A monarch butterfly in Vista, Calif. (Gregory Bull/AP) By Jeremy Deaton

There is an iconic scene in “Jurassic Park” where Jeff Goldblum explains chaos theory.

“It simply deals with unpredictability in complex systems,” he says. “The shorthand is ‘the butterfly effect.’ A butterfly can flap its wings in Peking, and in Central Park, you get rain instead of sunshine.” Subscribe for unlimited access to The Post You can cancel anytime. Subscribe

Goldblum is right that chaos theory deals with unpredictability, but his description of the butterfly effect is a little misleading.

When meteorologist Ed Lorenz, the so-called “father of chaos theory,” first invoked a butterfly’s wings, it wasn’t to say that we can’t predict the weather in New York because we can’t account for all the butterf

See Full Page