Brilliant Blunders

From Darwin to Einstein - Colossal Mistakes by Great Scientists That Changed Our Understanding of Life and the Universe

Mario Livio

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781439192382
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Science History
• Index: History

Drawing on the lives of five great scientists, this "scholarly, insightful, and beautifully written book" (Martin Rees, author of From Here to Infinity ) illuminates the path to scientific discovery. Charles Darwin, William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), Linus Pauling, Fred Hoyle, and Albert Einstein all made groundbreaking contributions to their fields—but each also stumbled badly. Darwin's theory of natural selection shouldn't have worked, according to the prevailing beliefs of his time. Lord Kelvin gravely miscalculated the age of the earth. Linus Pauling, the world's premier chemist, constructed an erroneous model for DNA in his haste to beat the competition to publication. Astrophysicist Fred Hoyle dismissed the idea of a "Big Bang" origin to the universe (ironically, the caustic name he gave to this event endured long after his erroneous objections were disproven). And Albert Einstein speculated incorrectly about the forces of the universe—and that speculation opened the door to brilliant conceptual leaps. As Mario Livio luminously explains in this "thoughtful meditation on the course of science itself" ( The New York Times Book Review ), these five scientists expanded our knowledge of life on earth, the evolution of the earth, and the evolution of the universe, despite and because of their errors."Thoughtful, well-researched, and beautifully written" ( The Washington Post ), Brilliant Blunders is a wonderfully insightful examination of the psychology of five fascinating scientists—and the mistakes as well as the achievements that made them famous.

CHAPTER 1

MISTAKES AND BLUNDERS

Great blunders are often made, like large ropes, of a multitude of fibres. Take the cable thread by thread, take separately all the little determining motives, you break them one after another, and you say: that is all. Wind them and twist them together they become an enormity.

—VICTOR HUGO, LES MISÉRABLES

When the mercurial Bobby Fischer, perhaps the most famous chess player in the history of the game, finally showed up in Reykjavik, Iceland, in the summer of 1972 for his world championship match against Boris Spassky, the anticipation in the chess world was so thick you could cut it with a chain saw. Even people who had never shown any interest in chess before were holding their breath for what had been dubbed “the Match of the Century.” Yet in the twenty-ninth move of the very first game, in a position that appeared to be leading to a dead draw, Fischer chose a move that even amateur chess players would have rejected instinctively as a mistake. This may have been a typical manifestation of what is known as “chess blindness”—an error that in the chess literature is denoted by “??”—and would have disgraced a five-year-old in a local chess club. Particularly astonishing was the fact that the mistake was committed by a man who’d smashed his way to the match with the Russian Spassky after an extraordinary sequence of twenty successive wins against the world’s top players. (In most world-class competitions, there are easily as many draws as outright victories.) Is this type of “blindness” something that happens only in chess? Or are other intellectual enterprises also prone to similarly surprising mistakes?

Oscar Wilde once wrote, “Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.” Indeed, we all make numerous mistakes in our everyday lives. We lock our keys inside the car, we invest in the wrong stock (or sometimes in the right stock, but at the wrong time), we grossly overestimate our ability to multitask, and we often blame the absolutely wrong causes for our misfortunes. This misattribution, by the way, is one of the reasons that we rarely actually learn from our mistakes. In all cases, of course, we realize that these were mistakes only after we have made them—hence, Wilde’s definition of “experience.” Moreover, we are much better at judging other people than at analyzing ourselves. As psychologist and Nobel laureate in economics Daniel Kahneman has put it, “I am not very optimistic about people’s ability to change the way they think, but I am fairly optimistic about their ability to detect the mistakes of others.”

Even attentively and carefully constructed processes, such as those involved in the criminal justice system, fail occasionally—sometimes heartbreakingly so. Ray Krone of Phoenix, Arizona, for instance, spent more than ten years behind bars and faced the death penalty after having been convicted twice of a brutal murder he did not commit. He was eventually fully exonerated (and the real killer implicated) by DNA evidence.

