In a Science Center lecture hall at Harvard, anthropologist Rowan Flad heats a hot metal poker and touches it to a goat scapula.
The ancient Chinese, he explains, used a ritual similar to this as a means of divination. As early as 4000 B.C., they attempted to predict the future by reading the patterns created after the bone cracked from the poker’s heat.
But nobody could have predicted that “oracle bones” would be recreated millennia later, for a digital camera, in the name of Internet-enabled education.
That’s one small part of “PredictionX,” a HarvardX offering covering the history of prediction. Created by astrophysicist Alyssa Goodman, the modular learning experience traces humanity’s effort to understand the future — from ancient rituals to the scientific revolution to modern predictive simulations.
Read More: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2015/11/an-academic-reality-show/