the briefcase, saving Hitler’s life. By this stage Germany had probably already lost the war although it dragged on for another nine months.

In March 19 1981, newly elected President Ronald Reagan was shot. The bullet punctured Reagan’s lung and was almost fatal.

Reagan recovered and served out two terms, greatly influencing the course of American and World history.

We are surrounded by them. Consider your personal existence. What sliding door moments preceded your parents meeting? Or your great grandparents for that matter.

Our personality is largely determined by our genes. The configuration of your genome is contingent on which sperm fertilised which egg, with millions of near misses, going back thousands of generations.