We outsource to Clifford the task of advertising the Categorically Not! events that KC Cole organizes at the Santa Monica Art Studios. Except for this Sunday, since I’m going to be one of the presenters, and I never shy from doing my own PR. The event (see blurb below) will begin at 6:30; everyone is welcome.
The topic is Mistakes! I think we’re all familiar with them. As the scientist, I suppose it’s my job to talk about mistakes made by scientists, and I’m not too proud to stoop to using Einstein as my example. He made some whoppers, and that’s not even including his personal life.
Any fun examples of scientific mistakes? Best would be those that teach some cute lesson about how true progress is impossible if you’re too timid to make mistakes, etc etc. Ideas are welcome.
Here is the blurb:
Blunders, boo boos, bloopers, errors, slip-ups, goofs, misinterpretations and misunderstandings. Everyone makes mistakes. In science, the notion of “mistake” is often itself misunderstood. Frequently, a “mistake” often turns out to be nothing more than a limited or skewed perspective. Or as Einstein put it, discovering a new theory is not so much like tearing down a house to build a new one as climbing a mountain from which one can see farther; the old “house” is still there, but is seen in a vastly different context. Mistakes in personal life and matters of policy can ruin lives; but “mistakes” in a humorous context can also make us laugh.
For our September 9th Categorically Not!, Caltech theoretical physicist Sean Carroll will talk about how mistakes are an inevitable part of scientific inquiry. From Aristotle through Kepler to Einstein, leaps in understanding have often been the offspring of wrong ideas, or right ideas that were suggested for the wrong reasons. (And what about Einstein’s so-called “biggest blunder”?) Sean is the author of a textbook on general relativity, lecturer in a course on cosmology offered by the Teaching Company, and a blogger at Cosmic Variance.
For a psychological perspective, social psychologist Carol Tavris will talk about her new book: Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why we justify foolish beliefs, bad decisions, and hurtful acts. She’ll describe the biases that blind us to our mistakes, make us unwilling to change unsupported beliefs, and allow us to think ourselves above conflicts of interest. She’ll also explain how the need to justify mistakes prevents us from realizing we might be wrong, ensuring we make the same mistakes again. The antidotes are the scientific method, and a sense of humor.
And as for sense of humor, the endlessly talented Orson Bean will talk about how mistakes are the basis of comedy. Orson won a Tony nomination for his role in Subways Are For Sleeping, appeared regularly on the Tonight Show with Jack Paar (and later Johnny Carson), and hosted numerous game shows (he is the last surviving panelist from To Tell the Truth). More recently, he played Dr. Lester in Being John Malkovich as well as numerous other film and TV roles. He is also the author of the book Me and the Orgone: One Guy’s Search for the Meaning of it All.
In science, the notion of “mistake” is often itself misunderstood.
Yes it is. Some researchers prefer to pronounce it as “breakthrough.”
O. K. this is quite embarrassing but…
I came up with this formula some years ago
——————————————————-
I have discovered the following interesting formula that very closely approximates the neutron mass:
Mass(neutron) = (h/c^2)*(pi/k)
Here’s the math
h 6.62600E-34
c 2.99790E+08
k 1.38060E-23
pi 3.14159E+00
(h/c^2) 7.37254E-51
(pi/k) 2.27553E+23
(h/c^2)*(pi/k) 1.67764E-27
mass of neutron 1.67490E-27
This turns out to be a less than 1% differential.
——————————————————
I leave identifying the error I made as an exercise for the CV crowd. (or any 1st year physics student)
but the lesson is a good one for those who think they may have stumbled upon the secret of the universe.
Elliot
There’s a nice quote from Einstein demonstrating his awareness of the necessity of mistakes in Pais’ biography. I don’t have the exact citation but the passage had some physicist showing Einstein around his institute. Einstein was introduced to some fellow who was walking down the hall and, after the fellow had left, Einstein’s host described him as a “very humble physicist”. Einstein replied, “How can he possibly be humble? He hasn’t done anything yet”. The passage clearly illustrates that humility, in science, comes from having been arrogant enough to propose something new; a process that inevitably involves making mistakes.
Also, to state the obvious, with the inductive method, it is precisely when your predictions are shown to be false that you make progress.
There’s a story, unfortunately with no names, about the discovery of pulsars (which helped win Anthony Hewish the Nobel Prize). His student, Jocelyn Bell, was looking at chart recorder paper, and noticed some odd-looking noise. She noted it down, saw it again at the same spot in the sky a few times, and persuaded Hewish to let her follow it up. The story is that around that time another researcher saw the same funny noise, gave his instrument a thwack, and it went away. No discovery.
This is the mistake of looking only for the expected, which is very easy to make…
Anne: In 1974 Luigi di Lella of CERN discovered a huge amount of background in his experiment and modified the detector electronics to remove it. It was — as later realized — from the undiscovered 4th quark, the charm quark, 1976 Nobel prize for Sam Ting and Burt Richter, who simultaneously found it 2 months later.
