Brilliant Blunders: From Darwin To Einstien...

Mario Livio, “Brilliant Blunders: From Darwin To Einstein, Colossal Mistakes by Great Scientists That Changed Our Understanding of Life and the Universe”, Simon & Schuster (2013) 268 pp

Livio’s book deals with the blunders of five great scientists: the naturalist Charles Darwin; the physicist Lord Kelvin (after whom a temperature scale is named); Linus Pauling, one of the most influential chemists in history; the famous English astrophysicist and cosmologist Fred Hoyle; and Albert Einstein.  Paradoxically, in spite of the mistakes, these scientists led us to changes in our understanding of life and the universe. 

Again I got into a book a bit above my abilities.  In spite of this, I enjoyed reading it.

My Notes:

Pg. 1:  Objective of this book is to correct the impression that scientific breakthroughs are purely success stories.  In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.  Not only is the road to triumph paved with blunders, but the bigger the prize, the bigger the potential blunder.  This book is more concerned with the scientific journey than with the destination.  It concentrates on the thought process and the obstacles on the way to discovery rather than on the achievements themselves.

Pg. 18:  In one blow, Darwin disposed of the notion of design, dispelled the idea that species are eternal and immutable, and proposed a mechanism by which adaptation and diversity could be accomplished.  In simple terms, Darwin’s theory consists of four main pillars that are supported by one remarkable mechanism.  The pillars are: evolution, gradualism, common descent, and speciation.  The crucial mechanism that drives it all and glues the different elements into cooperation is natural selection, which, we know today, is supplemented to some degree by a few other vehicles of evolutionary change, some of which could not have been known to Darwin. 

Today biologists can track evolution at the molecular level because they know what genes are made of. In the early 1950s, Francis Crick and James Watson worked out the double-helix structure of DNA. They worked quickly, because they knew that the Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Linus Pauling was trying to solve the puzzle as well. Pauling came very close, but stumbled just as Watson and Crick were making their breakthrough. He got stuck on the idea that DNA forms three intertwined spirals, rather than two, and worse, he made an elementary error in the chemistry — his nucleic acid molecule was actually not an acid.

Pg. 24:  Physicists are not satisfied with having one extremely successful theory (quantum mechanics) for the subatomic world, and one equally successful theory (general relativity) for the universe at large.  They would like to have one unified theory of everything that would explain it all. 

Copernicus taught us that the Earth is not at the center of the solar system, and all the subsequent findings in astronomy have only strengthened our realization that, from a physics perspective, humans play no special role in the cosmos.  …Not only are there about two hundred billion galaxies in our observable universe, but even ordinary matter—the stuff that we and all the stars and gas in all the galaxies are made of—constitutes only a little over 4 percent of the universe’s energy budget. 

Pg. 38:  At the time of Darwin, the laws of inheritance are best characterized by the ‘paint-pot theory,’ as in the mixing of paints.  In this theory the heredity contribution of each ancestor was predicted to be halved in each generation, and the offspring of any sexual partners were expected to be intermediates.  Somehow Darwin, while believing this, also expected natural selection to work.  He did not see that the two concepts could not both be true.

Pg. 42:  The modern theory of genetics originated from Gregor Mendel.  He found that genes are discrete entities that are not only preserved during development but are also passed on absolutely unchanged to the next generation.  Every offspring inherits one such gene from each parent, and that a given characteristic may not manifest itself in an offspring but can still be passed on to the following generations.  Mendel’s results at once disposed of the notion of blending, since already in the very first offspring generation, all the seeds were not an average of the two parents. 

Pg. 61:  Using the bible, James Ussher, who became archbishop of Armagh in 1625 calculated the date of the creation of the world as October 23, in the year 4004 BCE.

Pg. 154:  Scientists now believe that modern humans did not simply march out of Africa.  Rather, they probably encountered and bred with at least two other groups of ancient, now-extinct humans. 

Pg. 161:  The periodic table currently consists of 118 elements (the latest, ununoctium, was identified in 2002), of which 94 occur naturally on Earth. 

Pg. 222:  Edwin Hubble confirmed unambiguously in 1924 that the Andromeda galaxy, M31, was outside the Milky Way.  Up to then it was thought that the Milky Way was the entire universe (at least it could not be proved otherwise).  Since Hubble, we have known we are living in an expanding universe.  Also, in 1998 it was discovered that the cosmic expansion is not slowing down; in fact, over the past six billion years, it has been speeding up. 

Pg. 255:  Matter (ordinary and dark together) contributes only about 27 percent of the universe’s energy density, while ‘dark energy’—the name given to the smooth component that is consistent with being the vacuum energy—contributes about 73 percent.