Opinions about the merits of making science writing accessible differ widely, especially among scientists. Two camps, a bimodal distribution in science-speak, appear to be discernible. For one there is the part of the scientific community in which accessible science books are not popular. These scientists find it annoying to read, but also impossible to write, books about scientific matters that laypeople and nonexperts of the given domain can comprehend. This is understandable. Making complex scientific phenomena and ideas accessible to nonexperts and new students carries the danger of oversimplification, distortion, and sensationalism. Accessible science is often likened to ‘pop science,’ which can lack the necessary detail and may be prone to presenting outdated information and ignoring some vital evidence. The fear is that it waters down science.

There are many examples of attempts in science communication in the media that have gone badly wrong. They are so frequent and often notorious that there is no need to give any examples here. Some respected scientists think it is impossible to produce a science book for ‘beginners’ that is engaging, perhaps even fun, and at the same time a rigorous and ‘reasonably correct’ portrayal of the state of the art of a scientific topic. They consider the possibility of a sweet spot, an area of effective science communication somewhere between talking down or dumbing it down to the reader and talking above readers’ heads, a mirage. Science, it follows from such views, is partly incomprehensible to the noninitiated and in the end a matter of trusting the expertise.

But there is another school of thought about the matter of communicating science. It comes across well in a quote, often ascribed to Ernest Rutherford, that a “scientific theory has no merit unless it can be explained to a barmaid.” Similarly, there is the quote, often falsely attributed to Albert Einstein, that “if you can’t explain it to your grandmother, you don’t understand it well enough.” I have taken these opinions as a guide and inspiration. The aim of this book is to make the new science of the predictive mind accessible to a wider audience.

Science is getting ever more specialized and the new prediction science is no exception to this. Accessible introductions and overviews of scientific topics hence may not only benefit laypeople and new students. Biologist Edward Wilson worried that specialization in science has a tendency to create disciplinary ‘thought silos.’ ‘Superspecialization,’ but also the sheer amount of knowledge that has been accumulated and the many ways scientific questions can be investigated, makes it difficult even for experts to keep up with different but perhaps just as beneficial ways of thinking about a particular subject. My hope is that experts from related fields can also take in something they weren’t acquainted with from this book, perhaps from the approaches to prediction they know least about.

I nevertheless took care to make sure that the explanations of the often technical approaches are comprehensible to a wide audience. Readers may pick and read individual chapters as they please. The book is organized however in such a way that later chapters build on the concepts and theoretical foundations introduced in earlier ones. Hence it should be of particular benefit to nonexperts to read the chapters in the order they are presented. At the beginning of the chapters about the individual theories the basic idea of the specific approach is summarized in a few sentences; at the end the key concepts are explained again briefly in a separate box. For readers who wish to follow up a topic in more detail, I have added a list of three key articles or books at the end of each chapter, and provided plenty of references that should make it easy for anyone to dive into particular approaches in more depth should they wish to do so.

The chapters give the reader a flavor of the various scientific frameworks that have been applied to the study of the predictive mind. A lot of it is necessarily just touching the surface. A comprehensive, complete, and detailed description of all the facets of particular approaches to prediction and an exhaustive evaluation of pros and cons and experimental evidence of the specific theories would take a book for each of them. The scientists who study the predictive mind will see very clearly that I have passed over many aspects and topics that may feel essential to them. There is not a single mathematical formula in this book. The goal of this book is to get the reader thinking about the myriad ways of looking ahead.