[BloodEagle]

Then there's the Periodic Table of Elements.

---

Among these explanations, Velikovsky also said that Venus had a heavier atmosphere and was hotter than Earth, and had a comet-like tail, and that Mars had a surface of craters, and that its atmosphere contained neon and argon.

Even a broken clock is right twice a day.

Unless it has one of its hands torn off.

[Androgeos Exeunt]

In that case, Eagle, then it'll either be right twice a day, or TWENTY-FOUR times a day.

[BloodEagle]

1-12:-- isn't a time of day, just like --:0-59 isn't a time of day.

[NGTM-1R]

Even a broken clock is right twice a day.

Unless it's digital.

[karajorma]

Then there's the Periodic Table of Elements.

Can't believe I forgot about that one, especially since Mendeleyev was the answer in a quiz yesterday. But yes, when the periodic table was first drawn up by him he noticed that it made more sense if he left gaps for elements which hadn't been discovered yet. Mendeleyev then predicted the properties of the missing elements and was pretty much on the money when they were discovered.

[Androgeos Exeunt]

I didn't know the Periodic Table was a scientific prediction...

[karajorma]

Mendeleyev made some pretty impressive predictions based on it too.

http://www.rsc.org/chemsoc/visualelements//pages/history_iii.html

That Mendeleev realised that he had discovered, rather than designed, the periodic table is shown by his attitude towards it. First, he left gaps in it for missing elements. Leaving such gaps in tables of elements was not in itself new, but Mendeleev was so sure of himself that he was prepared to predict the physical and chemical properties of these undiscovered elements. His most notable successes were with eka aluminium (= Gallium) and eka-silicon (= germanium). Lecoq de Boisbaudran discovered gallium in 1875 and reported its density as 4.7g cm -3, which did not agree with Mendeleev’s prediction of 5.9g cm -3. When he was told that his new element was Mendeleev’s eka-aluminium, and had most of its properties foretold accurately, Boisbaudran redetermined its density more accurately and found it to be as predicted, 5.956 g cm -3. There could be no doubt now that Mendeleev had discovered a fundamental pattern of Nature.

Secondly, Mendeleev was prepared to place elements in his table in apparently the wrong group. Thus the oxide of beryllium had been reported to be Be2O3 by none other than the great chemist Berzelius. Later workers claimed it to be BeO. The former gave the element a valency of III, the latter II. Mendeleev had a vacancy in his table for an element in group II, and so he had no hesitation in placing beryllium in it.

Thirdly, Mendeleev was prepared to place elements in his table in the wrong order of atomic weight. The anomaly here was that tellurium (atomic weight 128) should come after iodine (127), whereas the group for Te is clearly the one before I. Mendeleev presumed that the atomic weight of Te had been determined wrongly. However, fresh analyses confirmed the original value and this anomaly remained as a puzzle for chemists until the discovery of isotopes. Where I has only a single isotope of mass number 127, Te has eight stable isotopes of mass numbers 120 to 130, and the most abundant is 130Te (32%). This results in the high average atomic weight of 128.

[Androgeos Exeunt]

Trial-and-error is an ancient, cheap, but fail-safe way of doing stuff.

[FUBAR-BDHR]

Here's a really primitive one:  Air.  Probably goes back millions of years of speculating before someone figure out a way to prove that air does indeed exist.

[Androgeos Exeunt]

Here's a really primitive one:  Air.  Probably goes back millions of years of speculating before someone figure out a way to prove that air does indeed exist.

I wonder how they proved it back then.

[WMCoolmon]

Fire and caves?

[BloodEagle]

I don't recall if anyone mentioned this earlier, but.... Atoms were predicted to exist long before their existence was proven.

[Herra Tohtori]

I don't recall if anyone mentioned this earlier, but.... Atoms were predicted to exist long before their existence was proven.

Well the hypothesis (first documented in ancient India, most known to be supported by Democritus) was that world is built of atoms, which would be the smallest possible entity... atomos means "undividable", or fundamental building block that cannot be split into smaller parts.

Atoms as we know them were named as such in a bout of arrogance assuming that they would not have internal structure and further components. So, as such, atoms themselves actually didn't fulfill that prediction. I wouldn't credit that to the plethora of particles that the standard model of particle physics introduced. But things like string theories that suggest that everything is some kind of composition of entities called "strings", then I would be more than willing to accept the re-designation of "strings" to "atoms" and re-name current "atoms" to something else, like stoichions (stoicheion = element or letter in Greek), which would mean something like elemental particle, which would refer to the elements in the context of current terminology (the elements in periodic table).

...at least until strings are proved to consist of something.

[Androgeos Exeunt]

No one has done a scientific prediction about probability yet, have they?

[Herra Tohtori]

No one has done a scientific prediction about probability yet, have they?

Radioactive decay comes to mind as probably the oldest example.

It's all about probability; it defines the half lifes of active substances. A nucleus has 50:50 chance to split during one half-time. And as a consequence, half of the active nuclei will decay during one half life.

Quantum physics introduced a lot more concepts depending on probabilities.

Interference of photons, electrons or any particles in a double-slit experiment can also be explained by probability; a single particle willl end up on some points of film with larger probability than other points, but it can end up everywhere. It's just that the probability of ending up on places that will eventually form a diffraction pattern is higher than particles ending up somewhere completely randomly. Of course, on a more fundamental level the diffraction of single particles is usually explained either by wavefunction of the particle interfering with itself, or the wavefunction interfering with the same particle's wavefunction in a parallel universe where the particle happened to travel through the other slit...

Confusingly, recent experiments seem to point to parallel universes being more probable explanation to a lot of phenomena that happen with photons. It's rather... fascinating, as Spock would say.

[Scorpius]

Evolution has held strong for 150 years with new evidence continually supporting it.  I think its one of the top three most important scientific principles of all time.  Calculus, Evolution and relativity.  But evolution isn't a predictive science though.

Anyway, those arent long-term scientific predictions but I think your friend misses the point of science.  Its an interpretation of the world given a certain volume of information and when you try to map out something as complex as weather patterns your margin of error gets wider with every moment into the future. 

The oil supply example is pretty shaky because those estimates didn't take into account the new reserves found and the new technologies developed to get the oil out of the ground/sands/shale.

Right now I  can only think of one example of a predictive model that works extremely well. Its a speciation/island size theory in ecology which states a direct relationship between the number of species on an island and the size of the island.

[Ghostavo]

Calculus isn't science, it's math.

[Herra Tohtori]

=Calculus isn't science, it's math.

Well, mathemathics is a science too...

[Ghostavo]

No it isn't.

Math doesn't follow the scientific method. Theory in science has a different meaning than theory in math.

[Snail]

Well, that analogy makes sense up to, like Secondary 1.