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

“Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.”

There is no better way to end a book on blunders than with an important reminder—a plea for humility, if you like—that nobody can express more eloquently than Darwin:

We must, however, acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system—with all these exalted powers—Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.

Einstein had to find a way to keep the universe described by his equations from collapsing under its own weight. To achieve a static configuration with a uniform distribution of matter, Einstein guessed that there had to be some repulsive force that could balance gravity precisely. Consequently, just a little over a year after he had published his theory of general relativity, Einstein came up with what appeared, at least at first glance, to be a brilliant solution. In a seminal paper entitled “Cosmological Considerations on the General Theory of Relativity,” he introduced a new term into his equations. This term gave rise to a surprising effect: a repulsive gravitational force! The cosmic repulsion was supposed to act throughout the universe, causing every part of space to be pushing on every other part—just the opposite of what matter and energy do. As we shall soon discover, mass and energy warp space-time in such a way that matter falls together. The fresh cosmological term effectively warped space-time in the opposite sense, causing matter to move apart. The value of a new constant that Einstein introduced (on top of the familiar strength of gravity) determined the strength of the repulsion. The Greek letter lambda, Λ, denoted the new constant, now known as the cosmological constant. Einstein demonstrated that he could choose the value of the cosmological constant to precisely balance gravity’s attractive and repulsive forces, resulting in a static, eternal, homogeneous, and unchanging universe of a fixed size. This model later became known as “Einstein’s universe.” Einstein concluded his paper with what turned out to be a pregnant comment: “That term is necessary only [my emphasis] for the purpose of making possible a quasi-static distribution of matter, as required by the fact of the small velocities of the stars.” You’ll notice that Einstein talks here about “velocities of stars” and not of galaxies, since the existence and motions of the latter were still beyond the astronomical horizons at the time.