The Science of Predicting the Future

“Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future.” -Neils Bohr
What’s going to happen next? It’s perhaps the most important thing to know if we want to be prepared for practically anything in our lives. And without even thinking about it, most of us are actually very good at this in a huge number of aspects of our lives. For example…
Image credit: Crazy Adventures in Parenting.
I was hungry at work today, and I was prepared for it. Somehow, I knew that I was going to need food throughout the course of the day, and so I was prepared for it by bringing food from home. This is an incredibly mundane prediction, but think about it for a moment: how did I know I was going to be hungry?
In my case, it’s because I’ve been in this situation before: thousands upon thousands of times before, in fact. Every day when I wake up, I get hungry after a certain amount of time. Perhaps today would have been different; perhaps it would have been the first time in many years where I simply wasn’t hungry during the day. But I was so certain I would get hungry ...