Scientific Prediction Quotes

Science is a little bit more than a wonderful way of modelling and predicting; it's a wonderful technical abstraction. I think science is a really wonderful technical abstraction.

The thing about a theory in science is it allows you make predictions. Evolutionary theory allows us to predict what apples will taste good next harvest.

In so far as such a theory is empirically correct it will also tell us what empirical facts it should be possible to observe in a given set of circumstances.

Unlike science, creationism cannot predict anything, and it cannot provide satisfactory answers about the past.

For me the problem of induction is a problem about the world: a problem of how we, as we are now (by our present scientific lights), in a world we never made, should stand better than random, or coin-tossing chances changes of coming out right when we predict by inductions. . . .

When we initially proposed LIGO, the only sources that we were really contemplating were supernovae. We thought we would see something like one a year, maybe even ten a year.

All the scientist creates in a fact is the language in which he enunciates it. If he predicts a fact, he will employ this language, and for all those who can speak and understand it, his prediction is free from ambiguity. Moreover, this prediction once made, it evidently does not depend upon him whether it is fulfilled or not.

Unfortunately, The End of Nature turns out to be correct, although I wish it were not so. The only places that I was incorrect was, as with environmental science at the time, the estimation of the speed at which we see the effects of global warming.

All Science is necessarily prophetic, so truly so, that the power of prophecy is the test, the infallible criterion, by which any presumed Science is ascertained to be actually & verily science. The Ptolemaic Astronomy was barely able to prognosticate a lunar eclipse; with Kepler and Newton came Science and Prophecy.

In effect, we have redefined the task of science to be the discovery of laws that will enable us to predict events up to the limits set by the uncertainty principle.

We are just a blip. I found it very interesting when Clive [Oppenheimer] interviewed the Ethiopian scientists and asked them, "Do we have another 100,000 years?" In their calculation, mankind will be entering a very critical phrase a thousand years from now.

If we knew all the laws of Nature, we should need only fact, or the description of one actual phenomenon, to infer all the particular results at that point.

Prediction is certainly a valuable goal in science, but not the only one. Explanation is also important, and there are plenty of sciences that do a lot of explaining and not much predicting.

The paradigm of physics - with its interplay of data, theory and prediction - is the most powerful in science.

I had a bet with Gordon Kane of Michigan University that the Higgs particle wouldn't be found.

Just by studying mathematics we can hope to make a guess at the kind of mathematics that will come into the physics of the future... If someone can hit on the right lines along which to make this development, it may lead to a future advance in which people will first discover the equations and then, after examining them, gradually learn how to apply them... My own belief is that this is a more likely line of progress than trying to guess at physical pictures.

Physics as we know it will be over in six months - Max Born

For years, my early work with Roger Penrose seemed to be a disaster for science. It showed that the universe must have begun with a singularity, if Einstein's general theory of relativity is correct. That appeared to indicate that science could not predict how the universe would begin.

Perhaps... some day the precision of the data will be brought so far that the mathematician will be able to calculate at his desk the outcome of any chemical combination, in the same way, so to speak, as he calculates the motions of celestial bodies.

Quantification, experimentation, rigor, repetition, prediction - all of these are part of the experimental sciences. There's an iconography also namely man, and I do mean males in white coats who spin dials and wait for numbers to appear.

You should never bet against anything in science at odds of more than about 1012 to 1.

The faculty of art is to change events; the faculty of science is to foresee them. The phenomena with which we deal are controlled by art; they are predicted by science.

In order to predict effectively, we need to use science. And the reason that we need to use science is because then we can reproduce what we're doing; it's not just wisdom or guesswork. And if we can predict, then we can engineer the future.