Thursday, November 7, 2013

Mistake Bank Bookshelf: "Brilliant Blunders" by Marco Livio - the consequences of scientific mistakes

This week's entry in the bookshelf is Brilliant Blunders: From Darwin to Einstein - Colossal Mistakes by Great Scientists That Changed Our Understanding of Life and the Universe, by Marco Livio.

Livio profiles the work of Charles Darwin, Lord Kelvin, Linus Pauling, Albert Einstein and Fred Hoyle. A greater roster of 19th and 20th century scientists would be difficult to create. Livio first sketches out the subject's research, then examines a large mistake each made. These stories don't follow the typical inventor narrative - where the scientist makes a mistake and then, by overcoming it or following where it leads, achieves a breakthrough. In each case, the mistakes either follow or sit alongside a breakthrough. They are significant and frequently held onto tenaciously by the scientist, even in the face of evidence to the contrary. One blunder, Einstein's concept for a cosmological constant, was accepted (especially given its esteemed author), then discredited by evidence of an expanding universe and has, lately, somewhat come back into fashion. If you want to learn about how complex and convoluted scientific progress can be, read this: "Why Einstein Was Wrong About Being Wrong."

My favorite section of Brilliant Blunders concerns Linus Pauling's attempts to decode the structure of DNA - the major scientific race of the 1950s. Pauling, the most honored chemist in the first half of the 20th century, was widely expected to solve the mystery of genetic reproduction. We all know how that story ended. There are traces of the Innovator's Dilemma in Pauling's story - too tied to the theories that made his reputation, and complacent, he was outflanked by a nimbler, disruptive competitor (Crick and Watson and the frequently neglected Rosalind Franklin). There are lots of lessons in Pauling's story about how our biases contribute to mistakes. And I've never read a pithier postmortem review:

Pauling's wife, Ava Helen, asked him after all the hoopla surrounding the Watson and Crick model had subsided: "If that was such an important problem, why didn't you work harder on it?"

Possibly the greatest message from Brilliant Blunders is that scientific progress (indeed much important progress) requires competition, collaboration and dialogue (for more on this, see one of my favorite books, Smart World). Each of the scientists, despite his genius, made significant mistakes that, if unchallenged, would have greatly slowed the advance of their fields of study. Instead, others disputed, probed and created alternative explanations that, in combination with the breakthroughs from the "blundering" giants, provided a much greater understanding of our world.

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