Chapter 42 Notes

The Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings. Josh says, thinking about the effects of First Nudge, “It’s a sobering lesson on the flap of a butterfly’s wings.” The quote was coined by Edward Lorenz while working on Chaos Theory about 10 years after Bradbury’s story was published. He initially used the phrase the flap of a seagull’s wings, but changed this to a butterfly, when describing the effects on weather patterns caused by tiny variations in the initial starting state of the system.

In Ray Bradbury’s A Sound Of Thunder, a time-traveler, restricted to observing a prehistoric scene from within the machine, steps off it for a moment and onto a butterfly. He returns to an altered modern reality.