What was the biggest prediction ever made?

Question: What was the biggest prediction ever made?
- Keywords:
  prediction
Asked by Scifierrupt to Anthony, Cathal, Hannah, Jade, Sallie on 6 Mar 2017.
- Sallie Baxendale answered on 6 Mar 2017:
  
  That depends on what you mean by biggest. If by biggest you mean most important then that will probably be different for everyone. Also if by biggest you mean most unexpected, then again that will be different for different people. I think that the episode of the Simpsons about 10 years ago that predicted that Donald Trump would become president was a pretty big prediction!
- Jade Owen answered on 6 Mar 2017:
  
  I think the ‘biggest’ prediction I can think of that was publicly over-the-top was the ‘millennium bug’.
  People thought computers etc would go crazy when the year changed from 1999 to 2000 and cause a load of havoc. In reality – nothing happened, but at the time it was all in the news and lots of people were talking about it.
  
  At present I think the prediction of dark matter existing is pretty interesting – something that’s helping to hold the universe together that so far they cannot measure! So once they build something that can confirm its existence it will be big news.
- Anthony Caravaggi answered on 6 Mar 2017:
  
  I’m going to take ‘biggest’ in a different way – a prediction which was ambitious, prescient, and right on the money.
  
  Many things have been impressively predicted by theoretical physics, including gravitational lensing, the Higgs boson, etc. and it would be easy to pick one of those. But my example comes from a different field – Chemistry. In the 1860s, only 60 chemical elements were known. A Russian chemist called Dmitri Mendeleev used a system of atomic weights and other properties to build a chart (the Periodic Table of Elements) which accurately predicted the properties of many more elements. We’ve since discovered more than 40 additional elements and they all fit perfectly into Mendeleev’s system.
- Cathal Breen answered on 7 Mar 2017:
  
  I will follow Anthony’s thoughts and suggest the discovery of penicillin. This was a complete accident, something that can happen often in research projects. The result you get was not what you had anticipated but has significant findings. Penicillin revolutionized the treatments of infection and is still currently used today

Question: What was the biggest prediction ever made?

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