By Darron McMahon
Posted: 2008-09-05
From The Wall Street Journal, Sept. 5,
2008.
Book Review
Einstein's
Mistakes
By Hans C. Ohanian
(Norton, 394 pages, $24.95)
Ask anyone where E=mc2 comes from and you will
invariably be told "Einstein." The name is
forever paired with the famous equation, and the
two together -- emblazoned on T-shirts, public
monuments and book covers -- are synonymous with
genius, like the image of the wild-haired
physicist himself.
The problem is that Einstein was not the first to
discover the equation: It was known for several
years before he presented it in his celebrated
1905 paper, "Does the Inertia of a Body Depend on
its Energy-content?" Nor was the proof that he
provided there complete. It was only in 1911 that
the physicist Max von Laue offered a full proof
of the startling assertion that energy equals
mass times the speed of light squared -- a truth
that has ever since affected our understanding of
matter and motion, not to mention the fabric of
the universe itself. Einstein tried for years to
come up with better proof of his own but could
never get it quite right.
Hans C. Ohanian's engaging "Einstein's Mistakes:
The Human Failings of Genius" is full of such
interesting revelations. "Almost all of
Einstein's seminal works contain mistakes," he
writes. "Sometimes small mistakes -- mere lapses
of attention -- sometimes fundamental failures to
understand the subtleties of his own creations,
and sometimes fatal mistakes that undermined the
logic of his arguments."
The pattern endured throughout Einstein's career.
Ohanian finds that four out of five of the
seminal papers that Einstein produced in the so-
called "miracle year" of 1905, when he was
working as a patent inspector in Zurich, were
"infested with flaws." Einstein's doctoral
dissertation, finally accepted in the same year
after a botched first submission, contained so
many mistakes in its mere 17 pages that when the
editors of his "Collected Papers" sought to
republish it decades later, they were forced to
add more than 30 footnotes to qualify and correct
the mess.
More gravely, there are flaws in Einstein's
Principle of Equivalence (concerning gravity and
acceleration), an important building block in the
general theory of relativity. And there are
errors in Einstein's effort to introduce a
"cosmological constant" in his equations for
space-time. The mathematical constant supposedly Einstein's belief that the universe was static.
He later came to grasp that the universe wasn't
static at all; he referred to the constant as his
"biggest blunder."
But that realization didn't prevent him from
devoting the last 30 years of his life to a
futile effort to formulate a unified field theory
of the universe. The endeavor, as Mr. Ohanian
describes it, was something of a wild goose
chase, and the work for it was filled with
"mistakes and more mistakes."
A theoretical physicist by training, Mr. Ohanian
doesn't write like one. He recounts his chronicle
of errors in clear and engaging prose, giving us
in the process a short course in the history of
modern physics and a witty and provocative
account of his subject's life. Anyone who has
read the recent biographies of Einstein by Walter
Isaacson or Jürgen Neffe may find some of the
material familiar, but on the whole "Einstein's
Mistakes" is original and fresh. Nor is Mr.
Ohanian one of those petty biographers who
delight only in turning up the failings -- or
turning out the dirty laundry -- of great men.
Rather he notes Einstein's errors for a purpose,
showing us why his achievement was all the
greater for them.
In this Mr. Ohanian provides a useful corrective,
for there is a tendency, even today, to deify
Einstein and other men of genius, treating them
as if they were immortal gods. Einstein himself
objected to the practice even as he reveled in
his fame. "It is not fair," he once observed, "to
select a few individuals for boundless admiration
and to attribute superhuman powers of mind and of
character to them." In doing so, ironically, we
make less of the person, not more, forgetting and
simplifying their struggle.
Some of Einstein's lapses, like his rumpled
shirts and sockless shoes, are simply endearing -
- examples of what the 19th-century criminologist
Cesare Lombroso once called the "stupidity" of
men of genius. But others reveal a great mind at
work. In Mr. Ohanian's telling, Einstein had a
"mystical, intuitive" approach to problem
solving. That approach, coupled with a stubborn
disposition and an irreverent attitude toward
established truths, meant that Einstein could be
right even when he was wrong. He may never have
come up with a perfect proof of E=mc2, but his
certainty that the equation was true led him
farther than any physicist of the 20th century.
He saw the forest even as he bumped into trees.
Of course, not every tree collision in history
ends up at a great thought. But Einstein's
ability to make use of his mistakes as "stepping
stones and shortcuts" was central to his success,
in Mr. Ohanian's view. To see Einstein's
wanderings not as the strides of a god-like
genius but as the steps and missteps of a man --
fallible and imperfect -- does not diminish our
respect for him but rather enhances it.
Mr. McMahon, a professor of history at Florida
State University, is currently writing a history
of the idea of genius in Western thought.
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