The four biggest mistakes of Einstein’s scientific life
No one is right 100% of the time. Even the greatest genius of all.
“The only man who never makes a mistake is the man who never does anything.” -Theodore Roosevelt
In science, as in life, you usually get things wrong over and over again before you get it right. That’s particularly true whenever you’re trying something new; no one is born an expert at anything. We have to accumulate a strong foundation — a toolkit for problem-solving, if you will — before we’re actually capable of solving something novel or difficult. Yet no matter how good we get at something, we all have limits to how successful we’ll ever be at it. That’s not a failing on our part; that is life as a limited being. It in no way diminishes our successes, however; those are our greatest achievements as human beings. When we break new ground, push the scientific body of knowledge and our understanding of the Universe forward, it’s the greatest advance for all of humanity. Even arguably the greatest genius of all-time, Albert Einstein, made some colossal mistakes that it took others to correct. Here are the four biggest.
