7 ms·
"It'll never work": a collection of failed predictions
- hyko 16y ago"Mathematics is inadequate to describe the universe" The jury is still out on that one.
- _delirium 16y agoIt also depends to some extent on whether you count interpretations as "within" mathematics. For example, Stephen Hawking's latest book clearly draws on a lot of mathematical models of the universe, but its main arguments are non-mathematized, philosophical ones. Arguably they're arguments over how to interpret the existing mathematical models (though some stray further from math than others), but the arguments themselves appear to live outside what you'd normally call mathematics. Interpretations of quantum mechanics fall into a similar camp. There is the actual formal theory of quantum mechanics, which is clearly mathematics; but something like the Copenhagen Interpretation is also attempting to "describe" the universe, but is forced to do it extra-mathematically, by attaching interpretations (which can't be mathematically proven) to the formal results. I suppose it also depends on what one means by "describe": does quantum mechanics fully "describe" the universe, or is it quantum mechanics plus an interpretation which describes the universe?
- wisty 16y agoMathematics will always be inadequate to describe mathematics, let alone the universe, as there will always be a need for new axioms. That's mathematically proven, so it must be true.
- mechanical_fish 16y agoAnd that is just the first half of the quote. It goes on: Also, mathematics may predict things which don't exist, or are impossible in nature. As a former experimental physicist I can't help but notice how true this is. ;)
- JoeAltmaier 16y agoPhysicists deal with impossible things every day - light is a particle And a wave, far-away objects can be receeding faster than the speed of light.
- dtc 16y agoHow are they impossible if they are happening?
- JoeAltmaier 16y agoIn the macroscopic world, they make no sense. Somebody said "the Universe isn't just stranger than you imagine; its stranger than you Can imagine"
- jules 16y agoEverything that is provably correct becomes mathematics. Of course physical laws are never provably correct.
- ugh 16y agoSo mathematics is not even adequate to describe the universe? “Adequate” doesn’t imply ”perfect“ for me.
- hyko 16y agoThe meaning of the sentence hinges on the word 'describe'. I took it to mean a complete description. You're right though, it could mean a description of any complexity, something Mathematics is well capable of.
- olalonde 16y ago(self-promotion) I wrote a somewhat related post a few days ago (Twitter predictions in the early days): http://syskall.com/twttr-and-the-benefit-of-hindsight http://syskall.com/twttr-and-the-benefit-of-hindsight
- sorbus 16y agoThe first quotation, from Lucius Annaeus Seneca, contains no prediction.
- wisty 16y agoSpace travel is utter bilge. - Dr. Richard van der Reit Wooley, Astronomer Royal, space advisor to the British government, 1956. (Sputnik orbited the earth the following year.) IIRC, this is a misquote. The original was something like "All this talk of space travel is utter bilge. It would cost as much as a major war to put a man on the Moon." Which was more or less correct.
- pierrefar 16y agoWhen did facts ever stop an opportunity to hype up a story? Anyway, for reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_van_der_Riet_Woolley http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_van_der_Riet_Woolley
- bonch 16y agoReminds me of the Bill Gates 640kb quote. Gates has denied saying it, but even if he had, it would have been an accurate statement at the time it was supposedly made.
- chc 16y agoThe 640 KB quote wasn't about the time is was supposedly made. That's why it's so laughable. It was "Nobody will ever need more than 640 KB."
- jayzee 16y agoSometimes you are glad that they were wrong and sometimes you are sad that they were not right. Automobiles will start to decline almost as soon as the last shot is fired in World War II. The name of Igor Sikorsky will be as well known as Henry Ford's, for his helicopter will all but replace the horseless carriage as the new means of popular transportation. Instead of a car in every garage, there will be a helicopter.... These 'copters' will be so safe and will cost so little to produce that small models will be made for teenage youngsters. These tiny 'copters, when school lets out, will fill the sky as the bicycles of our youth filled the prewar roads.
