Oldest outstanding scientific prediction?

Factual Questions
21

Correction: As my old advisor used to put it, we know that magnetic monopoles exist; there just might be a very small number of them, such as zero.

That is to say, unless a lot of what we know about physics is very wrong indeed, it should be possible to produce magnetic monopoles under sufficiently-extreme conditions (we don’t know exactly how extreme is needed, but we can put some bounds on it on both sides). But those conditions are, so far as we know, nonexistent now. They did exist at one time in the Universe, but it’s expanded enough since then that the expected number of them in the entire observable Universe could be as low as 1. And an expected number of 1 means that there’s a pretty good possibility that the actual number would be 0.

That said, there has been at least one detection event of a magnetic monopole. Of course, nobody actually believes that we were lucky enough to detect the one singular magnetic monopole in the entire Universe. The possibilities, in order of decreasing probability, are roughly that it was some sort of glitch in the detection apparatus, it was a hoax, or magnetic monopoles are a lot more common than the worst-case estimates (though still quite rare). And I don’t think that anyone’s really betting on that last possibility, cool though it would be.

22

Pi was proved to be irrational 250 years ago Proof that π is irrational - Wikipedia and proven to be transcendental 130 years ago Lindemann–Weierstrass theorem - Wikipedia

23

Thanks for the correction!

I guess tachyons are more along the lines of what I was thinking of.

24

It could be a scientific hypothesis, however, if the people who were supporting it made additional predictions which distinguished it from “the solar system formed naturally” which we could either verify or falsify to bolster our confidence in one theory over the other.

Basically, it works like this: A hypothesis is a proposed explanation for something we observe. We can usually generate multiple possible hypotheses to explain any observation, so to rule out competing hypotheses, we have to think through the implications of each to generate new predictions which, if true, would be evidence in favor of one hypothesis over all of the others. Those predictions guide experimentation: We run specific experiments with those predictions in mind, in an attempt to rule out hypotheses.

For example, if you see a smashed mailbox, you can hypothesize that a person with a baseball bat in a car hit it, or that a meteor hit it. If a car hit it, you can predict that there will be tire tracks leading up to the box; if a meteor hit it, you can predict that there will be strange rock fragments nearby. Each of those predictions distinguishes the hypothesis it came from, in that verifying one of them is stronger evidence for one hypothesis over the other. In addition, each of those predictions suggested experiments to run, such as looking for tire tracks near the mailbox.

Of course, the people who say “God did it” or the equivalent refuse to make any such predictions, and then they say that since they made no predictions, their explanation cannot be falsified, so they win. In science, of course, saying a theory is unfalsifiable is one of the strongest criticisms you can level at it: It means it cannot be used to generate new predictions, so it can’t generate new experiments, so it’s a dead-end, epistemologically speaking. It’s infertile, a sterile idea which can generate no new advances, merely restatements of the axioms and corollaries, and the occasional religious war.

So, to answer the topic, no, it isn’t a prediction, and it cannot be used to make predictions. It could be scientific, but the people who hold to it won’t make it scientific, so it just lays there, dead.

25

Maybe it could be called “philosophical” reasoning, more concrete than theological, but lacking the evidence that would make it scientific.

I know that part of his reasoning was theological, having to do with God’s plenitude. God wouldn’t limit himself to only one world, because God isn’t limited. But an argument from “lots and lots of stars out there” is reason-based, and not a theological point a priori.

26

It took over 130 years for one of Darwin’s predictions to be verified.

27

I don’t see how this question has a GQ answer. There’s way too much ill-defined-ness in “scientific”, “prediction”, and “observed”.

ETA: wireless keyboard malfunction ==> hit send too soon. more to come. ugh.

28

Thank you …

29

Alfred Russel Wallace identified such a long-proboscis moth just 5 years after Darwin’s prediction, even guessing the correct species!

30

A lot of the squishiness here is in what “observed” means. “Seeing something consistent with X” vs. “seeing X” isn’t a distinction I can get behind. All observations are of the former type, and so we are always on a sliding scale of “proof”*. LIGO’s observation of gravitational waves was another cherry on the mountainous sundae of evidence in support of Einstein’s general relativity, with prior support for gravitational radiation in particular coming much earlier as Chronos noted (decay of binary pulsar).

Another modern era example might be dark matter. There’s gobs of evidence for it, so when would it cross over into “yeah, it’s official” for the purposes of the OP? Individual particles of dark matter haven’t been observed, but that’s more a statement about the ranges of properties that the particles might have.

It’s still an interesting topic for discussion, of course, even if it doesn’t have a definitive answer. So, for my money, extraterrestrial life fits nicely. The best understanding people had of the universe hundreds of years ago could extrapolate that life might exist somewhere else. The same holds today, even if the prediction has different thinking underlying it.

The idea that consciousness comes about through natural processes in the brain has been debated and predicted for a long time, too, so maybe that’s another.

