Thursday, May 16, 2013

Even for the greats, blunders are part of the equation



>>> our next guest says mistakes are an essential part of his field. not toure. he is a renowned physicist and says the errors from the most famous scientists from einstein to darwin to kelvin are every bit as important to the world as their successes. according to him, the march toward our understanding of evolution and the earth around us has been filled with false starts and botched theories and we are all better for it. joining us now is mario, the astrophysicist at the hubble space science institute and the author of brilliant blunders. let's start there. why blunders? why are they productive? what was the goal of the book?

>> so there were three goals to the book. one is to make us all feel a little bit better. namely that even the biggest geniuses make some serious blunders. second is to correct the misconception that some people think that science marches on a straight line from a to b when in fact it is really a zig zag path that encounters many, many blunders. and third to convey this notion that if you want to think outside the box , be prepared to meet some blunders along the way.

>> chars darwin didn't know any genetics and we cannot blame him for that because nobody knew genetics at the time. but the theory of genetics with which he was operating was like mixing of paints. you take qualities of the father and the mother and mix them. or you would do gin andtonic. what he didn't realize was that if that was the correct theory, natural selection could never have worked. because you know, you think of one black cat , 100 white cats. every time they mate, you mix those paints, no way even if black gives some advantage will take over. because you know, it will just get diluted and diluted.

>> i want to talk about the big bang for a hot second. you look at the review of when we had the big bang on one side and the steady state theory on the other. you tell the story of fred hoyle . a big believer in the steady state theory . that the universe doesn't change over time . it basically has no beginning or end. kind of a cool concept. that ultimately the big bang won out. that's the idea that the universe began as hot dense matter and then it expanded and cooled over time . you explain that fred basically knew a lot of stuff and better, but he couldn't get away from the study staeady state theory . you wrote being wrong in a major enterprise constitutes a trauma. why was hoyle traumatized by the fact the steady state theory was failing?

>> you know, fred hoyle had this idea of a steady state , that the universe isn't changing. this was a very elegant idea, and he got, you know, in some way fell in love with that idea. and so that every time, you know, people said no, actually it started with a big bang and so on, you know, he's -- what's amazing is that he coined the term " big bang ." you know, he said it all started in one big bang , and this is the term we use ever since. but he never believed in that. and the main blunder really, in his case, is that just stubbornly refusing to accept even as evidence was mounting that the big bang was the correct theory.

>> are you saying that he used the term "big boang" dericively?

>> this was in a radio address. he wanted to create a mental picture for his listeners. basically he said on one hand we have this theory, and on the other, there are those who say it all started in one big bang .

>> mario, you'll be happy to know in all of my science classes i almost always made blunders and that's why i'm here today and not in a lab somewhere. but, you know, legend has it that thomas edison famously said, no, no, no, i didn't fail a thousand times to make a light bulb work, i came up with a thousand ways how not to make a light bulb . but are there any happy accidents that come out of these blunders where maybe you don't stumble through science to get to the point you were hoping, but you do sort of go off route and find something else? some other wonderful discovery?

>> well, yes. there are a number of such examples and discovery of penicillin is one such example. but, in fact, you will notice that i called the book "brilliant blunders" because of the reason that, in fact, all of the blunders i describe here eventually actually led to breakthroughs. i mean, the idea is that to make a really big discovery, you need to think outside the box . and to think outside the box really means that sometimes you're going to make blunders.

>> right.

>> and this is the way science really progresses.

>> all right. mario livio , interesting things and certainly makes us all who have made a blue blunders feel better that geniuses have also made blunders. so thank you so much for the book and for joining us.

>> thank you for having me.

>>> all right. up next, s.e.'s take on the real life episode of "scandal" unfolding in washington right now. we had

Source: http://feeds.nbcnews.com/c/35002/f/653377/s/2beb3c42/l/0Lvideo0Bmsnbc0Bmsn0N0Cid0C518820A23/story01.htm

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