This isn't ONLY a sneaky way to include some of my favorite strips/comics/artists in science...but I admit I couldn't resist thieving humor for the topic title. [and does have some scienc-y-ness-es!]
The article is about a book, has some summaries of mistakes from it...not sure if really the 5 biggest.
The weirdest, and something I didn't know, in it isn't really the mistakes though. It's the very end, after talking General Relativity issue, where the author says
"The theory allowed him to put it in. We've since learned that everything the theory allows appears to be compulsory."
Heh...so the Universe is, physically, a Communist State!!
[it's called Gell-Mann's Totalitarian Principle, is apparently true, was taken from Lit [once and future king] represented by Ants but inspired by actual political thought/philosophy. All kinds of fun.
Anyway, anyone have favorite screw-ups besides the ones mentioned?
For instance, sticking with Einstein, I think his greatest mistake was more philosophical/stubborn...he disliked the indeterminate so much that he spent decades trying to counter it, or at least tell "the rest of the story."
Sure, it led to a lot of cool things, and his ongoing argument with Bohr was classic and fruitful. HOWEVER...at the time there were many [relatively speaking] people with the wherewithal to fill the oppositional role he did. But I think, all things considered, especially his creativity, few if any could have been more insightful in advancing it...if he'd accepted it and tried to see where it led, all of physics might be 5, 10, 20 years further along.
heh...with all my finger-blather, I almost forgot. Here's the link:
[spoiler]Sig-man, Libtard, Stupid piece of shit. change your text color to brown. Mr. Reliable, bullshit-slinging liarFucker-user.[/spoiler] the difference between evidence and sources: whether they come from the horse's mouth or a horse's ass. "Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation." the hyperbole is a beauty...for we are then allowed to say a little more than the truth...and language is more efficient when it goes beyond reality than when it stops short of it.
Heh...so here's an accident with high potential for usefulness.
These guys were trying to do some stuff with graphene...
But, unbeknownst to them, they had furnace troubles.
Then, they're all "HEY, Who got GUNK all over my GRAPHENE!"
Took a look at it and....TA DA! Worlds thinnest piece of glass!
So thin that, for the first time ever, folk could see the physical structure of glass. Till now they only had a theoretical model. Looks like it was damn close.
[spoiler]Sig-man, Libtard, Stupid piece of shit. change your text color to brown. Mr. Reliable, bullshit-slinging liarFucker-user.[/spoiler] the difference between evidence and sources: whether they come from the horse's mouth or a horse's ass. "Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation." the hyperbole is a beauty...for we are then allowed to say a little more than the truth...and language is more efficient when it goes beyond reality than when it stops short of it.
That really is highly useful, given the general nonreactivity that glass--silicon dioxide--has to many substances. A sheet only two molecular layers thick could still be used to coat things to keep them protected.
[spoiler]Sig-man, Libtard, Stupid piece of shit. change your text color to brown. Mr. Reliable, bullshit-slinging liarFucker-user.[/spoiler] the difference between evidence and sources: whether they come from the horse's mouth or a horse's ass. "Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation." the hyperbole is a beauty...for we are then allowed to say a little more than the truth...and language is more efficient when it goes beyond reality than when it stops short of it.
