Ten years before Lorenz elaborated chaos theory as supported by his own experimental data, Ray Bradbury published his short story A Sound of Thunder. In the story, time travelers accidentally kill a butterfly on a visit to the prehistoric past and thereby alter the next 65 million years of history. I have wondered whether students of chaos theory named the “butterfly effect” after Bradbury’s hapless insect.
Ten years before Lorenz elaborated chaos theory as supported by his own experimental data, Ray Bradbury published his short story A Sound of Thunder. In the story, time travelers accidentally kill a butterfly on a visit to the prehistoric past and thereby alter the next 65 million years of history. I have wondered whether students of chaos theory named the “butterfly effect” after Bradbury’s hapless insect.