- api 16y agoYou really want your typical driver flying around in a helicopter? I think this is the reason we don't have flying cars. We could build them. We could do a lot of things. But nobody really wants them, given the danger they would pose. (Energy constraints are probably another reason, but secondary. There are flying car prototypes that get MPG numbers comparable to SUVs.)
- extension 16y agoAny flying car system I can conceive of would be vastly safer than the bloodbath caused by non-flying cars. And yes, we want them. Many times faster than ground transport, safely usable by any person young or old, no congestion, frees up the ground for other uses. Feasibiliy aside, it would be undeniably utopian.
- notahacker 16y agoI'm assuming your hypothetical flying cars transporting people around cities are dramatically safer than today's general aviation (light aircraft piloted largely by well-trained enthusiasts and professionals in controlled environments). If I had to bet it would be on the "driverless" car.
- nbashaw 16y agoCan you link to the flying car prototypes that you're referring to?
- api 16y agoThis just shows how difficult prediction is. For every one of these, there is an equally wrong wildly positive prediction. A few of those are included, like von Neumann's "nuclear power will make energy free!" prediction. The future will surprise. It will surprise us by what is possible, and by what isn't.
- stcredzero 16y agoWe entrepreneurs can actually analyze his mistake and profit from it! In this case, it was just mental laziness. Yes, even John von Neumann can be guilty of this. E=mc^2 implies a freaking huge ratio in your favor. That makes nuclear energy seem of "virtually limitless" abundance for the same reason that nuclear bombs seem like "virtually unstoppable" weapons. Yet, simple ball bearings or a complex mechanism like an Orion rocket pusher plate can survive close proximity to a nuclear explosion with some judicious engineering. If John von Neumann started looking closely at nuclear energy in the broader context of our industrial and political infrastructure, he might have come to a different conclusion. My conclusion is this: One of the best places for opportunities to hide is in the mistaken popular applications of basic principles and physical laws. This isn't to say that those principles and laws are incorrect, just that the way most people apply them either doesn't go far enough, or fails to also include an economic analysis. This tells us how to look for opportunities hiding behind other common misapplications of principles. (Not necessarily ones involved in nuclear energy.)
- stcredzero 16y agoOne "rock to look under" is the misapplication of scientific theory or a common misunderstanding of basic principles. (See: http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html) One famous example is Professor Joseph Le Conte's mistaken engineering analysis demonstrating the impossibility of flight. (See below.) Another common example is the use of the Halting Problem to rule out the entire notion of tools for detecting bugs in software. (Yes, I've had professors tell me this flat-out.) The Halting Problem doesn't rule out such programs, it only demonstrates that they can't be perfect. To date, there are lots of tools that do an imperfect but still valuable job, to the point where people can even charge for them. http://www.microquill.com/heapagent/ha_comp.htm http://www.microquill.com/heapagent/ha_comp.htm A major area where basic principles are misunderstood is in security. It's a truism that no security is perfect. However, it doesn't follow that no one is able to do online banking without instantly being hacked and robbed. Yet many who find the previous idea ridiculous also think that all "DRM doesn't work." That's simply not true. While it's true that all DRM can eventually be broken, it's not true that all of it instantly evaporates on contact with the internet. Breaking DRM involves a certain cost. If enough people are "willing to pay" the cost, then it will be broken. This is almost always true for big-budget hollywood movies. It's certainly not true for all digital content. ---- Professor Joseph Le Conte's mistaken engineering analysis Put these three indisputable facts together: One: There is a low limit of weight, certainly not much beyond 50 pounds, beyond which it is impossible for an animal to fly. Nature has reached this limit, and with her utmost effort has failed to pass it. Two: The animal machine is far more effective than any we can hope to make.; therefore the limit of the weight of a successful flying machine can not be more than fifty pounds. Three: The weight of any machine constructed for flying, including fuel and engineer, cannot be less than three or four hundred pounds. Is it not demonstrated that a true flying machine, self-raising, self-sustaining, self-propelling, is physically impossible? — Joseph Le Conte, Professor of Natural History at the University of California, Popular Science Monthly, November 1888
- neilk 16y agoI find Le Conte's reasoning interesting. It's almost seductive even now. He's absolutely right that we don't have systems which approach the efficiency of the "animal machine". But that efficiency is due to our remarkable performances on nothing but a few grams of low-grade fuel. It doesn't say anything about what would happen if you had some really high-grade fuel. Sugar has about 18.8 joules per gram. Kerosene, which was pretty well known in 1888, has almost 46 000 joules per gram. Perhaps we can extract some general principles about prediction from that, like: given a complex enough system, if one factor changes by two or more orders of magnitude, previously observed behavior is useless as a guide to the future. I'm fudging on 'complex enough', though. Trigonometry works just fine with triangles the size of pencils or skyscrapers, but predicting the scope of inventions doesn't seem to work well when one factor changes radically.