The focus of this book, however, is not on such mistakes, no matter how grave they may be: it is on major scientific blunders. By “scientific blunders,” I mean particularly serious conceptual errors that could potentially jeopardize entire theories and game plans, or could, in principle at least, hold back the progress of science.

Human history teems with stories of momentous blunders in a wide range of disciplines. Some of these consequential errors go all the way back to the Scriptures, or to Greek mythology. In the book of Genesis, for instance, the very first act of Eve—the biblical mother of all living humans—was to yield to the crafty serpent and to eat the forbidden fruit. This monumental lapse in judgment led to no less than the banishment of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, and—at least according to the thirteenth-century theologian Thomas Aquinas—even to humans being eternally denied access to absolute truth. In the Greek mythology, Paris’s misguided elopement with the beautiful Helen, the wife of the king of Sparta, brought about the total destruction of the city of Troy. But these examples don’t even begin to scratch the surface. Throughout history, neither renowned military commanders nor famous philosophers or groundbreaking thinkers were immune to serious blunders. During World War II, the German field marshal Fedor von Bock foolishly repeated Napoléon’s ill-fated attack on Russia in 1812. Both officers failed to appreciate the insurmountable powers of “General Winter”—the long and harsh Russian winter for which they were woefully unprepared. The British historian A. J. P. Taylor once summarized Napoléon’s calamities this way: “Like most of those who study history, he [Napoléon] learned from the mistakes of the past how to make new ones.”

In the philosophical arena, the great Aristotle’s erroneous ideas on physics (such as his belief that all bodies move toward their “natural” place) fell just as wide off the mark as did Karl Marx’s awry predictions on the imminent collapse of capitalism. Similarly, many of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic speculations, be it on the “death instinct”—a supposed impulse to return to a pre-life state of quietude—or on the role of an infantile Oedipus complex in the neuroses of women, have been found to be pathetically amiss, to put it mildly.

You may think, OK, people made mistakes, but surely, when it comes to some of the greatest scientists of the past two centuries—such as the twice Nobel laureate Linus Pauling or the formidable Albert Einstein—they were correct at least in those theories for which they are best known, right? After all, hasn’t the intellectual glory of modern times been precisely in the establishment of science as an empirical discipline, and of error-proof mathematics as the “language” of fundamental science? Were, then, the theories of these illustrious minds and of other comparable thinkers truly free of serious blunders? Absolutely not!

The purpose of this book is to present in detail some of the surprising blunders of a few genuinely towering scientists, and to follow the unexpected consequences of those blunders. At the same time, my goal is also to attempt to analyze the possible causes for these blunders and, to the extent possible, to uncover the fascinating relations between those blunders and features or limitations of the human mind. Ultimately, however, I hope to demonstrate that the road to discovery and innovation can be constructed even through the unlikely path of blunders.

As we shall see, the delicate threads of evolution interweave all the particular blunders that I have selected to explore in detail in this book. That is, these are serious blunders related to the theories of the evolution of life on Earth, the evolution of the Earth itself, and the evolution of our universe as a whole.

Blunders of Evolution and Evolution of Blunders

One of the definitions of the word “evolution” in the Oxford English Dictionary reads: “The development or growth, according to its inherent tendencies, of anything that may be compared to a living organism . . . Also, the rise or origination of anything by natural development, as distinguished from its production by a specific act.” This was not the original meaning of the word. In Latin, evolutio referred to the unrolling and reading of a book that existed in the form of a scroll. Even when the word started to gain popularity in biology, it was used initially only to describe the growth of an embryo. The first utilization of the word “evolution” in the context of the genesis of species can be found in the writings of the eighteenth-century Swiss naturalist Charles Bonnet, who argued that God had pre-organized the birth of new species in the germs of the very first life-forms he created.

In the course of the twentieth century, the word “evolution” has become so intimately associated with Darwin’s name that you may find it hard to believe that in the first, 1859 edition of his masterwork, On the Origin of Species, Darwin does not mention the word “evolution” as such even once! Still, the very last word of The Origin is “evolved.”