  • with “proof” in quotes since science can’t prove things.
31

No problem.

32

Or just until the individual experimentor dies, according to some proposals.

33

I can’t write down the Einstein equations, but realize that Einstein’s prediction of gravity waves was a consequence of the theory, not a reasonable guess or hypothesis. It is based on the fact that the Einstein equations describe a wave equation. That makes his idea based on far more than a reasonable guess-and it means that if gravity waves didn’t exist, the theory of general relativity would be wrong.

34

Nitpick: they’re gravitational waves. The term “gravity waves” was already taken, so they had to make do with second best.

35

The alchemists of antiquity predicted that they could turn base metals into gold.

You can, assuming a particle accelerator, large amounts of cash and energy and extremely low yield expectations. This was achieved in Berkley in 1981 using bismuth as substrate though most of the yield was detected from radioactive gold isotopes. The amount of stable gold 197 was thought to be less than the detection level in a mass spectrometer
Scientific American: Lead Can Be Turned into Gold

36

If you want to get precise about things, this doesn’t validate the alchemists’ predictions, because we know that their methods could never have succeeded.

It’s like how the subsequent circumnavigation didn’t validate Columbus’ prediction that he could sail to India from Europe on a given route: Magellan’s men helped demonstrate the extent of the big honking landmass in the way, which made nonsense of Columbus’ proposed route; the fact we can now fly a jumbo jet from Europe to “the Indies” along Columbus’ proposed route (more-or-less) is neither here nor there.

The alchemists thought they could turn “base metals” into gold through combinations of macro-scale reagents, which we now know is impossible. The fact we can turn other metals into gold using particle accelerators is similarly irrelevant, both to the concept of alchemy and to the price of gold.

37

You’ve over pedanted that pudding.

From the OP:

Einstein didn’t predict how gravity waves would be discovered and we now know the methods used by the early researches to find them could never have succeeded.
He made a prediction, it came to be found true. It took a while. QED.

Your thesis is the only valid answer would be for a prediction to be made and that the way to prove it was known at the time. With the obvious corollary that the prediction wouldn’t have remained unproven for very long.

38

I don’t see how this qualifies as a “scientific prediction” (per the OP), since there was no scientific basis. There was no underlying theory and no proposed mechanism (or if there was, it was wrong). They messed around hoping they could turn lead into gold.

One might as well say that an ancient Shaman predicted men’s souls could fly, and the prediction was validated by balloons and airplanes.

39

A few thoughts. The OP specifies a scientific prediction. That places a few constraints on what is possible, and arguably places a bound on the time - simply because what we recognise as science hasn’t existed all that long.

Talking of alchemists is a good example. Alchemy isn’t science. The alchemists didn’t predict that it was possible to turn base metals into gold - it was part of the belief system of alchemy. Alchemists believed that there were four basic constituents of all matter, and that these were combined in various ratios to form all the other materials. Gold being one possible outcome. However they did not arrive at this idea through experiment or theory - the basic tenets of alchemy were revealed truth - essentially a religious belief. The alchemists didn’t question these tenets, and there was no notion that they might be wrong, or falsifiable. Unless one tries to make some case that three quark colours plus the electron are the four basic constituents the alchemists believed in, the simple reality is that the alchemists were, and still are, wrong.

Einstein predicted the apparent offset of a star during a solar eclipse. At the time that was a testable result of relativity. When the star appeared to show the predicted offset, it did two things. It validated Einstein’s theory (it did not prove it) and just as importantly, it invalidated the known competing theories - that the observation was not consistent with Newtonian physics was just as big a deal. GR predicts a range of other interesting effects, and gravitational waves is one. However IMHO frame dragging is much cooler. Again, it isn’t just that the theory predicts the effect, but that the effect, if observed, contradicts competing theories.

It is remarkable that across all the sciences, and especially within such a fast moving science as physics, GR has stood essentially un-assailed for nearly a century. Most other sciences have made predictions, only to see some of them disproved, and new theories evolve. But GR is so far inviolate. I do wonder if there are still some curious corners that might yield yet more weird testable results (at ones that don’t require a tame black hole.)

40

There’s more to it than that. To summarize what Riemann and Francis Vaughan said, Einstein had a cogent theory which predicted gravity waves, such that the discovery of gravity waves validates his theory. That is so utterly, entirely, completely not true of the creation of gold vis a vis what the alchemists believed that the two things are not even in the same realm. Making gold out of lead these days does precisely nothing to validate anything the alchemists believed.

It’s entirely possible to be able to imagine a specific experiment which you have no way of conducting given current technology, and that’s what a gravity wave detection experiment amounted to in Einstein’s time: Something they could characterize very precisely, which would have certain results if the experiment validated the hypothesis, and, therefore, the theory the hypothesis was generated from, but something they had no way of performing given the technology of the first half of the Twentieth Century.