Have you ever heard that the flap of a butterfly’s wings occurring in a particular time and space, while seemingly insignificant, could be the difference between your home being destroyed by a hurricane or not at some later date? This is known as the “butterfly effect”, which lays the foundation for Chaos Theory. It 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. In particular, the Lorenz attractor is a set of chaotic solutions of the Lorenz system. In this project, we designed an analog circuits whose resistance values control the coefficients in the Lorenz system. The circuit can model the chaotic behavior of the Lorenz system by varying its resistance values, thus allowing us to demonstrate the "butterfly effect" on the oscilloscope and take measurements from it.
