Brilliant Blunders: From Darwin to Einstein - Colossal Mistakes by Great Scientists That Changed Our Understanding of Life and the Universe Read online

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  CONTENTS

  Preface

  1. Mistakes and Blunders

  2. The Origin

  3. Yea, All Which It Inherit, Shall Dissolve

  4. How Old Is the Earth?

  5. Certainty Generally Is Illusion

  6. Interpreter of Life

  7. Whose DNA Is It Anyway?

  8. B for Big Bang

  9. The Same Throughout Eternity?

  10. The “Biggest Blunder”

  11. Out of Empty Space

  Coda

  About Mario Livio

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Credits

  Index

  To Noga and Danielle

  PREFACE

  Throughout the entire period that I have been working on this book, every few weeks someone would ask me what my book was about. I developed a standard answer: “It is about blunders, and it is not an autobiography!” This would get a few laughs and the occasional approbation “What an interesting idea.” My objective was simple: to correct the impression that scientific breakthroughs are purely success stories. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Not only is the road to triumph paved with blunders, but the bigger the prize, the bigger the potential blunder.

  Immanuel Kant, the great German philosopher, wrote famously, “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.” In the time that has passed since the publication of his The Critique of Practical Reason (1788), we have made impressive progress in understanding the former; considerably less so, in my humble opinion, in elucidating the latter. It is apparently much more difficult to make life or mind comprehensible to itself. Nevertheless, the life sciences in general—and the research into the operation of the human brain in particular—are truly picking up speed. So it may not be altogether inconceivable after all that one day we will even fully understand why evolution has concocted a sentient species.

  While this book is about some of the remarkable endeavors to figure out life and the cosmos, it is more concerned with the journey than with the destination. I tried to concentrate on the thought process and the obstacles on the way to discovery rather than on the achievements themselves.

  Many people have helped me along the way, some maybe even unknowingly. I am grateful to Steve Mojzsis and Reika Yokochi for discussions on topics related to geology. I thank Jack Dunitz, Horace Freeland Judson, Matt Meselson, Evangelos Moudrianakis, Alex Rich, Jack Szostak, and Jim Watson for conversations on chemistry, biology, and specifically on Linus Pauling’s work. I am indebted to Peter Eggleton, John Faulkner, Geoffrey Hoyle, Jayant Narlikar, and Lord Martin Rees for helpful discussions on astrophysics and cosmology, and on Fred Hoyle’s work.

  I would also like to express my gratitude to all the people who provided me with invaluable materials for this book, and in particular to: Adam Perkins and the staff of the Cambridge University Library, for materials on Darwin and on Lord Kelvin; Mark Hurn of the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge, for materials on Lord Kelvin and on Fred Hoyle; Amanda Smith of the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge, for materials on Fred Hoyle and for processing photos related to Watson and Crick; Clifford Meade and Chris Petersen of the Special Collections Department of Oregon State University, for materials on Linus Pauling; Loma Karklins of the Caltech Archives, for material on Linus Pauling; Sarah Brooks from the Nature Publishing Group, for material on Rosalind Franklin; Bob Carswell and Peter Hingley for materials on Georges Lemaître from the Royal Astronomical Society; Liliane Moens of the Archives Georges Lemaître, for materials on Georges Lemaître; Kathryn McKee of St. John’s College, Cambridge, for materials on Fred Hoyle; and Barbara Wolff of the Albert Einstein Archives, Diana Kormos Buchwald of the Einstein Papers Project, Daniel Kennefick of the University of Arkansas, Michael Simonson of the Leo Baeck Institute, Christine Lutz of Princeton University, and Christine Di Bella of the Institute for Advanced Study for materials on Einstein.

  Special thanks are due to Jill Lagerstrom, Elizabeth Fraser, and Amy Gonigam of the Space Telescope Science Institute, and to the staff at the Johns Hopkins University Library for their continuous bibliographic support. I am grateful to Sharon Toolan for her professional help in preparing the manuscript for print, to Pam Jeffries for skillfully drawing some of the figures, and to Zak Concannon for cleaning some of the figures. As always, my most patient and supportive ally has been my wife, Sofie.

  Finally, I thank my agent, Susan Rabiner, for her relentless encouragement; my editor, Bob Bender, for his thoughtful comments; Loretta Denner, for her assistance during copyediting; and Johanna Li, for her dedication during the entire production of this book.

  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 peop
le’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 th
eme 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.