Butterfly Effect:
“A Sound of Thunder” was written in 1952 by Ray Bradbury. I read it in the 5th Grade, when I was 10 years old and did a book report on a cassette recorder. I wanted to be THE FUTURE.
It was a time travel story. They had to be very careful not to make any changes in the past or it would affect the future. Well, a butterfly got caught in an air pocket of the time ship and went back with them to dinosaur times.
They stepped on the butterfly that never should’ve been there and when they returned to the future, many things changed oddly, even if most things were the same.
While the Butterfly Effect wasn’t coined until the 1960s, named after the shape of the graph of chaos that looks like a butterfly’s wings, nevertheless, the Sound of Thunder is often credited with the idea of linking butterflies with unexpected futures based upon small changes.
I would not learn about Chaos Theory officially until my late teens, But it was very very familiar when I did and the notion of being careful with your little actions for how they may affect the future in significant ways has stayed with me. And now I know one of the sources for that idea. Thank you Ray Bradbury; I never would’ve expected it was you.