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FIVE QUESTIONS THIS BOOK ANSWERS
1. Why is it so risky to rely on assumptions?
2. Why is being too sure of one's abilities like an addiction?
3. Why does being open, curious and generous lead to success?
4. When should you be, and not be, a team player?
5. How and why should you challenge flawed ideas of geniuses?
Don't be afraid of mistakes, says astrophysicist Mario Livio; blunders actually lead to innovation
Albert Einstein stunned with his theory of gravity, but Livio chose to discuss his blunder, along with those of other scientists, to show even geniuses fall again and again before their Eureka! moments.
Even the brilliant naturalist Charles Darwin was not spared by Livio. But the seemingly shaming take serves to demonstrate that even the most gifted persons are human.
Brilliant Blunders
WHEN the Greek scientist Archimedes leapt out of his bathtub and ran through the streets of his city naked, yelling "Eureka!" (Greek for "I have found it!"), little did he know that that cry would come to mean scientific success.
Archimedes was so elated because he had hit on a way to solve a problem that the tyrannical King Hiero II had set him, that is: Find out if the king's goldsmith had cheated him by mixing silver into his golden crown.
As Archimedes sank into his tub, he realised that the volume of water splashing out as he did so was equivalent to his weight. So he weighed the gold crown against a pure gold ingot in water, and found that the goldsmith had indeed corrupted the heavier crown with silver.
While Israeli-American astrophysicist Mario Livio does not feature Archimedes in this artfully articulated book on five geniuses and their blind spots, he takes issue fiercely with society's long acceptance that breakthroughs are necessarily successful. "The bigger the prize, the bigger the potential blunder," the fiercely erudite Livio warns at the beginning of this ever-elegant book.
Livio, whose day job is studying what happens when stars explode, has chosen to spotlight superstar scientists Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Linus Pauling, Fred Hoyle and William Thomson, better known as Lord Kelvin (after whom the unit of measurement for temperature is named).
But unlike other biographers of great minds, Livio has made it his mission to spotlight the quintet's most mind-boggling failures, not to denigrate them but to reassure everyone that even geniuses had to flop again and again before they had their Eureka! moments.
"I want to show that blunders actually lead to innovation: Do not be afraid to make mistakes," says Livio, who is much sought after as a speaker on science. So his seemingly shaming take on Darwin and company has a noble aim, and one that is especially crucial in an age when those who pay billions for R&D insist on big ideas that can be commercialised quickly and for massive profits.
He has chosen his blunderers with care, as is evident in the unforced way he is able to link all of them to create a compelling narrative as the most skilful novelist would.
Of course, the Western scientific community in the 19th and 20th centuries was relatively small and everyone would have at least heard of almost everyone else. Livio acknowledges that but has gone further by digging deep into its archives of letters and scientific papers and come up with anecdotes that are as telling of each blunder as they are of society's attitudes to failure at the time.
So, for example, while it is not immediately apparent how Darwin, the father of natural selection, would ever rub shoulders with bumptious Lord Kelvin, who specialised in marine technology, Livio manages to paint them into the big picture of the West's quests for scientific truths. For instance, the author found that Lord Kelvin had actually been goaded by Darwin's book The Origin Of The Specie's to seek the Earth's age. The peer pooh-poohed Darwin's idea that humans had evolved, insisting that some force had "designed" the universe and everything and everyone in it.
Darwin's defender was none other than his fifth son, physicist George, who was an expert in calculating how fast the Earth spun, which helped it cool down. George Darwin showed how Lord Kelvin had mistakenly assumed that once the Earth cooled completely, it could no longer change its shape as it spun. Not so, George proved decisively, exposing Lord Kelvin as fallible after all. That emboldened other scientists to criticise the latter's views.
Livio's flair for spotting and telling good stories is helped by the fact that his five chosen subjects were obsessed with answering humanity's most intriguing questions, including:
• How do parents who are both brunettes produce a child with platinum white hair?
• How old is the Earth?
• How was the universe created and what is its shape?
• What is the seed of life?
Livio lays bare the individual blunder of all five thinkers, then picks at it the way a bird pecks at grains, and rounds everything off by associating each genius with the mind trap each fell into, which everyone else would do well to steer clear of. These traps include:
Failing to grasp fully implications of certain assumptions
DARWIN, always a poor mathematician, did not put two and two together at the most crucial point in his intellectual life. His idea was that only those species which adapted best to change would survive, and would ensure their offspring's
survival by transferring their single strongest characteristic to them.