Yes, there are a bunch of these cases!
As Franck Wilczek has said: If you’re not making mistakes, you’re not working on hard enough problems!
Somewhat related:
Here’s something that cheers me up on bad days/weeks (as i work toward my thesis)
” An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes, which can be made, in a very narrow field.” — Niels Bohr
Elliot,
I’m pretty sure the answer is it’s a fluke of the units you are using: the units in that formula don’t add up to mass. So you haven’t calculated the mass of a neutron at all: you’ve simply calculated a number that has some units other than mass, and happens to match up to the mass of the neutron in one choice of units. Given the large number of possible combinations of constants, of possible parameters for which you are attempting to “calculate” values, and the large number of possible choices of units, it is unsurprising that this sort of formula appears from time to time.
To see why the units don’t match up, notice that Boltzmann’s constant includes as part of its units temperature in Kelvin. It is the only constant in that expression to include temperature, and thus the units cannot come out to mass.
Jason,
Yes it only works in SI units therefore is an insignificant result.
Elliot
One I like is how Hubble screwed up his calibration of the Cepheids, and had the temerity to draw a straight line through that mess he got (getting a slope an order of magnitude too high in the process) and declare the universe to be expanding.
I remember reading something from Allan Sandage talking about how one of Hubble’s greatest strengths was his ability to see through the data (in general, not just this case) to what was really physcially important.
How dare you! I’ve neveer maid a mistaek in my life.
Michael Gelb proposes 7 attributes of genius/creativity in his simple yet revelatory How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci.
Check out the chapter on Dimostrazione — the openness to experiential learning, including mistake-making.
I think my favorite ‘mistake’ is the Michelson-Morley experiment to prove the existence of the luminiferous ether.
For an example of how science progresses by changing our point of view, consider the humble History of the Dumplings.
One famous QFT mistake was the Sutherland-Veltman “no-go theorem” which claimed that neutral pions can’t decay into photons via the EM interactions. The proof assumed that the axial vector current is conserved…which is wrong! It was later shown by Adler, Bell and Jackiw that this current isn’t conserved – there’s an “axial anomaly”. The important lesson from this was that symmetries of the classical field theory don’t always carry over to symmetries of the quantum theory – they can get broken by quantum effects (“anomalies”).
Well, it’s good to know that even Nobel Prize winners stuff up sometimes…
I think theres a statistic somewhere that claims that over 50% of all published research is wrong in some way. Which sounds right, theres nearly always a sign error or some trivial constant ommission.
There are some very famous results too where factors of ‘i’ were misplaced and which screwed up a calculation completely leading the authors to make a wrong claim.
Of course, thats just the easy mistakes, there are many examples of much more complicated and serious mistakes. Einstein himself was guilty of one or two such papers -in fact the ‘greatest blunder’ quote might actually not have to do with the CC addition, but rather a divide by zero mistake he made in the paper.
Pingback: Brooklyn Is Not Expanding | Cosmic Variance
What about Messier’s cataloging work done to *prevent* mistaking fuzzy Astronomical objects (star clusters and galaxies) for comets?
Sean,
Talk to David Politzer about comment #15. I think there’s a funny story behind this (if I remember correctly, the above mentioned anomaly was discovered by some a graduate student who figured he had made a mistake… in the aftermath of events frustration over this caused this particular physicist to switch from theory to experiment!… I think the experimentalist is quite accomplished, but I’ll withhold the name because my memory is probably wrong).
Yes, it was Jack Steinberger. He’s pretty accomplished.
I like what John Wheeler would say about mistakes, “Our task in physics is to make our mistakes at the fastest possible rate.”
Fellow Teaching Company addicts can now view Yahoo groups and phpbb forums:
A forum on each individual lecture in all recent courses:
http://teachingcompany.12.forumer.com/index.php
My posts in Robert Hazen’s “Origins of Life” forum:
http://teachingcompany.12.forumer.com/viewforum.php?f=17
Some of my new Yahoo groups:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Teaching_Company_Users/?yguid=317656331
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Teaching_Company_Users_Professor/?yguid=317656331
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Teaching_Company_Users_Subject/?yguid=317656331
Doug van Orsow
moderator
Ellipsis: Sorry, but your story about me discovering a huge amount of background in my experiment, and modifying the electronics to remove it, thus missing a discovery, is totally wrong. The experiment was designed to search for new particles, but none was discovered because of a huge background from an unexpected phenomenon, namely the collision between two proton constituents (quarks and gluons), which occurred at such a high rate that we had to crank up an electronic threshold to reduce the data acquisition rate. This unexpected background was itself a discovery (we published it and reported it to various international conferences), but it prevented us from discovering the 4th quark. So, it was a new, unexpected discovery preventing us from making a more important discovery. A little like Christopher Columbus, who planned to reach India “from the other side”, but found something unexpected on his way (the Americas). In his case, of course, the unexpected discovery was more important than the planned one. In the case of my experiment in 1972 (and not 1974), it was the contrary.