I was just reading how Einstein predicted gravity waves a century ago and it was only proven this year. Are there other similarly long-outstanding scientific predictions waiting to be proved? Which has been outstanding the longest? Not mathematical hypotheses, thank you.
Not really an earth-shaking prediction. If two remote objects influence each other, and you can’t think of any other way, it is easy to postulate “waves” of some kind. Like light and sound. If waves are your default hypothetical mechanism, some of them are going to eventually turn out to be correct, even if it takes a century to nail them down.
Yes. Einstein was, as always, just stating the obvious. :rolleyes:
I don’t know if we can date the origin of the prediction, but: Extra-terrestrial life.
It also depends on what you count as “confirmation” of gravity waves. The direct detection was only a little more than a year ago, but their effect on the evolution of the binary pulsar has been known for decades.
Observing behaviour consistent with something isn’t the same as observing that something.
A higher being created earth and the rest of the solar system.
Technically, they didn’t observe gravity waves, they observed behavior consistent with them.
I think we’ll be waiting forever on that one.
How do you observe something? Like, when you look at a rock, and observe the rock, what is actually happening? Your brain is constructing a mental image of that rock, based on nerve impulses from your optic nerve, based on neurons firing on your retina, based on photons changing a chemical from one form to another, based on photons bouncing off the rock, based on photons emitted from the sun.
That’s a pretty long chain of behavior consistent with a rock being there, that gives you a justified belief that a rock exists there.
Magnetic monopoles.. It has never been observed, and probably doesn’t even exist.
I’m sure there are other “predictions” which are difficult to prove wrong, but probably are wrong. Like the idea that there are whole star systems or galaxies made of antimatter.
So whose prediction was it and why was it restrictive to the solar system and not the universe.
Doesnt make sense for this being to just create the solar system from the universe. There would have been an almighty fight from the original creator of the universe when some other being meddles with his creation.
That’s neither scientific nor a prediction.
Not likely to ever be confirmed or disproved by direct observation; but there’s the theory of the heat death of the universe, first proposed by Lord Kelvin in 1851.
Have we proved that the number pi is irrational yet? … or it that too mathematical for the OP?
It’s clearly irrational- it just goes on and on and on, never repeating itself. Just CRAZY!
I dunno if he was first, but there was Bruno in 1584.
But wasn’t Bruno’s idea theological, not scientific? Or did it, perhaps, partake just barely enough of non-theological reasoning to count as scientific?
I don’t know. He wasn’t reasoning from data. I don’t think he proposed a way to test it, and if he had tried he would have learned that he was wrong about there being “air” between the stars loooong before he proved or disproved life on other worlds.
His method of reasoning doesn’t seem to dissimilar from modern scientific reasoning, though. He intuited that the sun could look like a star if seen from very far away, and that therefore stars could look like suns if seen close up. Once you realize that, it seems quite scientifically reasonable to suppose they could be earthlike unless specific reasons for them to NOT be earthlike are considered.
I don’t know, but I guess he probably didn’t engage in considering the reasons exoplanets might not be earthlike, or attempt to calculate the probability that an earthlike exoplanet might orbit a given star, so that is less *scientific *than it might be. However, given the state of the art, that all would have been just guessing anyway. We could do little better just 50 years ago.
I guess I’m saying that Bruno’s theories about the universe being the same everywhere don’t sound very much different than Einstein (and others) assuming an isotropic universe. (Less the maths of course.)