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 it through the chaos.
And yes, I know that 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.
I made an example to clarify it:
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.
Now this is Chaos theory and there is a part of it which study the variation of a system through the dependence on initial conditions.
If you imagine the sentence “Small causes can have larger effects” it can open an infinity of narrative solutions and Ray Bradbury find a really good one.
Time travel is the perfect way for evolving this concept.
So! Now follow me:
In the future, hunters have the possibility to make safaris where is possible to kill a T-rex that will eventually die in a few seconds of natural cases.
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.
So if you take the butterfly out of the equation, the castle fall apart.
Even Hiro Nakamura in Heroes touches the point of this possibility… Fortunately, he is more regarded than trained hunters.
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 butit became a cult, In fact, I guess that nobody knew that the butterfly effect came from this very story.
I’ll end with a short line from it
«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»
-ldmarchesi
I am in need of writing this post because since I read the book a couple of days ago, I am drowning in this tide . . .
The three-body problem is a Chinese sci-fi masterpiece that I suggest everybody who loves the genre to read, have a different point of view on many things.