[Ads-l] butterfly effect

[Laurence Horn]

I always assumed that that 1952 Bradbury story (in which--spoiler alert--a
butterfly *is* carelessly killed by time travelers, radically altering the
present time for the worse upon their return) was the origin. But I see
it's much more complicated, and it seems as though the
mathematician/meteorologist E. N. Lorenz should get some of the credit,
along with The Phantom Tollbooth:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect. Perhaps there's a
distinction to be made between two kinds of butterfly effects in the
Bradbury-style time-travel cases vs. the Lorenz-style weather-based cases.

LH

On Thu, Jan 29, 2026 at 10:20 PM Bill Mullins <amcombill at hotmail.com> wrote:

> OED has [1972] and 1976
>
> OED has probably considered and rejected Ray Bradbury's 1952 story "A
> Sound of Thunder" for a bracketed cite (Argosy, 10/1952):  "Killing one
> butterfly couldn’t be that important! Could it?"
>
> I suggest, however:
> [1969 Bull. Am. Meteor. Soc. 289
> Or, would the flutter of a butterfly's wings ultimately amplify to the
> point where the numerical simulation departs from reality, so that there
> will come the time when they must be randomly related to each other?
>
> https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/50/5/1520-0477-50_5_286.xml?tab_body=pdf
> ]
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org