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There's an ancient conundrum that runs, "All lawyers are liars. I am a lawyer. What am I?" That old saw came to mind when I started thinking about this column, which is about how experts are often wrong in their predictions. You can't always trust the opinions of experts. Since I am considered an expert in some fields, this means you can't always trust what I say, either. So beware.

For example, American astronomer Simon Newcomb said in 1903: "May not our mechanicians be ultimately forced to admit that aerial flight is one of the great class of problems with which man can never cope?" Two months later the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk.

Once the world realized that airplanes do work, a group of New York financiers assembled a committee of experts to look into the possibilities of investing in the new invention.

The experts recommended against it. For airplanes to be profitable, they reasoned, you would need airports at virtually every city in the nation. Who would invest the billions of dollars needed for that? Every city in the nation, it turned out. Even Naples.

But the financiers heeded their hired experts and lost the opportunity to eventually cash in on commercial aviation.

On January 18, 1920, the New York Times fit this bit of stupidity into its columns, regarding Professor Robert Goddard's vision of using rockets to explore outer space:"Professor Goddard does not know the relation of action to reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react" The Times was dead wrong. Newton's Third Law works fine in the vacuum of space. So do rockets.

Experts failed to see the potential power of the atom, as well.

In 1933 the British physicist Ernest Rutherford pronounced: "The energy produced by the atom is a very poor kind of thing. Anyone who expects a source of power from the transformation of these atoms is talking moonshine."

Not long afterward Albert Einstein agreed: "There is not the slightest indication that (nuclear) energy will ever be obtainable." However, scientists are usually open to new information, and as nuclear experiments continued, Einstein and many other physicists — who had fled Hitler's Germany — began to fear that the Nazis would develop a nuclear bomb. They urged President Franklin Roosevelt to start an American program to build nuclear weapons. After some delays, the U.S. began the Manhattan Project, which ended in the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The Germans, under the leadership of Nobel Prize winner Werner Heisenberg, did indeed undertake a nuclear bomb program. But it faltered and never produced anything useful. After the war Heisenberg and other German scientists hinted that they deliberately slowed down nuclear research so that Hitler would not get "the bomb." Their claim is hotly debated by others.

And so it goes. In 1943 Thomas J. Watson, chairman of IBM (whose corporate motto was THINK) said: "I think there is a world market for about five computers." He may have been right, in 1943. Computers were huge and bulky, powered by vacuum tubes. They needed a small power station's worth of electrical current, and thousands of gallons of water to cool them.

But then the transistor was invented and a couple of kids working in a garage developed the personal computer. They weren't experts, so they didn't know it was impossible. The turn of a century is always a good time for predictions. In 1903 the American physicist Albert Michelson foresaw: "The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplemented in consequence of new discoveries is extremely remote." Two years later Einstein unveiled his Relativity Theory, based heavily on Michelson's work! As the 20th century drew to a close we heard plenty about the Y2K problem that would melt down all our computers. Didn't happen.

With the Cold War behind us, pundits talked about "the end of history," looking forward to a boringly peaceful era. That was before 9/11 and the war against terrorism.

The experts have been just as far off the mark in astronomy, as well.

When Galileo's primitive telescope revealed that the planet Jupiter is attended by at least four moons, university professors scoffed:"Jupiter's moons are invisible to the naked eye and therefore can have no influence on Earth, and therefore would be useless, and therefore do not exist." Neat reasoning! Auguste Comte was one of the most influential French philosophers of the early 19th century, the founder of Positivism and the man who coined the term sociology for the study of human societies.

Comte held that there were limits to what the human mind can know, limits set mainly by constraints on how much information we can gather. "On the subject of the stars," he wrote, "we shall never be able by any means to study their chemical composition." After all, Comte reasoned, the stars are enormously far away. All we see of them, even in the mightiest telescopes, are pinpoints of light.

Not much. But enough. Even as Comte was writing his gloomy forecast scientists were discovering that light can be broken into a rainbow of colors by prisms, and those colors can tell us not only the chemical composition of the stars, but their temperatures, and even the speeds of their motions.

All this history of failed prophecies by experts led the British writer Arthur C. Clarke to enunciate Clarke's First Law: When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible he is very probably wrong.

So there you have it. Beware of prophecies by the experts, whether it's global warming or the origin of the universe. Take it from me.

After all, I'm an expert.

Naples resident Ben Bova is the author of more than 110 books, including his latest novel, "Titan." Dr. Bova's Web site address is www.benbova.com.