- kingofspain 16y agoComputers in the future may...perhaps only weigh 1.5 tons. That's hardly a howler is it?! I see nothing suggesting that 1.5 tons is the endpoint or that we'll be using heavy computers in The Year 2000. Will those people suggesting we'd one day have a supercomputer in our pockets be laughed at when we have microscopic omniputers floating around our then-useless brains?
- mkr-hn 16y agoThe kind of computers Popular Science was thinking of in 1949 are what we call supercomputers today. They didn't have anything to distinguish it from, so "computer" was the only term to use. IBM's Watson is powered by 90 of these (according to the wiki): http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/hardware/750/index.html http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/hardware/750/index.html The datasheet says they weigh 120 pounds. 90 of those would be 10,800 pounds, or 5.4 tons. We're still a bit above the prediction, but I think Watson could be done in 1.5 tons of gear with some more development work focused on that. I'd need to see the Popular Science article, but I doubt they were envisioning a personal computer. They might have been envisioning a community computer though. 1.5 tons would probably be enough for that in terms of a shared file/message board/connectivity supercomputer for a city block's worth of people.
- patrickk 16y agoProfessor Frink's (from The Simpsons) prediction on where computers would be in one hundred years: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DE7mi-gdIYw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DE7mi-gdIYw
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- j_baker 16y agoClarke'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 probably wrong.
- zepolen 16y agoWhat about: It's impossible to go faster than the speed of light?
- SoftwareMaven 16y agoBut it is possible to go faster than the speed of light. As space expands, it pushes the rest of space (and therefore its contents) apart, potentially faster than the speed of light.
- mkeblx 16y agoHence the "probably"'s.
- ecubyx 16y agoYou have to be careful in how you define speed before answering this question: do you mean group velocity or phase velocity? And faster than the local velocity of light or the value in vacuo? It is indeed possible for a particle to travel at a speed greater than the local phase velocity of light through a medium. This is what brings about Čerenkov radiation, which is that eerie blue glow associated with the core of nuclear reactors.
- ghostDancer 16y agoNot really scientific but a good quote ;- ) : No matter how fast light travels it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it. ~Terry Pratchett
- me_again 16y agoClarke's law is catchy, but I don't buy it. Unfortunately, elderly scientists are unreliable in both positive and negative predictions, especially outside their specialty: for example, Luc Montagnier's recent hokum or Linus Pauling's vitamin C megadosage scheme.
- maxer 16y agoa friend who is MD/owner of a cloud storage service for corporate told me that his career teacher at school told him not to do computers as a subject as they would never take over.. this was in the early 90s
- dkarl 16y agoAnimals, which move, have limbs and muscles. The earth does not have limbs and muscles; therefore it does not move. I wonder if this sounded as dumb back then as it does now? What about things that do not move under their own power, yet move nonetheless, such as waves and wind? What about flowers that close every night and open in every morning? What about the fact that they knew almost nothing about the earth deeper than the tiniest scratch on its surface -- perhaps there are muscles of a sort under there? What about the "fact," as they would have seen it, that God can make anything move however he wants, and that he might have a special mechanism that makes planets and stars move but does not apply the same way to things on Earth? And did he really believe that the moon and stars have limbs and muscles? I think this illustrates how people can get away with any possible idiocy as long as they are on the right side of an issue. This is why scientists care about the timing of publication: they look a lot more competent if they publish their results at a time when everyone will tend to believe they are correct, instead of at a time when everyone will pick their paper apart looking for flaws (or simply assume the flaws are there.)