In the time that has passed since the publication of The Origin, evolution has assumed the broader meaning of the definition above, and today we may speak of the evolution of such diverse things as the English language, fashion, music, and opinions, as well as of sociocultural evolution, software evolution, and so on. (Check out how many web pages are devoted just to “the evolution of the hipster.”) President Woodrow Wilson emphasized once that the correct way to understand the Constitution of the United States was through evolution: “Government is not a machine, but a living thing . . . It is accountable to Darwin, not to Newton.”

My focus on the evolution of life, of the Earth, and of the universe should not be taken to mean that these are the only scientific arenas in which blunders have been committed. Rather, I have chosen these particular topics for two main reasons. First, I wanted to critically review the blunders made by some of the scholars that appear on almost everybody’s short list of great minds. The blunders of such luminaries, even if of a past century, are extremely relevant to questions scientists (and, indeed, people in general) face today. As I hope to show, the analysis of these blunders forms a living body of knowledge that is not only captivating in its own right but also can be used to guide actions in domains ranging from scientific practices to ethical behavior. The second reason is simple: The topics of the evolution of life, of the Earth, and of the universe have intrigued humans—not just scientists—since the dawn of civilization, and have inspired tireless quests to uncover our origins and our past. The human intellectual curiosity about these subjects has been at least partially at the root of religious beliefs, of the mythical stories of creation, and of philosophical inquiries. At the same time, the more empirical, evidence-based side of this curiosity has ultimately given birth to science. The progress that humankind has made toward deciphering some of the complex processes involved in the evolution of life, the Earth, and the cosmos is nothing short of miraculous. Hard to believe, but we think that we can trace cosmic evolution back to when our universe was only a fraction of a second old. Even so, many questions remain unanswered, and the topic of evolution continues to be a hot-button issue even today.

It took me quite a while to decide which major scientists to include in this journey through deep intellectual and practical waters, but I eventually converged on the blunders of five individuals. My list of surprising “blunderers” includes the celebrated naturalist Charles Darwin; the physicist Lord Kelvin (after whom a temperature scale is named); Linus Pauling, one of the most influential chemists in history; the famous English astrophysicist and cosmologist Fred Hoyle; and Albert Einstein, who needs no introduction. In each case, I will address the central theme from two rather different—but complementary—perspectives. On one hand, this will be a book about some of the theories of these great savants and the fascinating relations among those theories, viewed in part from the unusual vantage point of their weaknesses and sometimes even failures. On the other, I will scrutinize briefly the various types of blunders and attempt to identify their psychological (or, if possible, neuroscientific) causes. As we shall see, blunders are not born equal, and the blunders of the five scientists on my list are rather different in nature. Darwin’s blunder was in not realizing the full implications of a particular hypothesis. Kelvin blundered by ignoring unforeseen possibilities. Pauling’s blunder was the result of overconfidence bred by previous success. Hoyle erred in his obstinate advocacy of dissent from mainstream science. Einstein failed because of a misguided sense of what constitutes aesthetic simplicity. The main point, however, is that along the way, we shall discover that blunders are not only inevitable but also an essential part of progress in science. The development of science is not a direct march to the truth. If not for false starts and blind alleys, scientists would be traveling for too long down too many wrong paths. The blunders described in this book have all, in one way or another, acted as catalysts for impressive breakthroughs—hence, their description as “brilliant blunders.” They served as the agents that lifted the fog through which science was progressing, in its usual succession of small steps occasionally punctuated by quantum leaps.

I have organized the book in such a way that for each scientist, I first present the essence of some of the theories for which this individual is best known. These are very concise summaries intended to provide an introduction to the ideas of these masters and an appropriate context for the blunders, rather than to represent comprehensive descriptions of the respective theories. I have also chosen to concentrate only on one major blunder in each case instead of reviewing a laundry list of every possible mistake that these pundits may have committed during their long careers. I shall start with the man about whom the New York Times correctly wrote in its obituary notice (published on April 21, 1882) that he “has been read much, but talked about more.”

