The Butterfly Effect

The idea that one butterfly could eventually have a far-reaching ripple effect on subsequent historic events seems first to have appeared in a 1952 short story by Ray Bradbury about time travel (see Literature and print here) although Edward Lorenz made the term popular (see below). Lorenz noted in a publication for the New York Academy of Sciences that "One meteorologist remarked that if the theory were correct, one flap of a seagull's wings could change the course of weather forever." Later speeches and papers by Lorenz used the more poetic butterfly. According to Lorenz, upon failing to provide a title for a talk he was to present at the 139th meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1972, Philip Merilees concocted "Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?" as a title for the talk.

P.S. The term "butterfly effect" itself is related to the work of Edward Lorenz, and is based in Chaos Theory and sensitive dependence on initial conditions, first described in the literature by Jacques Hadamard in 1890^[1] and popularized by Pierre Duhem's 1906 book.