The kakkalachi (fortuneteller) showed up when we were out in the front yard playing shuttle badminton. My brother Vinod, nine years younger, was beating me with his sharp returns no matter what trick I tried. Kakkalachi’s appearance offered a way out for me to abandon the match and cut my losses.
She wore a colorful, rumpled sari with the long end pulled over her shoulder and tucked into her waist. Her forearms were thick with jingling bangles, her lips red and teeth discolored from chewing betel. Long braided hair dangled down to her hips and a sack hung over her left shoulder.
Sensing she had a ready audience, she sat down on the steps to the porch. I sat opposite her and stuck my hand out. She pulled in my palm and after a close study started talking in heavily accented Malayalam. I leaned in, listening eagerly.
One thing the kakkalachi said that day is still stuck in my mind—“ningalu videsham pookuma” (you will go overseas). Everything else she said, I have forgotten. My selective memory isn’t the least bit surprising though. The videsham part of kakkalachi’s prognosis was uplifting. I was waiting to hear something hopeful like that, a reassurance I won’t be stuck in that remote village where I grew up. And whatever kakkalachi meant by videsham—she could have meant the other side of the river—it did happen. The rest of what she said was either vague or unimpressive.
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Whether by chance or choice, out of desire or desperation, we listen to predictions from many sources. From street artists such as the kakkalachi, to more sophisticated hacks such as a jyothisha pandithan (learned astrologer) or a hastharekha vidagdhan (palmist par excellence) claiming to have special knowledge about the future. Of these, the few things that turn out to be true, even remotely, are remembered. The overwhelming number that doesn't happen is forgotten, not to mention all the important things that did happen but were never predicted. Nobody keeps count of the unmentioned and the unrealized, which largely explains how the prognosticators continue to stay in business.
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| Magic Squares |
But it’s worse actually. If not forgotten, failed forecasts are more often than not excused by the believers. Who do you think are eager to seek out advanced knowledge about future events in their life? They aren't skeptics, people who have thought about the evidence that exists for a mechanism that would provide such knowledge, or who have considered all the ramifications if such a mechanism did exist. The believers are a self-selected group who take it on faith that something must be there, for whom seeking “evidence” or asking “what if” questions reduces the power of the mysterious mechanism that enables the forecasts. Perfectly circular reasoning, so when what was foretold doesn't happen, absolution is guaranteed for the foreteller.
My grandmother was a firm believer. She wielded a chokehold on my father by recounting what his jathakam (horoscope) supposedly said about his lifespan: that it wasn’t “visible” beyond 60! Whenever grandma wanted to get her way with my father, she would pull out this pessimistic outlook about his future. Distressed and not wanting to hear more about the bleak prospect, my father would give in. Once he sped past 60, the subject ceased to come up, but it didn’t dampen grandma’s belief one bit. My father, however, became a skeptic. He lived a good 30 years beyond, enjoying every minute of it.
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Fact is, genuine predictions are difficult. “It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future,” as Yogi Berra pithily put it. And we are better off for it. If one knew beforehand everything that was going to happen, life would be boring indeed.
Yet, spectacular predictions have been made that turned out to be accurate. Instead of evoking awe and wonder though, this type of prediction elicits yawns. The reason is that such predictions are accompanied by the revelation of the mechanism that makes the prediction possible. This robs the process of any mystery. Moreover, predictions are verified, become routine and accurate, and therefore ordinary.
In 1705, a brief book filled with charts, tables, and calculations was published. It contained the following bold statement about something that would happen a half-century later: “Hence I dare venture to foretell, that it will return again in the year 1758.” The author who made the prediction didn’t live to see the result. He died in 1742. Sixteen years later, his prediction came true on a December night of 1758.
