Quotes About Prediction

I have states that no other Republican would do well in that I think I'm gonna win. But I don't want to name those states.

The Population Reference Bureau predicts that the world's total population will double to 7,000,000,000 before the year 2000. I suppose they will all want dignity, I said.

People ask me to predict the future, when all I want to do is prevent it.

By the time I'm 40, interplanetary travel will be common. Nobody will want to talk to me at that age, anyway.

I envision some years from now that the majority of search queries will be answered without you actually asking. It'll just know this is something that you're going to want to see.

Ordinary fortune-tellers tell you what you want to happen; witches tell you what's going to happen whether you want it to or not. Strangely enough, witches tend to be more accurate but less popular.

I have one talent, and that's figuring out what people want about two minutes before they know it themselves.

Bugg's Construction will be the first major enterprise to collapse.' 'And how many will it drag down with it?' 'No telling. Three, maybe four.' 'I thought you said there was no telling.' 'So don't tell anyone.' 'Good idea. Bugg

Reagan had predicted since the early 1960s that a "prairie fire" of conservative populism would someday sweep the nation; on November 4 it appeared that Reagan had finally struck the match.

The amount of time we can successfully predict the state of a chaotic system depends on three things: how much error we're willing to tolerate in the forecast; how precisely we can measure the initial state of the system; and a time scale that's beyond our control, called the Lyapunov time, which depends on the inherent dynamics of the system itself.

Lyapunov time sets a horizon beyond which acceptable prediction becomes impossible. For a chaotic electrical circuit, the horizon is something like a thousandth of a second; for the weather, it's unknown but seems to be a few days; and for the solar system itself, five million years.

Pecora started the transmitter and receiver in different states, and then asked the computer to predict their behavior far into the future. As the numbers poured out, they bobbled erratically—the aperiodicity expected of chaos—but amazingly, their values converged toward each other. They were synchronizing. By driving the receiver with a chaotic signal transmitted from a duplicate of itself, Pecora had coaxed them to fluctuate in lockstep.

I BET I CAN guess your favorite math subject in high school. It was geometry.

With the star up above and the blackness of space, I can't avoid feeling awe. How could we, Homo sapiens, an insignificant species on an insignificant planet adrift in a middleweight galaxy, have managed to predict how space and time would tremble after two black holes collided in the vastness of the universe a billion light-years away? We knew what that wave should sound like before it got here. And, courtesy of calculus, computers, and Einstein, we were right.

So he used calculus not only to predict the existence of electromagnetic waves but also to solve an age-old mystery: What was the nature of light? Light, he realized, was an electromagnetic wave.

Culture is the multigenerational hard-drive of memory, change, and innovation. Culture transforms a record of the past into a prediction of the future; it transforms memory into tradition — into rules of how to proceed. And culture is profoundly social. It exists not just in one mind, but binds together mobs of minds in a common enterprise.

In one of the paradoxes of storytelling, readers want to predict how the story will end (or how it will get to the end), but they want to be wrong.

Yet in another way, calculus is fundamentally naive, almost childish in its optimism. Experience teaches us that change can be sudden, discontinuous, and wrenching. Calculus draws its power by refusing to see that. It insists on a world without accidents, where one thing leads logically to another. Give me the initial conditions and the law of motion, and with calculus I can predict the future -- or better yet, reconstruct the past. I wish I could do that now.

The search for predictive and explanatory general rules—that's the crux of our game.

There is a spooky quality about the ability of mathematicians to get there ahead of physicists. It's as if when Neil Armstrong first landed on the moon he found in the lunar dust the footsteps of Jules Verne.

I know when I'm going to die. My birth certificate has an expiration date on it.

If it's zero degrees outside today and it's supposed to be twice as cold tomorrow, how cold is it going to be?

I'm a psychic amnesiac. I know in advance what I'll forget.

Love seemed far from this place, but then, had he not predicted himself that love could be cruel and stronger than death?