Making predictions

Yes, it's been a bigger time gap than most, because in Covid-19 time, I have been clearing my back burner of partly done books. More of the current time-stealer in the near future.

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Out there, somewhere, there is a discovery, an observation, a measurement that does not quite fit the present model for something. There is an idea, a notion, a hunch that will some day become a great discovery of science. I have no idea how long it will take for us to realise that it is both a discovery and a great discovery, but it will occur to us one day that we ought to have seen it coming.

I have no intention of trying to predict what it might be, because as Niels Bohr used to say, making predictions is problematical, especially about the future. Bohr always said he got it from Robert Storm Petersen, who apparently got it from somebody else.

Some people out there will already have predicted it: in 1906, rocket scientist Robert Goddard was thinking of the energy in a gram of radium and wondering if it could be used to power a rocket. In 1913, H. G. Wells was describing the dropping of an atom bomb, though he thought the target would be Berlin. Nobody paid attention.

Most predictions miss the mark. For the past hundred years, every depiction of the future has offered us food pills, flying cars and easy access to space, and none of those has happened.

Then again, remember Arthur C. Clarke’s First Law: When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

They say Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, said in 1943: “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”

who could have guessed that two World War II developments, jet engines and computers, would lead to us booking our overseas holidays online in the 21st century?

When scientists get old, they often become fixed in their ways. They make dogmatic statements, and expect everybody to accept what they say, but more often than not, they turn out to be disastrously wrong. Take these examples:

• In 1797, farmers in America rejected a new cast-iron plough, saying it would stimulate weeds and poison the crops.

• The patent for the radio valve (the thermionic valve, the thing we used before the invention of the transistor) was not renewed when it ran out in 1907. Nobody could find a use for the Edison effect until a few years later.

• During World War II (when the first atom bombs were exploded), an admiral reassured the American vice-president: “Atomic bombs won’t go off, and I speak as an explosives expert.” (Even though H. G. Wells had predicted atomic bombs in his novel The World Set Free, as early as 1913!)

• A few years earlier, Ernest Rutherford, New Zealand’s greatest scientist, and one of the greatest scientists of this century, said “The energy produced by breaking down the atom is a poor kind of a thing. Anyone who expects a source of power from transformation of these atoms is talking moonshine.”

• Twelve years before the first moon landing, and just after the first Russian satellite was launched, the Astronomer Royal of Great Britain commented that generations would pass before people landed on the moon, and even if they did, there was little chance they would ever get back to earth. (In fairness, the Astronomer Royal was being political, as funds were being diverted into rocketry that he thought should have been going to astronomy.)

The moral of this list of disasters: keep an open mind, because things may change sooner than you think. And if you have to make a prediction, try to make sure nobody writes it down! But if you want to see science flourish, don’t let such fears stop you from making or drawing inferences.