Yesterday there was a live webinar from the Perimeter Institute in Canada by astrophysicist Mario Livio. The title was Brilliant Blunders and Scientific American broadcast it. I think you can probably guess what the talk was about! (Dr. Livio has a book by the same name.) The talk lasts about 1 hour and I must say that Dr. Livio is very good and very funny! Especially humorous I thought was the "Barometer Problem" story, which he recounts near the end.
I hope folks find the time to listen and enjoy!
Even Albert Einstein made mistakes—as did other towering figures of science such as Charles Darwin, Linus Pauling and Lord Kelvin, to name a few. These errors were not unfortunate incidents in otherwise unsullied careers but vital parts of the scientific process, argues astrophysicist Mario Livio, formerly of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.
[...]Einstein, for instance, assumed the universe must be static, rather than shrinking or expanding, so he added a term called the cosmological constant to his general relativity equations to force it to be so. When it was later revealed the universe was in fact growing larger, he abandoned the term. Yet his initial error led to a second one, because scientists have since revived his constant as a possible explanation for the fact that the universe is not only expanding, but apparently doing so at an accelerating rate.
The talk, “Brilliant Blunders,” (based on Livio’s 2013 book of the same name) is part of a public lecture series at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Ontario.
Here is the link to the Scientific American page:
www.scientificamerican....