Einstein's Errors Were in a Class by Themselves

Did 'Sleepwalker' Get Where He Was Going Without Knowing How?

Oct 31, 2009

Physics professor and author Hans Ohanian says Einstein's work was fraught with errors in the details, but his thinking was still decades ahead of all his contemporaries.

The greatest physicist of the 20th century, creator of the theories of special and general relativity, master of the “mind experiment,” founder of modern cosmology, advocate for peace – Albert Einstein was all of these and more.

He was also a “sleepwalker,” as Hans C. Ohanian asserts in “Einstein’s Mistakes: The Human Failings of Genius” (W. W. Norton & Co., New York, 2008).

“He intuitively knew where he wanted to go and managed to get there without quite knowing why,” writes Ohanian, a physicist of 40 years’ standing, author of several textbooks and currently adjunct professor at the University of Vermont.

Einstein’s Miracle Year

“Einstein’s Mistakes” is a quirky, readable critique of the work of a science icon by a quirky science iconoclast. Ohanian details error after error in physics, mathematics or both in Einstein’s work.

Ohanian points to errors in the four scientific papers published by Einstein in 1905, including special relativity and the photoelectric effect. This “annus mirabilis,” or miracle year, won Einstein the Nobel Prize in 1921. Even the proof for the hallowed equation E=MC(2) comes under scrutiny.

Among Einstein’s misjudgments was quantum theory. His work was a major contributor in establishing quantum theory – yet Einstein himself struggled mightily not to accept quantum theory for years.

“Does God play dice?” he famously asked, though the answer seems to be “Yes.”

With particular pertinence to 21st century physics, Einstein committed what he always called his “biggest blunder:” the cosmological constant. This story, too, starts out with Einstein’s resistance to an idea whose time had come. It also concludes with the head-scratching realization that this time he was right for the wrong reason.

The Cosmological Constant

In his quest to understand the state of the universe – and its fate – he found that his equations for a uniformly curved universe showed that it does not remain static. Instead, it expands with gradually decreasing speed, stops, then collapses with a gradually decreasing speed.

But Einstein sided with many contemporary colleagues in the belief of a static universe. So he fudged it to get the result he wanted. He added one more term on the left side of his equation, the so-called cosmological constant represented by the Greek letter lambda. He chose a value for the cosmological term producing an equilibrium of gravitational attractions and repulsions, resulting in a static or steady-state universe.

Einstein was not happy about the result from the start, but could see no way of getting around it. He wrote to physicist Paul Ehrenfest in Leyden, the Netherlands: “I have again committed a crime on the theory of gravitation, which puts me somewhat in danger of being interned in a nuthouse. I hope there is none in Leyden, so I can again visit you without endangering myself.”

Hubble and the Expanding Universe

By 1930, American astronomer Edwin Hubble had compiled conclusive proof that the universe was expanding. Einstein visited Hubble personally in California to recant his steady-state beliefs.

And in 1998, teams of American and Australian astrophysicist discovered that the expansion of the universe was actually accelerating. The cosmological constant could then be taken as a place-holder for the mysterious repulsive force called dark energy.

Dark energy has been estimated as making up 71 percent of the universe, with dark matter making up some 25 percent and the bright matter of our everyday experience making up less than five percent.

Ohanian borrows the “sleepwalker” notion from British writer Arthur Koestler’s “The Sleepwalkers,” a biography of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo. Ohanian asks: “What lessons can we extract from Einstein’s mistakes? Not many. The art of sleepwalking and of distilling great (or even small) discoveries from fruitful mistakes is a gift that cannot be learned – you either have it or you don’t, and most of us don’t.”

Ohanian further declares that Einstein’s “mistakes” often placed him 10 to 20 years ahead of his colleagues in their thinking. “This,” Ohanian concludes, “is what made him the preeminent physicist of the 20th century.”

The copyright of the article Einstein's Errors Were in a Class by Themselves in Science Books is owned by Mike Perricone. Permission to republish Einstein's Errors Were in a Class by Themselves in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.