But as Livio explains beautifully in the book, other scientists in Darwin's time assumed that when a man and woman created a child, the act blended their traits in the embryo, as one would mix paints in a pot.
But, Livio notes, Darwin did not realise that even if the fittest of a species passed its strongest trait on to the next generation, that inherited trait would surely be swamped by other existing average or weaker traits in the species.
"As with gin and tonic, if you keep mixing the drink with tonic (water), you eventually no longer taste the gin," Livio points out in the book.
Shutting one's mind to possibilities proposed by others
LORD Kelvin wanted to know how old the Earth was. To do so, he first had to calculate how long it took the Earth to cool down enough to support life. This was because scientists thought that the Earth was a chunk of the sun that had been sent flying into space after a comet collided with the sun.
Lord Kelvin managed to devise a formula that could determine the age of the Earth but grossly underestimated the planet's age because he would not listen to his former pupil, John Perry. Perry pointed out that Lord Kelvin had assumed that the distance from the Earth's molten core to its crust, or surface, was the same wherever one was on the planet. Not so, said Perry, because the crust had peaks and vales.
Perry's own calculations showed that the Earth should be about 4 billion years old - close to the estimate of 4.5 billion years by today's scientists, compared to Lord Kelvin's 40 million years.
Insisting on making the problem fit one's theory
EINSTEIN stunned everyone in the early 20th century by showing that gravity was the overarching force at work in the universe. Unfortunately, he then had to answer why the universe was not caving in on itself if that were so. So he suggested that there was a repulsive force at work too, cancelling out the collapsing effect of gravity.
The problem was, if Einstein was correct, then the universe was highly unstable, akin to "a pencil standing on its tip", says Livio. Scientists who built on Einstein's ideas later found that the universe was expanding all the time, which did away with the need for a repulsive force to counter gravity.
The thing is, the ideas in this book and the questions they try to address are so big that Livio should have written an extra chapter to sum up all the lessons for those who are out of touch with such deep concerns. As he points out in the book, science is so relentlessly progressive that those who embark on its journeys of discovery are actually signing up for a lifetime of pin-sharp bends and dead ends. What a relief it is, then, to learn from Livio that even the most gifted of people are as nakedly human as you and me.
1. Why is it so risky to rely on assumptions?
2. Why is being too sure of one's abilities like an addiction?
3. Why does being open, curious and generous lead to success?
4. When should you be, and not be, a team player?
5. How and why should you challenge flawed ideas of geniuses?
Don't be afraid of mistakes, says astrophysicist Mario Livio; blunders actually lead to innovation
Albert Einstein stunned with his theory of gravity, but Livio chose to discuss his blunder, along with those of other scientists, to show even geniuses fall again and again before their Eureka! moments.
Even the brilliant naturalist Charles Darwin was not spared by Livio. But the seemingly shaming take serves to demonstrate that even the most gifted persons are human.
Brilliant Blunders
WHEN the Greek scientist Archimedes leapt out of his bathtub and ran through the streets of his city naked, yelling "Eureka!" (Greek for "I have found it!"), little did he know that that cry would come to mean scientific success.
Archimedes was so elated because he had hit on a way to solve a problem that the tyrannical King Hiero II had set him, that is: Find out if the king's goldsmith had cheated him by mixing silver into his golden crown.
As Archimedes sank into his tub, he realised that the volume of water splashing out as he did so was equivalent to his weight. So he weighed the gold crown against a pure gold ingot in water, and found that the goldsmith had indeed corrupted the heavier crown with silver.
While Israeli-American astrophysicist Mario Livio does not feature Archimedes in this artfully articulated book on five geniuses and their blind spots, he takes issue fiercely with society's long acceptance that breakthroughs are necessarily successful. "The bigger the prize, the bigger the potential blunder," the fiercely erudite Livio warns at the beginning of this ever-elegant book.
Livio, whose day job is studying what happens when stars explode, has chosen to spotlight superstar scientists Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Linus Pauling, Fred Hoyle and William Thomson, better known as Lord Kelvin (after whom the unit of measurement for temperature is named).
But unlike other biographers of great minds, Livio has made it his mission to spotlight the quintet's most mind-boggling failures, not to denigrate them but to reassure everyone that even geniuses had to flop again and again before they had their Eureka! moments.
