Well, then, can you scientists predict anything?
An old joke goes like this: “What do tornadoes and divorce have in common?”
Answer: “Somebody’s gonna lose a trailer.”
Harold Camping made millions preaching that The Rapture would begin on May 21, 2011… and the world would then end October 21, 2011 (Goffard, 2011). In his words, “May 21st was one of the worst days of my life.”
We don’t feel sorry for him: Would it have been a better day for him if everyone had died? Camping claimed to preach from the Bible, but apparently somehow overlooked Matthew 24:36 ”But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only.”
Here are some disasters can you can definitely predict:
– a volcanic eruption,
– a traffic accident in your lifetime, and
– your inevitable death (though not everyone considers this a disaster).
Here are some disasters that you cannot predict:
– mega-earthquakes, and
– when the world will end.
In between these extremes there are some that you can “sort of” predict with varying future time-frames:
– a tornado – by a few minutes to an hour,
– the price of oil – up to weeks ahead, and
– if you faithfully and regularly buy Lotto tickets… you will have one less car during your lifetime.
Conservative estimates of money spent world-wide to study earthquakes range up to $50 billion – but with no success for all that expenditure. The top earthquake scientists we have talked with tell us that science can’t actually predict earthquakes (see previous chapter). We can forecast the statistical likelihood of one, but we cannot predict one. However, statistical likelihood makes the assumption that the earthquake-generation process is similar to and somehow linked to past events, which is a pretty shaky proposition (pardon the pun) – because then we should be able to predict them in the first place.
Some things are truly random – or at least we cannot find a discernible pattern to them. Roulette comes to mind. However, your ultimate success at roulette is not random:
You. Will. Lose. This is because the numbers and payout are rigged against the player.
However, some apparently random events may simply have causal factors still unrecognized or not understood by science. This hope has driven some brilliant people I know to gamble their entire professional science careers on earthquake research, and they have all seen little for it. So far, anyway.
Human beings always look for patterns in everything – it’s built into us. If we can see a pattern in something (like earthquake precursors, or bubonic plague and rats), we hope we can predict something (like the next earthquake, or how to NOT get the plague) that might extend our lives. But a number of things we see over our lifetimes just don’t make sense, and there is an instinct in us to try to come up with SOMETHING to explain them. Science merely tries to put some rigor into that process: can you replicate it? Can you verify it somehow? Is it random?
When something doesn’t make sense, we can either invoke magic, or conclude that we are missing information. There is at least one reason, one causative variable or set of variables, for everything that happens, unless we scientists have seriously misunderstood time; the linearity of time is another one of those faith-based assumptions of science, though there is some argument about it stemming from general relativity. One aspect of this causation issue revolves around the concept of random. The reliability and safety of your online credit-card purchases depends on being able to generate a random number. Really: it has to be something that someone else cannot factor, break down, and otherwise use massive computing to derive the encryption key.
But here’s the fun part: generating a truly random number is impossible.
Mathematicians and computer scientists have spent decades trying to do this – but hardware that can generate a number by a certain process can be duplicated. Mathematicians have gotten really, really good at generating pseudo-random numbers – numbers that sure seem to be random. Yet the fact is that the National Security Agency was able to eavesdrop on conversations in Islamabad, supposedly encrypted, on and after May 1, 2011. The NSA knew exactly what Pakistani authorities were saying to each other after Osama bin Laden had been tracked down and killed in their own back yard. That means the encryption keys being used were NOT random. Massive computing power in Fort Meade, Maryland (and a ginormous and not-so-secret server farm in the Utah desert), win again (Wikipedia, 2016, Utah data center: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center )
However, there are no random events. Nothing “just happens.” The Big Bang didn’t just happen. Something causes everything, and if we don’t understand something, it just means we don’t understand the principles underlying it – and it’s a fool’s errand to then just deny that something doesn’t exist just because we don’t understand it.
But Someone knows all the principles and rules governing this universe.
Wouldn’t that Someone be nice to have for a friend?