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Comment by quercusa | Hacker News Reader

Is there any scientific discovery with a longer gap between prediction and validation?

This isn't a longer gap, but I think it's interesting. Black holes were first hypothesized by someone named John Mitchell in 1783 [0]. Interestingly enough, and back on topic for the article, Laplace also independently came to the same conclusion in 1796 [0].

It's a little fuzzy as to when black holes were "discovered": most sources say 1971, when Charles Bolton identified Cygnus X-1 as a black hole by measuring its mass indirectly using the wobble of nearby star HBE226868 [1], but the first image of a black hole was only taken in 2019 [2]. Yes, it looked just like in Interstellar, because Kip Thorne consulted on the film [3].

The gap from 1783-1971 is "only" 188 years, but 1783-2019 is 236 years. And, from Laplace's rediscovery of the idea, it's 175 and 223 years, respectively. I think that's pretty cool, too.

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[0]: https://blackholecam.org/john-mitchell-developed-theory-of-b...

[1]: http://torontodreamsproject.blogspot.com/2012/01/very-first-...

[2]: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/news/2019/4/19/how-scientists-c...

[3]: https://www.wired.com/2014/10/astrophysics-interstellar-blac...

Do you want to count Democritus and indivisible constituents of matter?

Holy cow, he predicted way more than just indivisible constituents of matter [1]:

> The theory of Democritus held that everything is composed of "atoms", which are physically, but not geometrically, indivisible; that between atoms, there lies empty space; that atoms are indestructible, and have always been and always will be in motion; that there is an infinite number of atoms and of kinds of atoms, which differ in shape and size.

The accuracy is uncanny.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democritus#Atomic_hypothesis

Uncanny indeed, especially when you consider that Democritus's understanding of atoms is a mostly sufficient underpinning for the science of chemistry, at least up through the end of the 19th century.

Lacking evidence, scientists didn't accept Democritus's model continued to speculate. My favorite being the "plum pudding" model proposed by JJ Thompson in 1904.

> that there is an infinite number of atoms and of kinds of atoms

Well, that bit is wrong. Especially if you take the fundamental constituents of what are now called atoms: 6 quarks, 6 antiquarks, 6 leptons (counting neutrinos), 6 antileptons, 5 gauge bosons, 1 scalar boson. Only 30, possibly + whatever dark matter and dark energy are.

We don't know how many kinds of atoms there are, and infinite is pretty damn accurate all things considered. And it's pretty disingenuous to go out of your way to take quarks to mean what he called atoms just so you can claim he's wrong.

They're just trying to be accurate. The most important aspect of Democritus' atoms is indivisibility, so that's why fundamental particles like quarks are technically a better fit.

Are you seriously suggesting that when Democritus referred to "uncuttable things", he meant to describe particles that would in the future be named after his work rather than to describe particles that were indivisible?

If you genuinely find that interpretation of my statement plausible then I don't really have anything to add.

Here's your statement:

> And it's pretty disingenuous to go out of your way to take quarks to mean what he called atoms just so you can claim he's wrong.

You can try to identify atoms by his description of them, in which case you'd have to choose fundamental particles. But you've already explicitly chosen to interpret Democritus' "atoms" as identical with our "atoms", despite the fact that they do not exhibit any of the characteristics Democritus described. What can I conclude except that you think Democritus, in the past, named his concept after ours, in the future?

I guess the prediction was made in his 1798 book:

https://library.si.edu/digital-library/book/traite-de-mecani...

John Adams was the second US President. 5.3 million people lived in America.

Makes me want to learn more math.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_experiment

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