HEADQUARTER
Pasadena, CA, United StatesFOUNDED
1891COMPANY SIZE
5001-10,000INDUSTRY
UniversityCaltech is a world-renowned science and engineering Institute that marshals some of the world's brightest minds and most innovative tools to address fundamental scientific questions and pressing societal challenges. Caltech's extraordinary faculty and students are expanding our understanding of the universe and inventing the technologies of the future, with research interests from quantum science and engineering to bioinformatics and the nature of life itself, from human behavior and economics to energy and sustainability.
The butterfly effect—the idea that a butterfly flapping its wings in South America could change the course of a tornado in Texas—has been a popular way to illustrate the difficulty of making predictions about the behavior of chaotic systems like the weather. Because such systems are extremely sensitive to their initial conditions, even the tiniest of changes can send their behavior careening off into unexpected directions.