Assessing the assessment of five fruitful scientific faux pas

Abstract

The author of Brilliant Blunders, Mario Livio, is a man of many parts. He is an astrophysicist at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which, among other things, operates the science program for the Hubble Space Telescope. Livio is also author of an award-winning 2002 book, The Golden Ratio: The Story of Phi, the World’s Most Astonishing Number. In addition to his research on supernova explosions, dark energy, black holes, and the formation of planetary systems around young stars, he clearly feels called both to explain to a general audience how science actually progresses and to do painstaking archival research himself to get to the bottom of certain questions in the history of science. Brilliant Blunders presents him with the opportunity to strut his stuff in both of these endeavors. As Livio explains in his first chapter, ‘‘Mistakes and Blunders,’’ his focus in the book is on ‘‘particularly serious conceptual errors that could potentially jeopardize entire theories ... or could, in principle at least, hold back the progress of science.’’ He calls these major errors ‘‘blunders,’’ a choice of words he will explore more closely in an interesting excursus toward the end of the book. His goal is to demonstrate that the course of true science rarely if ever did run smooth; it is instead strewn with some ‘‘surprising blunders’’ perpetrated by even the most ‘‘genuinely towering scientists,’’ and that, surprisingly, reactions to those blunders can result in fruitful outcomes. After some deliberation, he selected five scientists whose blunders all involve some aspect of evolution—biological, planetary, or cosmological. He makes clear that while the blunder committed by each man (and all five scientists he selects are male, a point to which I will return later) differed in nature from those of the others, ‘‘all, in one way or another, acted as catalysts for impressive breakthroughs,’’ justifying linking them with the adjective ‘‘beautiful.’’ Livio begins with Darwin (1809–1882), whose name is the first one called to mind by the noun ‘‘evolution.’’ Darwin accepted without challenge the theory of