Oct 9, 2017 05:45 AM
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk...478b144af2
EXCERPT: [...] Gott has put his Copernican formula to the test in a number of different ways over the years, with some surprising results. For starters, on the day Gott published his Nature paper in 1993 there were 44 plays currently running on and off Broadway in New York. He applied the Copernican formula to each of those plays to derive an estimate of how much longer they'd run.
As of 2016, 42 of those plays had closed within the time frames he predicted. Two more remain open. “I could even be wrong about those two and still get at least 95 percent right,” Gott notes in “Welcome to the Universe.”
He did a similar exercise with the 313 world leaders in power the day of his article's publication. As of 2016, the formula had successfully predicted the time frame in which 94 percent of them left office.
By this point you've probably thought of circumstances where the predictive power of the formula breaks down....
MORE: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk...o-extinct/
EXCERPT: [...] Gott has put his Copernican formula to the test in a number of different ways over the years, with some surprising results. For starters, on the day Gott published his Nature paper in 1993 there were 44 plays currently running on and off Broadway in New York. He applied the Copernican formula to each of those plays to derive an estimate of how much longer they'd run.
As of 2016, 42 of those plays had closed within the time frames he predicted. Two more remain open. “I could even be wrong about those two and still get at least 95 percent right,” Gott notes in “Welcome to the Universe.”
He did a similar exercise with the 313 world leaders in power the day of his article's publication. As of 2016, the formula had successfully predicted the time frame in which 94 percent of them left office.
By this point you've probably thought of circumstances where the predictive power of the formula breaks down....
MORE: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk...o-extinct/