Everyone knows about the Butterfly effect!
But do you know the origin?
The Novel Determined tells about this short story called “A Sound of Thunder”!
This is often credited as the origin of the term “butterfly effect”, a concept of chaos theory in which the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in one part of the world could create a hurricane on the opposite side of the globe!
In the novella you have time travel for the rich! You can go back in time and shoot even T REX!
But you are specifically told to stay in the marked path and not even kill a MOUSE!
It has been explained so well on what would happen if you do!
The ‘GUIDE’ explains what happens if you kill on mouse and thus eliminate by default all the families of the families of the families of that one mouse!
With a stamp of one foot, you annihilate first one, then a dozen, then a thousand, a million, a billion possible mice!”
He then adds Because of that one mouse and its progenies who are dead you have a fox die! The foxes that’ll need those mice to survive and for want of ten mice, a fox dies!
For want of ten foxes a lion starves. For want of a lion, all manner of insects, vultures, infinite billions of life forms are thrown into chaos and destruction!
So eventually it all boils down to this acccodring to the ‘GUIDE’: fifty-nine million years later, a caveman, one of a dozen on the entire world, goes hunting wild boar or saber-toothed tiger for food!
By stepping on all the tigers in that region as a cascade of stepping on one single mouse! The caveman starves!
Now the ‘GUIDE’ speculates that the caveman, is not just any expendable man, no! He is an entire future nation!
From his loins would have sprung ten sons. From their loins one hundred sons, and thus onward to a civilization!
Destroy this one man, and you destroy a race, a people, an entire history of life. It is comparable to slaying some of Adam’s grandchildren.
The stomp of one foot, on one mouse, could start an earthquake, the effects of which could shake our earth and destinies down through Time, to their very foundations.
With the death of that one caveman, a billion others yet unborn are throttled in the womb! He even goes on to say that if he steps on a mouse and he would crush the Pyramids!
Unfortunately in spite of all the warnings, a tragedy does occur and when he returns back to the present time with a shock he realises that a dictator has become the PRESIDENT!
They investigate and see that while running all he did was to step on a BUTTERFLY!
The novel thus shows Bradbury’s concept of how the death of a butterfly in the past could have drastic changes in the future!
It was one of the first representation of the butterfly effect and is used as an example of how to consider chaos theory and the physics of time travel!
So if you do have a LEADER who you think is REALLY CRAZY! There is a possibility that a time travelling Physicist would have stepped on a BUTTERFLY!
Now if you ever get an opportunity to go back in time and ‘accidently’ step on a Butterfly; make sure it is an ‘ORANGE’ coloured one for no particular reason!
Do not step over any butterfly which could have lead to successful CEOs like Anand Gopal Mahindra!
Now hopefully the ‘Butterflies in your stomach’ have been taken care of!
SHubh Ratri!
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