Domino effect
A domino effect is a sequence of - mostly similar - events, each of which is also the cause of the following and which all go back to a single initial event. A chain reaction can be viewed as a special case of the domino effect.
origin
The domino effect got its name from a trick in which the stones of a domino game are misused: The stones are placed upright in a row and with a small distance behind one another. When knocking over or by manually tapping the first stone in the row, it falls over and hits the second stone, which then also falls and in turn causes the third stone to tip over; this then hits the fourth stone and so on, until all stones in the row have fallen one after the other. Theoretically, the row could be of any length and the falling motion would always propagate the entire length to the last stone.
Playful application and record attempts
Due to the relatively high level of awareness of the effect, many people try it at home with a (relatively small) number of dominoes from a domino game. Children in particular, but also adults, are often fascinated by the unexpected effect. The theoretically unlimited extension of the domino chain is also used for record attempts. A large number of stones are set up in partly artistic geometric shapes in such a way that up to a few million stones fall after the first stone has been pushed. Branches, overpasses and multiple lanes are built in and specially made stones in different colors are used. It can, for. B. a color change can be achieved by stones with two differently colored sides when falling over. Corresponding records are recorded in the Guinness Book of Records . In Europe, the most famous event that focused on attempts to record records with the domino effect was Domino Day until 2009 . In 2009 4.8 million stones with a weight of around 33 tons were built. Due to the required installation area of up to several thousand square meters , such events often take place in sports, multi-purpose or exhibition halls.
Physical basics
There are no physical limits to the length of such a chain of events, since (explained using the domino game as an example) each falling stone gives off enough energy to the next to bring it down as well. Each domino has stored potential energy when it was set up and at the same time is in a metastable equilibrium of forces - the amount of stored energy can be released through the action of a smaller amount of kinetic energy . Since the kinetic energy of a falling domino is enough to knock down several others, the chain of events does not have to remain linear, but can split up into any number of chains and thus lead to an exponential increase in events. The chain of events is practically limited solely by the number of stones placed, their dimensions (if the size is finite, they can be arranged in a circle and thus lead away from a center; the spread would no longer be exponential, but only square) and the available ones Room.
Generally speaking, a domino effect can always be used if a. an initial event releases at least as much energy as must be used to bring it about immediately (including all losses due to friction, etc.), and b. the released energy triggers one or more subsequent events that also meet conditions a and b. If one of these conditions is not met at one point in the chain of events, it comes to a standstill. (Exception: When unequal events are chained, condition a does not need to be met in certain individual cases: whenever the triggering of the subsequent event consumes less energy than the triggering of the previous one. For a permanent chain of events, one of the subsequent events must then release more energy when expended on its creation.)
The domino effect gives the illusion that a “snap of the fingers” is enough to achieve an arbitrarily large effect. In fact, it only triggers a cascade of conversions of previously stored energy into kinetic energy. Taking the dominoes as an example, this means: To the work of snapping the fingers, that of setting up all the stones must be added.
Figurative meaning
Because of its clarity, the term domino effect is also used, for example, for social or political processes that consist of a series of mutually dependent events . In retrospect, domino effects can definitely be seen. The problem with planning and prognoses, however, is the “energy balance” of such social processes, which cannot be precisely quantified, and the fundamentally incomplete knowledge of all “dominoes”, their “position” in relation to one another, and thus the largely unpredictable variety of their possible interactions.
A well-known example of the transfer of the domino effect to political processes is the domino theory used by the US government from the 1950s onwards . She predicted that the communist overthrow in just one country in a region would practically inevitably lead to the victory of communism in other neighboring countries. This expected effect was justified with the alleged " populist force" of communism. The domino theory served the USA during the Cold War as a justification for the active containment ( containment policy ) or the violent pushing back ( rollback policy ) of left-wing political tendencies and movements worldwide. Together with the doctrine of strict anti-communism , it served, among other things, as one of the justifications for the participation of the USA in the Vietnam War and in many other conflicts, especially in Latin America , Southeast Asia and Africa.
In a later variant, the US government also put forward the domino theory as a justification for the third Gulf War it began against Iraq in 2003: The violent overthrow of Saddam Hussein's government and the subsequent democratization of Iraq should therefore trigger further democratization efforts in neighboring states, and thus in a domino effect in the long term the transformation of Middle Eastern dictatorships into democratic communities. This should also have cut the ground for Islamist terrorism . However, these considerations did not come true in the following years; on the contrary, Islamist-fundamentalist attacks even increased. It was not until the revolution in Tunisia in 2010/2011 that a domino effect was triggered in the Arab world and led to similar uprisings in many Arab countries.
In economics , the contagion effect (contagion effect ) is a sub-case of the domino effect. It describes situations in which an individual case (crisis of Lehman Brothers , Thailand ) spills over to an entire industry or region and triggers a banking crisis or - in the case of Thailand - the Asian crisis .
Accident
In the German Hazardous Incident Ordinance of April 26, 2000 (Federal Law Gazette I, page 603), domino effect is also a legal term that describes a situation in which an incident may cause further incidents in susceptible companies in the area. The operators of the companies in question are obliged to inform one another in such a case. In such a case, the authorities must inform the public (Section 6 in conjunction with Section 15 of the Ordinance on Incidents).
art
The film The Course of Things (1987) by Fischli and Weiß playfully shows a highly complex chain of events that are linked together over a period of around thirty minutes using the domino effect.
See also
- Cascade effect , avalanche effect , cascade risk
- Rube Goldberg machine
- Tipping point , tipping elements in the earth system
- Snowball effect , butterfly effect
