Other physicists predicted in interviews that experiments now in progress might settle the issue within the next few weeks and that they would be surprised if the results were anything but negative.

Why are far fewer neutrinos emitted by the Sun than nuclear physicists had predicted?

American physicists, proud of a technical achievement unmatched in history, predicted that the new source of energy would one day propel airplanes and heat vast underground cities.

"Many physicists had predicted that no condensate could form from lithium atoms, which are much lighter than the rubidium atoms used at Colorado, and which interact with each other differently," he said.

A German physicist predicted the location of that fragment by computer simulation, properly taking into account the wind-induced drift, which might have been miscalculated previously.

An Italian physicist, Quirino Majorana, predicted such an effect shortly after Einstein applied his relativity theory to gravity in 1916.

In 1990, two University of Alabama physicists, Douglas Torr and Ning Li, had predicted that superconducting magnets might reduce the effect of gravity.

One physicist predicted futuristic playlands where skiers would slalom down electromagnetic slopes buoyed by superconducting skis.

As the physicist predicted, the test did not determine what caused several fires that, fed by old layers of paint, raced up housing project stairwells, killing two residents last November.

Smaller people pogo faster, at precisely the increments a physicist would predict from the known properties of springs - although keeping them bouncing long enough to prove this was another challenge for Taylor.