We need heroes. The ancient Greeks had Ulysses and Hercules (actually Heracles was his Greek name). More modern times have given us the likes of Harry Potter and Superman.
We look up to real people, too. In politics, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln are at the top of many lists. In the military, Sergeant Alvin York and the U.S. Navy’s Pearl Harbor hero Doris “Dorie” Miller are only two of many.
Yet there can be heroes in every field. In science, almost everyone respects and admires Albert Einstein. In high school, when asked to write about the most consequential personality of the 20th Century, I picked Einstein. He really shaped modern physics through his work on the existence of gravitational waves, the theory of relativity and other innovative concepts. Which brings me to today’s thought: Was Einstein ever wrong about anything?
In a word, yes. According to Nicolás Yunes, a theoretical physicist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, “For sure, he was wrong about tons of things.”
For example, one of his most famous predictions was that the acceleration of matter could produce gravitational waves. But when he and physicist Nathan Rosen did the math, the prediction didn’t work: the waves in effect “blew up.” Consequently, Einstein decided gravitational waves couldn’t exist after all.
But when the resulting paper was sent out for peer review, an anonymous reviewer found (horrors!) a math error. Once the error was explained to Einstein, he rewrote the paper. As was recently proved, gravitational waves exist after all!
This subject came to my attention through an email from the “Life’s Little Mysteries” portion of the LiveScience website (https://www.livescience.com/tag/lifes-little-mysteries?). So if you are having a difficult day and want to commiserate with Albert Einstein about mistakes, like his skepticism of black holes and his resistance to quantum mechanics, check out “Was Einstein Wrong About Anything?” by Ashley Hamer Pritchard at https://www.livescience.com/physics-mathematics/was-einstein-wrong-about-anything.
May it brighten your day.