- davnola 16y agoAlthough I cannot find the original text, I expect the word "move" is not a precise translation because he goes on to say: > Animals, which move, have limbs and muscles; the earth has no limbs or muscles, therefore it does not move. It is angels who make Saturn, Jupiter, the sun, etc., turn round. If the earth revolves, it must also have an angel in the centre to set it in motion; but only devils live there; it would therefore be a devil who would impart motion to the earth.... > The planets, the sun, the fixed stars, all belong to one species - namely, that of stars. It seems, therefore, to be a grievous wrong to place the earth, which is a sink of impurity, among these heavenly bodies, which are pure and divine things.'' A sink of impurity. There's a data point that has lasted through the ages.
- dkarl 16y agoA sink of impurity. There's a data point that has lasted through the ages. I wonder, then, why he didn't find it plausible that it is devils or fallen angels who move the earth?
- cwbrandsma 16y agoMy problem isn't in people wanting things that are impossible (at first glance), the problem is they want them done in so short an amount of time that they are impossible.
- brownleej 16y agoMy favorite quote like this is from Ed Colligan, who was at the time the CEO of Palm. When asked in late 2006 about the prospect of Apple entering the mobile phone market: "We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone. PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in."
- lallysingh 16y agoTo be fair (and tease a bit), one can argue that Apple didn't make a decent /phone/ until this verizon deal :-P
- aseemk 16y agoI've lurked Hacker News for a long time, but never posted or commented until now. This is one of the most inspirational things I've ever read. Thank you for posting.
- egor83 16y agoYou're welcome :)
- cj 16y agoThese three arguments against the use of gas street lights in 1878 demonstrate why change is so difficult, even today: 1) Theological: It is an intervention in God's order, which makes nights dark... 2) Medical: It will be easier for people to be in the streets at night, afflicting them with colds... 3) Philosophical-moral: Morality deteriorates through street lighting. Artificial lighting drives out fear of the dark, which keeps the weak from sinning...
- ibejoeb 16y agoI actually came to discuss the relative merits of this perspective. Raise your hand if you have a sleep disorder...
- kingkawn 16y ago"In my own time there have been inventions of this sort, transparent windows, tubes for diffusing warmth equally through all parts of a building, short-hand which has been carried to such a pitch of perfection that a writer can keep pace with the most rapid speaker. But the inventing of such things is drudgery for the lowest slaves; philosophy lies deeper... - Roman poet Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 B.C.E.-65 C.E.)" This quote is in a way a direct refutation of the work done by many here in programming, and this perspective has its merits and flaws. But I don't see exactly how its a prediction of anything.
- _delirium 16y agoYeah, that seems to just be a subjective judgment, based on information that he did in fact have. I suspect many people here think Roman-era technology (transparent windows, tubes for diffusing warmth, aqueducts, etc.) is at least as interesting as Rome's contribution to philosophy and literature. Seneca disagreed. But neither view has a lot to do with predictions. It's not as if he was arguing that technological inventions could never have a big impact, and then history proved him wrong. He saw many inventions in his own day that did have a big impact; he was just arguing that philosophy is nonetheless a higher calling. If that's wrong, it's for reasons other than being a misprediction.
- dasil003 16y agoComputers are already our lowest slaves, and I think perhaps with time they could become more efficient inventors than we are, so I'm not ready to write off this prediction yet.
- davidmathers 16y agoThis fool wishes to reverse the entire science of astronomy; but the sacred scripture tells us [Joshua 10:13] that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, not the earth. Whenever I see that quote I picture Martin Luther as the "Get A BRAIN! MORANS" guy.