"I want to show that blunders actually lead to innovation: Do not be afraid to make mistakes," says Livio, who is much sought after as a speaker on science. So his seemingly shaming take on Darwin and company has a noble aim, and one that is especially crucial in an age when those who pay billions for R&D insist on big ideas that can be commercialised quickly and for massive profits.
He has chosen his blunderers with care, as is evident in the unforced way he is able to link all of them to create a compelling narrative as the most skilful novelist would.
Of course, the Western scientific community in the 19th and 20th centuries was relatively small and everyone would have at least heard of almost everyone else. Livio acknowledges that but has gone further by digging deep into its archives of letters and scientific papers and come up with anecdotes that are as telling of each blunder as they are of society's attitudes to failure at the time.
So, for example, while it is not immediately apparent how Darwin, the father of natural selection, would ever rub shoulders with bumptious Lord Kelvin, who specialised in marine technology, Livio manages to paint them into the big picture of the West's quests for scientific truths. For instance, the author found that Lord Kelvin had actually been goaded by Darwin's book The Origin Of The Specie's to seek the Earth's age. The peer pooh-poohed Darwin's idea that humans had evolved, insisting that some force had "designed" the universe and everything and everyone in it.
Darwin's defender was none other than his fifth son, physicist George, who was an expert in calculating how fast the Earth spun, which helped it cool down. George Darwin showed how Lord Kelvin had mistakenly assumed that once the Earth cooled completely, it could no longer change its shape as it spun. Not so, George proved decisively, exposing Lord Kelvin as fallible after all. That emboldened other scientists to criticise the latter's views.
Livio's flair for spotting and telling good stories is helped by the fact that his five chosen subjects were obsessed with answering humanity's most intriguing questions, including:
• How do parents who are both brunettes produce a child with platinum white hair?
• How old is the Earth?
• How was the universe created and what is its shape?
• What is the seed of life?
Livio lays bare the individual blunder of all five thinkers, then picks at it the way a bird pecks at grains, and rounds everything off by associating each genius with the mind trap each fell into, which everyone else would do well to steer clear of. These traps include:
Failing to grasp fully implications of certain assumptions
DARWIN, always a poor mathematician, did not put two and two together at the most crucial point in his intellectual life. His idea was that only those species which adapted best to change would survive, and would ensure their offspring's
survival by transferring their single strongest characteristic to them.
But as Livio explains beautifully in the book, other scientists in Darwin's time assumed that when a man and woman created a child, the act blended their traits in the embryo, as one would mix paints in a pot.
But, Livio notes, Darwin did not realise that even if the fittest of a species passed its strongest trait on to the next generation, that inherited trait would surely be swamped by other existing average or weaker traits in the species.
"As with gin and tonic, if you keep mixing the drink with tonic (water), you eventually no longer taste the gin," Livio points out in the book.
Shutting one's mind to possibilities proposed by others
LORD Kelvin wanted to know how old the Earth was. To do so, he first had to calculate how long it took the Earth to cool down enough to support life. This was because scientists thought that the Earth was a chunk of the sun that had been sent flying into space after a comet collided with the sun.
Lord Kelvin managed to devise a formula that could determine the age of the Earth but grossly underestimated the planet's age because he would not listen to his former pupil, John Perry. Perry pointed out that Lord Kelvin had assumed that the distance from the Earth's molten core to its crust, or surface, was the same wherever one was on the planet. Not so, said Perry, because the crust had peaks and vales.
Perry's own calculations showed that the Earth should be about 4 billion years old - close to the estimate of 4.5 billion years by today's scientists, compared to Lord Kelvin's 40 million years.
Insisting on making the problem fit one's theory
EINSTEIN stunned everyone in the early 20th century by showing that gravity was the overarching force at work in the universe. Unfortunately, he then had to answer why the universe was not caving in on itself if that were so. So he suggested that there was a repulsive force at work too, cancelling out the collapsing effect of gravity.
The problem was, if Einstein was correct, then the universe was highly unstable, akin to "a pencil standing on its tip", says Livio. Scientists who built on Einstein's ideas later found that the universe was expanding all the time, which did away with the need for a repulsive force to counter gravity.
The thing is, the ideas in this book and the questions they try to address are so big that Livio should have written an extra chapter to sum up all the lessons for those who are out of touch with such deep concerns. As he points out in the book, science is so relentlessly progressive that those who embark on its journeys of discovery are actually signing up for a lifetime of pin-sharp bends and dead ends. What a relief it is, then, to learn from Livio that even the most gifted of people are as nakedly human as you and me.
