Ray Bradbury, butterfly effect and the sound of thunder

The sound of thunder is one of the most epics short stories never wrote, but what is about?

In his basic definition, the chaos theory says that more a system is complex more a small variation can drive this system through the chaos.

If you study physics you can say me that the basic definition is: Everything goes through the chaos but this is a bit not even close to the meaning of the post so let’s go with the previous one.

You didn’t get? I made an example:
Imagine a bridge made by a single wooden board. Now if you hit the center of this board you’ll break this and for getting this result you essentially made a massive change in the system.

Imagine now a hundred card castle. If you take out a single card all the castle will collapse but in this case, you get the same result with a smaller variation.

There is a part of this theory who study the variation of a system through the dependence on initial conditions.

We know that science fiction is built on real science if not will be just fantasy.

And yeah. A prelude as «Small causes can have larger effects» that is the smaller sum of the theory, can open an infinity of narrative solutions and Ray Bradbury got the point really.

Time travel is the perfect way for evolving this concept.

So! Now follow me:
In the future, the hunters have the possibility to make safaris where is possible to kill a single animal who will die in few seconds… A dinosaur in his own time.

But what happens if for an error you smash a butterfly?

Nothing immediately but in the rally of millions of years that butterfly will be the starting brick of an unbelievable card castle of events that’ll bring to the mankind as we know today.

Well no more. Thanks, hunters!!!

Even Hiro Nakamura in Heroes touches the point of this possibility… Fortunately, he is more regarded than this idiots.

And a similar story which involves dinosaurs and time travel is the episode 2×21 of “The real adventure of Jonny Quest” that titled “The edge of yesterday”

The story is just a short story but in his be short it became a cult.

Well! I know nowadays, nobody gives a fuck about this story and the plot, but in the past, it was so cool to give the name to a whole mathematical study and was the base of the time travel fiction as we know today.

In fact, I guess that nobody knew that the “butterfly effect” name came from a few page story

At this point, I’ll accept any critics if you’ll tell me that there is something older than The sound of thunder that touch these points. Just actually I know this story as starting brick of such narrative structure.

«The first human isn’t born yet. The Pyramids are still in the earth, waiting to be cut out and built. Remember that. Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler… None of them exist»


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