- noinput 16y agoIf I threw together a quick Android/iPhone app that allowed for user contributed geek/hacker/internets quotes that we could all contribute to, would anyone care? There are a couple out there but I'd prefer one community based which had entires that didn't suck. Free of course.
- egor83 16y agoWhy limit to Adroid/iPhone? Maybe a website (which can be accessed from the mobile) is a better idea. On a second thought, isn't bash.org exactly that?
- neilk 16y agoA common theme of failed predictions is the "X are interesting toys, but not suitable for Y" statement. Let's unpack that statement. A toy is something which fascinates the mind in some way. An "interesting toy" suggests something that has a scope of operation within some small realm. I'll posit that Legos are an "interesting toy" whereas a toy car is "just a toy". Substituted, this is now "X are things which have great possibilities within a smaller realm of operation, but are not suitable for Y". The problem should now be obvious. The next question is to ask what it would take to scale the X's realm up. If it's economically feasible, it will happen. The use of "toy" is the rhetorical trick here, because it implies the thing in question has permanently limited scope, and it might not be. (There's also the implied put-down, that those who find them worthwhile are childish.) So what things today are "interesting toys" but not suitable for "real work"? Mobile devices? Social networks?
- InclinedPlane 16y agoThe underlying fallacy is in imagining that there is some strict segregation between "toys" and tools. When a tool is too expensive and only moderately practical it is deemed a toy. But toys of such sort can become cheaper and evolve in function and scale, becoming imminently practical in the process. Many of the most practical tools began as toys of such sort: the steam engine, the automobile, the airplane, the laser, the rocket, personal computer, etc. Today the premier example would be mobile devices and mobile OS tablets. They have enormous potential, even the potential to replace traditional PCs, but today they are often regarded as toys.
- Tyrant505 16y agoGreat collection! And the Lock Haven url made me smile.
- tlb 16y agoThe most interesting predictions at least got right what would be the hard parts of the problem. Simon Newcombe's full article points to landing as the most difficult part of flying, which turned out to be the case. Landing technique depends on ground effect and stall, which wasn't well understood. I'm still amazed that people spend so much time staring at plywood boxes.
- philsalesses 16y ago"When an experienced scientist says something is impossible, they are almost always wrong. When an experienced scientist says something is possible, they are almost always right" - my memory, but almost certainly somebody else first
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- 6ren 16y agoTwo years later we ourselves made flights. This demonstration of my impotence as a prophet gave me such a shock that ever since I have distrusted myself and avoided all predictions. Wilbur Wright Isn't the below an over-optimistic failed prediction? a few decades hence, energy may be free—just like the unmetered air.... John von Neumann
- bonch 16y agoMy favorite has always been the one by Wilbur Wright: "I confess that in 1901 I said to my brother Orville that man would not fly for fifty years. Two years later we ourselves made flights. This demonstration of my impotence as a prophet gave me such a shock that ever since I have distrusted myself and avoided all predictions."
- Devilboy 16y agoHeavier-than-air flying machines are impossible. - Lord Kelvin I wonder how he explained birds?
- zeteo 16y agoMany of these are not even predictions, and most are badly sourced and out of context. E.g. the guy who foresaw no further progress for engines of war in 84 CE was definitely right for the next few hundred years. But one quotation that I'm really taking issue with is the one about Sir Walter Scott dismissing public gas lighting. Far from that, Scott was actually a dedicated promoter of gas lighting in its early years, as evidenced by his tenure as the First Chairman of the Edinburgh Gas Street Lighting Company: http://www.scotlandmag.com/magazine/issue30/12007614.html http://www.scotlandmag.com/magazine/issue30/12007614.html But when was a little bit of historical research an obstacle in the way of feeling good at the expense of people who lived hundreds of years ago?
- beagle3 16y agoPrediction is hard. Even more so if it is about the future.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- arvinjoar 16y agoOne of the automobile quotes is false[1] [1] http://www.snopes.com/history/document/horseless.asp http://www.snopes.com/history/document/horseless.asp