It is from this video. It is at the beginning.
The Big Bang Theory predicts that all matter, time and space began in an incredibly tiny, compact state about 14 billion years ago.
I am confused because as dictionaries say predict used to say that an event or action will happen in the future, especially as a result of knowledge or experience. How can someone predict the past?
Predict takes on different meaning and nuance in science. When we have a scientific model, that is a theoretical description of a system, like quantum mechanics or particle physics, what that model tells us is called a prediction. Much of the time it's predicting the result of some experiment or situation, so it has much the same meaning as the everyday usage. However, it is still used when the model is intended to tell us what may have happened in the past, which happens quite a lot in cosmology.
