
"It'll never work": a collection of failed predictions - egor83
http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/neverwrk.htm
======
wisty
_Space 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.

~~~
bonch
Reminds 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
The 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."

------
j_baker
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 probably wrong.

~~~
zepolen
What about: It's impossible to go faster than the speed of light?

~~~
ecubyx
You 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.

------
stcredzero
One "rock to look under" is the misapplication of scientific theory or a
common misunderstanding of basic principles.

(See: <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>

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
I 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.

~~~
tlb
The 18.8 number is kilojoules / gram (food energy).

The real limit is our ability to burn huge amounts of it. Even a small plane
burns over 1 lb / minute, which would be a shocking metabolism for an animal.

~~~
neilk
Damn, sorry about that, and thanks for the correction. So the real difference
between petroleum derivatives and sugars isn't the energy content so much as
the power you can generate? In layman's terms, the kablooie factor?

That puts Le Conte's error in even more perspective. Imagine if you said to
him in 1888 "...but what if you had access to vast, cheap supplies of high-
grade fuel which you burned off at a rate of 1 lb per minute?" He'd look at
you like you were an idiot. Now your heavier-than-air craft is carrying
several hundred pounds of fuel too, just to stay aloft for a few hours? And
what do you do when you get where you are going?

Does this mean Le Conte's real failure isn't energy calculations, but
predicting the availability of such fuel? In other words, it's all economics?

I had another comment about "toys" versus "tools for real work" in this
thread. Maybe that's another defining element of "toys", the difficulty of
maintenance and the lack of ubiquitous infrastructure. Only rich or eccentric
people are going to take the trouble to provide infrastructure for their own
machines, so it becomes by definition a "toy". Like planes or cars in the
early 20th century.

Okay, is this a new heuristic? We look for devices which are fun or useful but
impractical because right now, enthusiasts have to provide their own
infrastructure at great cost?

------
brownleej
My 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
To be fair (and tease a bit), one can argue that Apple didn't make a decent
/phone/ until this verizon deal :-P

------
kingkawn
"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
Yeah, 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.

------
api
This 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
We 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.)

------
cj
These 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
I actually came to discuss the _relative_ merits of this perspective.

Raise your hand if you have a sleep disorder...

------
hyko
"Mathematics is inadequate to describe the universe"

The jury is still out on that one.

~~~
mechanical_fish
And 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
Physicists 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
How are they impossible if they are happening?

~~~
JoeAltmaier
In the macroscopic world, they make no sense.

Somebody said "the Universe isn't just stranger than you imagine; its stranger
than you Can imagine"

------
kingofspain
_Computers 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?

~~~
patrickk
Professor Frink's (from The Simpsons) prediction on where computers would be
in one hundred years:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DE7mi-gdIYw>

~~~
hasenj
One comment (on youtube) says this is from a radio show during the 40's; is
"The Simpsons" that old?

~~~
kuk
No. That was from one of the episodes (recent, a few years ago) but I can't
remember which episode.

------
zeteo
Many 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>

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?

------
davidmathers
_This 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.

------
aseemk
I'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
You're welcome :)

------
dkarl
_Animals, 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.)

~~~
necubi
This statement is a clear and obvious logical fallacy, and should have
appeared as such to contemporary audiences. He is saying that Animals have
(limbs => they move) => (the Earth does not have limbs => it does not move).
But the latter is the inverse of the former, which must be proven separately
and which is not implied by the conditional.

~~~
davnola
As I commented below, I expect the translation "move" makes it sound worse
than it did in the original. If he means "are self-propelled" or "are mobile",
it's slight less wrong.

------
tlb
The 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.

------
neilk
A 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
The 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.

------
6ren
_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._ 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

------
sorbus
The first quotation, from Lucius Annaeus Seneca, contains no prediction.

------
jayzee
Sometimes 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
You 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
Any 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
I'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.

------
noinput
If 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
Why 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?

------
olalonde
_(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>

------
philsalesses
"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

------
maxer
a 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

------
cwbrandsma
My 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.

------
arvinjoar
One of the automobile quotes is false[1]

[1] <http://www.snopes.com/history/document/horseless.asp>

------
beagle3
Prediction is hard. Even more so if it is about the future.

------
Tyrant505
Great collection! And the Lock Haven url made me smile.

------
bonch
My 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
Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible. \- Lord Kelvin

I wonder how he explained birds?

