The butterfly effect in real life

There is a story of Ray Bradbury that I love. It’s called “A Thunderous Sound.” In the year 2055, a hunter pays 10 thousand dollars to travel back in time in a time machine and participate in a safari to kill a Tyrannosaurus Rex.

The rules are strict: you cannot do anything outside of what the guides tell you if you do not want to alter the course of history (Don’t even step on the grass!). But once there, the hunter gets scared, regrets it, takes the wrong path back to the machine and the expedition goes out of control.

When the protagonist returns to the present, he notices that everything is slightly different, from the language to the candidate who won the elections. And he discovers the reason: there are stickies attached to the sole of his boots. the remains of a prehistoric butterfly that was not supposed to die.

“A Thunderous Sound” was published in 1952 and is considered the first story that works on chaos theory and the butterfly effect. According to this idea, any modification to a system, no matter how minimal, can unleash a series of consequences capable of altering the whole.

There is something of this in “Prussian Blue”a story by Benjamín Labatut included in his exciting book “Un verdor terrible” (Anagrama).

At the beginning of the 18th century, a Swiss paint manufacturer, Johann Jacob Diesbach, was trying to synthetically create a red pigment to replace the carmine used at that time, which came from American insects and was monopolized by the crown of Spain. but by mistake he arrived at another result: “A blue so dazzling that Diesbach thought he had found ‘hsbd-iryt’, the original color of the sky.” I call it Prussian Blue.

In 1782, a German chemist, Carl Wilhelm Scheele, used a spoon containing traces of sulfuric acid to stir a jar of Prussian Blue and created, in this way, cyanide.

Already in the 20th century, another German chemist, Fritz Haber, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1918 for an innovation that made it possible to extract nitrogen from the air and thus develop new and effective fertilizers, He used cyanide to make a very powerful pesticide that he named Zyclon..

A converted Christian with Jewish roots and faced with anti-Semitic persecution by Adolf Hitler, Haber decided to emigrate from Germany in 1933 and died of a heart attack the following year.

He did not see that “the pesticide he had helped create would be used by the Nazis in their gas chambers to murder his half-sister, his brother-in-law, his nephews, and so many other Jews who died squatting, with stiff muscles and skin covered in red and green spots.”

Haber, says Labatut, left a letter to his wife in which “an unbearable guilt”not in reference to Zyclon, of course, but to the sensational fertilizer created with his method of extracting nitrogen from the air, since he understood that the plants were going to end up growing without restraint and suffocating any other form of life under “a terrible greenery.”

Look at everything that happened after that Diesbach mistake.