The Black Swan Theory is used by Nassim Nicholas Taleb to explain the existence and occurrence of high-impact, hard-to-predict, and rare events that are beyond the realm of normal expectations.
Taleb regards almost all major scientific discoveries, historical events, and artistic accomplishments as “black swans”—undirected and unpredicted. He gives the rise of the Internet, the personal computer, World War I, and the September 11, 2001 attacks as examples of Black Swan Events.
Use of the term, a black swan (not capitalized), is derived from the seventeenth century European presumption that ‘all swans must be white’, because all historical records of swans reported that they had white feathers. In that context, a black swan was something that was impossible, and could not exist.
