Extreme instability of the horocycle flow

Let g be aC ³ negatively curved Riemannian metric on a compact connected orientable surfaceS. LetB be the collection of all metrics resulting from sufficiently small conformal changes of the metricg. (1) Then there is a constantA > 0 such that ifB then the (bar d) distance between the horocycle flow? _t (Margulis parametrization) of (S, ?) and the rescaled horocycle flowh _ct of (S, g) is at leastA (?c > 0). No other dynamical system is known to have such extreme instability. (2) Fix ε > 0. Then there is anN > 0 so that if we are given samples {ξ} ₀ ^N {η} ₀ ^N which arose from the horocycle flows corresponding to two of the metrics?, g ∈B, then either the two samples are (bar d) farther thanA/2 apart or the two surfaces are closer than ε. This holds even if these samples are slightly inaccurate.