The Ripple Effect In Ray Bradbury's

1474 Words6 Pages
The encounter with the Tyrannosaurus forms the heart of the story with Bradbury’s eloquent prose transporting the reader along with the hunting expedition sixty-million years into the past. “It came on great oiled, resilient, striding legs. It towered thirty feet above half of the trees, a great evil god, folding its delicate watchmaker’s claws close to its oily reptilian chest. Each lower leg was a piston, a thousand pounds of white bone, sunk in thick ropes of muscle, sheathed over in a gleam of pebbled skin like the mail of a terrible warrior. Each thigh was a tone of meat, ivory, and steel mesh. And from the great breathing cage of the upper body those two delicate arms dangles out front, arms with hands which might pick up and examine…show more content…
It seems more likely that true effect might be equally as dramatic, but unfolding over time in a much more dynamic way. Using Bradbury’s example a lack of mice might mean something other than the fox evolves and thrives on the land, or perhaps the fox adapts to another food source altogether. The climax of the story involves the return of the hunting party to the office of Time Safari Inc. which still oddly enough still exists, but the language has evolved differently. But the immediate thing was the sign painted on the office wall, the same sign he had read earlier today on first entering. Somehow, the sign had…show more content…
The ending suggests that while the players remain the same, namely the presidential candidates Keith and Deutscher, that their environment and the evolution of the human language has been influenced. It's an interesting coincidence that Bradbury chose a butterfly to symbolize the chaotic effect multiplied over time. The term Butterfly Effect did not originate with this tale, but rather was coined after MIT research meteorologist Edward Lorenz who discovered in the early 1960s that small variations in his computer model caused wildly divergent results. Lorenz later went on to write a seminal paper on Chaos Theory based on his experience. Bradbury's butterfly and dinosaur hunting time travelers did have another influence on popular culture though, namely The Simpsons and the epsiode "Time and Punishment" which was part of Season 6's Treehouse of Horror V. In the episode Homer accidently discovers time travel when he jams a fork in a broken toaster trying to fix it. Homer's first unplanned trip to the past takes him to prehistoric times. Homer arrives in the dinosaur age. Homer: I've gone back to the time when dinosaurs weren't just confined to

More about The Ripple Effect In Ray Bradbury's

Open Document