Probing the Future: The Art and Science of Prediction

The book consists of two parts. The first is a historical survey of some of mankind's attempts to predict the future since antiquity, including the visions of philosophers, scientists, inventors, writers, and filmmakers, as well as some famously bad predictions by distinguished people. The second part consists of a casual (non-mathematical) discussion of the modeling of dynamical systems and the issues that relate to predicting the future states of such systems.