PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

6. A HARD FACT OF LIFE
soldiers oppose the Red Army. Casualties run high; leaders
fall, and so do hopes for democracy. Emotions heat up; the
young do not want to abandon their ideals. Clandestine meetings
take place where ambitions are transformed into
daydreaming.
“If only a superpower would take pity on us and come
down on the Russians with mighty weapons to punish them
for this wrong-doing!”
“You think the Americans might do it?”
• • •
The Americans did not do it. The whole world was alarmed but
watched passively as the rebellion was ruthlessly repressed and
170,000
Hungarians fled their country. It was only later that it appears a bee
may have stung the bear.
While I was exploring the distribution of Nobel prizes among different
countries, I found substitution processes taking place. Some trends
seemed familiar; for example, Americans progressively gaining over
Europeans during the first half of the twentieth century. But one substitution,
in spite of its natural appearance, did not make sense.
There has been a twenty-five-year-long battle between Swedes and
Russians for Nobel prizes. I focused on these two countries when I noticed
that from 1957 to 1982 the Russian share of prizes declined
sharply while the Swedish share showed a clear rise. The slopes being
complementary made me suspect a one-to-one substitution in a local
microniche.
On further investigation I found that the sum of Nobel laureates for
the two countries is remarkably constant, equal to five for all five-year
intervals between 1957 and 1982. In the first interval there were four
Russians and one Swede, but this ratio reversed in a continuous way,
and twenty-five years later there were four Swedes to one Russian. The
evolution of the Swedish-Russian ratio on the logarithmic scale turned
out to be quite compatible with a straight line, the hallmark of a natural
substitution (Appendix C, Figure 6.7). Was this an artifact of statistical
fluctuations? Could it be attributed to a subconscious bias, considering
that the Nobel Foundation is Swedish and that traditionally there has
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