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| Halley's Comet 1986 (Image Credit: NASA) |
The book that contained the prediction was Synopsis Astronomia Cometicae and its author, English astronomer Edmond Halley. Halley was studying the orbits of 24 comets recorded in history. After careful calculations, he realized that three comet sightings of 1531, 1607, and 1682 were of the same comet orbiting the sun about every 76 years. Thus, his spectacular prediction that it would return “about the end of the year 1758, or beginning of the next.” Since then, Halley’s comet has returned as he predicted, last appearing in 1986. Its next appearance will be in 2061, reaching closest to the sun (perihelion) on July 28 of that year.
How did Halley make this accurate prediction and how can we be certain that the comet will shine bright in the sky in 2061? That’s where the yawns start to come in. Halley had used Issac Newton’s theories of gravitation and planetary motion to compute the orbits of comets. It was the first time that a comet’s orbit had been accurately predicted. When Halley’s comet appeared in 1758, it was a triumphant confirmation of Netwon’s laws and the beginning of predictive astronomy.
In 1871, the Russian chemist Dimitri Mendeleev published an article in the Journal of the Russian Chemical Society. In it he predicted the existence and detailed properties of three hitherto unknown elements, calling them eka-boron, eka-aluminium, and eka-silicon (if you are curious, yes, “eka” Mendeleev was referring to is the Sanskrit word for “one”). Soon the three elements were discovered just as Mendeleev had predicted: gallium in 1875 (eka-aluminium), scandium in 1879 (eka-boron), and germanium in 1886 (eka-silicon).
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| Dimitri Mendeleev (Image Credit: chemistryworld.com) |
Mendeleev's predictions were based on his formulation of the Periodic Law, which proposed that the chemical properties of elements are related to their atomic mass. (Today we know the atomic number determines chemical properties of elements, not atomic mass.) In 1869, Mendeleev arranged the 64 then-known elements by their atomic weights and published the first tabular depiction that evolved into today’s periodic table. He left gaps in the table where no known elements existed. Confident in his discovery, Mendeleev boldly predicted that the missing elements should exist in nature and would be found. In a span of the next fifteen years, his predictions were borne out exactly and changed our understanding of chemistry.
If your mind isn’t already blown by the clarity, precision, and accuracy of these predictions, consider the next one. This isn’t even a prediction in that the person responsible, a quiet gentleman averse to small talk and bombast didn’t make the claim. Instead, the prediction inescapably fell out of what he wrote. And what a prediction it was! That there exists an entire class of matter, the mirror opposite of what you and I and everything else we know is made of. No one even in their wildest dream had thought such a state of matter existed, but it was encased in a compact equation written by the English physicist Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac.
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| Paul Dirac (Image Credit: diginole.lib.fsu.edu) |
Dirac was working on reconciling the new theory of quantum mechanics with Einstein's theory of special relativity. On February 1, 1928, Dirac published a groundbreaking paper with his findings that contained what’s since been called the Dirac equation. That equation predicted the existence of a particle exactly like the electron, but with the opposite, that is positive charge—an anti-electron, since then called the positron. Soon it was realized that Dirac’s prediction applies to all known matter. For every matter particle, there is a corresponding anti-particle. Dirac had predicted the existence of antimatter. In 1932, American experimental physicist Carl Anderson detected the positron, confirming Dirac’s prediction.
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So, yes, making accurate predictions is hard, and making them consistently, is even more so. But they can be made if you can recover the laws governing the thing that you are trying to predict. Then, if your predictions are borne out, you have uncovered something fundamental about how things work, available for everyone to understand and use. The ability to accurately predict the orbits of planets, comets, and asteroids is key to space exploration and could one day save the earth and humanity from a cataclysmic collision. The quest to understand the chemical properties of elements led to much current technology including the use of gallium and germanium in modern electronics. Positrons are what enable life-saving PET scans and antimatter could one day efficiently power spaceships.
I admire kakkalachi for being clever with her words. She was trying to make a living in a tough world. For the rest of the fortunetellers, palmists, astrologers, and the like, their trade is safe. No one is keeping count, no one is verifying, and no one, including the prognosticators themselves, knows what the heck is going on, let alone what’s going to happen. But they knew I was going to say this.
Happy predicting!
