tbe

A butterfly lands in Central Park. It stretches in the warm sunshine and contentedly flaps its wings. This motion creates a tiny current of air, sufficient enough to divert the course of an airborne spore. The spore lands beside a pathway and germinates.

One year later the spore has grown into a flowering vine. It spreads out across an adjacent path. A jogger fails to notice it, trips, and fractures her shin. As luck would have it, she works for the Mayor's office, where she has some influence. A program of defoliation is begun to eradicate all traces of the vine from Central Park.

Another year passes, and although the vine has been eradicated, the process has killed off a species of beetle that at one time thrived in the park. The beetle was the sole source of nutrition for the black-backed woodpecker. The woodpeckers, therefore, are forced to find other sources of food. They make a nuisance of themselves by raiding trashcans, harassing hot dog sellers and creating havoc in the city. However, they cannot adapt and soon begin to die off.


Now, the black-backed woodpecker is remarkable in that it usually expires mid-air. New York suddenly finds itself plagued by falling birds as the dead woodpeckers plummet from the sky. One falling bird strikes a pedestrian who dies on the way to the emergency room. As it turns out, this was the only man alive who knew the formula for Mountain Dew, every teen's favorite soft drink. Teens everywhere fail to get the caffeine boost they are so accustomed to and grades across the country plummet along with the woodpeckers. America goes stupid, all over the flutter of an insect's wings.

This is the Butterfly Effect. Although seemingly far-fetched, TBE is the basis for an important science known as Chaos Theory. But is the world this fragile? Just some food for thought. Even when it comes to Mountain Dew: This too shall pass.  Today we explored Ray Bradbury's Butterfly Effect Effect story, "A Sound of Thunder."  When the story was written there was as yet little written or research about Chaos Theory or bte, but Bradbury's imagination as a sci fi writer was astute and, like Jules Verne, HG Wells and Isaac Asimov, Bradbury used his knowledge of science to predict the future.