Foreign Policy has compiled a list of the Ten Worst Predictions for 2008. You’ll be happy to hear that physics has made the cut!
“There is a real possibility of creating destructive theoretical anomalies such as miniature black holes, strangelets and deSitter space transitions. These events have the potential to fundamentally alter matter and destroy our planet.” —Walter Wagner, LHCDefense.org
Scientist Walter Wagner, the driving force behind Citizens Against the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), is making his bid to be the 21st century’s version of Chicken Little for his opposition to the world’s largest particle accelerator. Warning that the experiment might end humanity as we know it, he filed a lawsuit in Hawaii’s U.S. District Court against the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), which built the LHC, demanding that researchers not turn the machine on until it was proved safe. The LHC was turned on in September, and it appears that we are still here.
Admittedly, FP didn’t get it quite right — as loyal readers know, it’s something of an exaggeration to say that the LHC was “turned on in September.” Protons circulated around the ring, but there were no collisions, and there won’t be until later this year. Still, they were right about the wrongness. The LHC is perfectly safe.
The other predictions were also amusing. Here’s my favorite:
“If [Hillary Clinton] gets a race against John Edwards and Barack Obama, she’s going to be the nominee. Gore is the only threat to her, then. … Barack Obama is not going to beat Hillary Clinton in a single Democratic primary. I’ll predict that right now.” —William Kristol, Fox News Sunday, Dec. 17, 2006
Weekly Standard editor and New York Times columnist William Kristol was hardly alone in thinking that the Democratic primary was Clinton’s to lose, but it takes a special kind of self-confidence to make a declaration this sweeping more than a year before the first Iowa caucus was held. After Iowa, Kristol lurched to the other extreme, declaring that Clinton would lose New Hampshire and that “There will be no Clinton Restoration.” It’s also worth pointing out that this second wildly premature prediction was made in a Times column titled, “President Mike Huckabee?” The Times is currently rumored to be looking for his replacement.
Of course, asking Bill Kristol to predict the future is like asking Rod Blagojevich to head a good-government task force. Here’s my prediction: Kristol will continue to say dumb things, next year and far into the future. And get paid handsomely for doing so.
I remember a discussion between George Johnson and John Horgan on bloggingheads.tv about some research that seem to suggest that the predictions of political pundits in popular media fared considerably worse than one would expect from chance alone!
I think that’s a very interesting observation, if true. It’d be fascinating to take each pundit, catalog their predictions, compare them to what actually happened, and see if there’s a significant trend, either toward accuracy or inaccuracy. Either way, anything other than random says something about that pundit in particular, and, if most pundits are non-random in a consistent way, punditry in general.
Hillary’s victory got sucked up by a black hole created by the LHC, which went back into the vacuum.
L. C.
“Here’s my prediction: Kristol will continue to say dumb things, next year and far into the future. And get paid handsomely for doing so.”
Now, I certainly agree with your prediction, but what I cannot understand is how is it that some people (who are these people?) take anything Kristol says seriously. Now, that’s a puzzle…
I secretly suspect that Kristol hates his job and just wants to see what it will take for all his employers to can him and all his customers to dump him. Then again, nobody when broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
I guess my question is, why, why, with so many good, hard-working people with families to support losing their jobs all around the country, is this man, who is so consistently and hilariously and publicly bad at his job, still getting a paycheck?
What will it really take?
We should remember the Kristol is not just the harmless buffoon he now may appear to be. As Chairman of PNAC (project for the new american century) he was actively involved in the megalomania that provided the theoretical underpinnings for the invasion of Iraq.
Not sure he can be put on trial for war crimes but he certainly bears some personal responsibility for billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives being expended on this illegal and immoral activity.
e.
it’s something of an exaggeration to say that the LHC was “turned on in September.”
It’s also something of an exaggeration to call Walter Wagner a “scientist.”
By ‘this year’ I hope you mean ‘next year’. The beam schedule has the beam turning on in July.
Also, first collisions aren’t the unexplored territory: first collisions are at 900 GeV (2 x SPS energy), below Tevatron.
Minor points, just clarifying.
Seriously. Has Kristol ever been right?
Here are some more fun predictions: http://www.religioustolerance.org/endwrl14.htm
“There is a real possibility of creating destructive theoretical anomalies such as miniature black holes, strangelets and deSitter space transitions. These events have the potential to fundamentally alter matter and destroy our planet.” —Walter Wagner, LHCDefense.org
Sorry for pointing this out. It’s not that I agree with that quote, but it is silly to include this in a list of bad predictions. Aside from what you have already pointed out, what this guy said isn’t even a prediction. He just said “there is a real possibility”.