CHAPTER 2

THE ORIGIN

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

—CHARLES DARWIN

The most striking thing about life on Earth is its prodigious diversity. Take a casual stroll on a spring afternoon; you are likely to encounter several kinds of birds, many insects, perhaps a squirrel, a few people (some may be walking their dogs), and a large variety of plants. Even just in terms of the properties that are the easiest to discern, organisms on Earth differ in size, color, shape, habitat, food, and capabilities. On one hand, there are bacteria that are less than one hundred thousandth of an inch in length, and on the other, there are blue whales more than 100 feet long. Among the thousands of known species of the marine mollusks known as nudibranchs, there are many that are plain looking, while others have some of the most sumptuous colors exhibited by any creature on Earth. Birds can fly at astonishing heights in the atmosphere: On November 29, 1975, a large vulture was sucked into a jet engine at a height of 37,900 feet above the Ivory Coast in West Africa. Other birds, such as the migrating bar-headed geese and the whooper swans, regularly fly higher than 25,000 feet. Not to be outdone, ocean creatures achieve similar records in depth. On January 23, 1960, the record-setting explorer Jacques Piccard and Lieutenant Don Walsh of the US Navy descended slowly in a special probe called a bathyscaphe to the deepest point at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean—the Mariana Trench—south of Guam. When they finally touched down at the record depth of about 35,800 feet, they were amazed to discover around them a new type of bottom-dwelling shrimp that did not seem to be bothered by the ambient pressure of some 17,000 pounds per square inch. On March 26, 2012, film director James Cameron reached the deepest point in the Mariana Trench in a specially designed submersible. He described it as a gelatinous landscape as desolate as the Moon. But he also reported seeing tiny shrimp-like critters no bigger than an inch in length.

Nobody knows for sure how many species are currently living on Earth. A recent catalogue, published in September 2009, formally describes and gives official names to about 1.9 million species. However, since most living species are microorganisms or very tiny invertebrates, many of which are very difficult to access, most estimates of the total number of species are little more than educated guesses. Generally, estimates range from 5 million to about 100 million different species, although a figure of 5 to 10 million is considered probable. (The most recent study predicts about 8.7 million.) This large uncertainty is not at all surprising once we realize that just one tablespoon of dirt beneath our feet could harbor many thousands of bacterial species.

The second amazing thing characterizing life on Earth, besides its diversity, is the incredible degree of adaptation that both plants and animals exhibit. From the anteater’s tubelike snout, or the chameleon’s long and fast-moving tongue (capable of hitting its prey in about 30 thousandths of a second!), to the woodpecker’s powerful, characteristically shaped beak, and the lens of the eye of a fish, living organisms appear to be perfectly fashioned for the requirements that life imposes on them. Not only are bees constructed so that they can comfortably fit into the flowering plants from which they extract nectar, but the plants themselves exploit the visits of these bees for their own propagation by polluting the bees’ bodies and legs with pollen, which is then transported to other flowers.

There are many different biological species that live in an astonishing “scratch my back and I will scratch yours” interaction, or symbiosis. The ocellaris clown fish, for instance, dwells among the stinging tentacles of the Ritteri sea anemone. The tentacles protect the clown fish from its predators, and the fish returns the favor by shielding the anemone from other fish that feed on anemones. The special mucus on the clown fish’s body safegua...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Mistakes and Blunders
• Chapter 2: The Origin
• Chapter 3: Yea, All Which It Inherit, Shall Dissolve
• Chapter 4: How Old Is the Earth?
• Chapter 5: Certainty Generally Is Illusion
• Chapter 6: Interpreter of Life
• Chapter 7: Whose DNA Is It Anyway?
• Chapter 8: B for Big Bang
• Chapter 9: The Same Throughout Eternity?
• Chapter 10: The “Biggest Blunder”
• Chapter 11: Out of Empty Space
• Coda
• About Mario Livio
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Credits
• Index
• Copyright