The Many Errors of Einstein

There can be no doubt that Albert Einstein was one of the greatest scientists of the twentieth century, one who saw deeper into the secrets of nature than anyone. Does this mean that we should take everything he did as correct? That he never made mistakes? On the contrary.

In fact, few scientists have made as many errors as Einstein. Few have changed their minds as frequently as he did. I’m not talking about the kind of mistakes he made in his everyday life, which are a matter of opinion and, ultimately, his own business. I’m talking about genuine scientific errors: mistaken ideas, wrong predictions, error-strewn equations, scientific assertions that he himself came to regret and that were proved false.

Let me give you a few examples. Today we know that the universe is expanding. The Belgian physicist Georges Lemaître managed to understand this by using Einstein’s own theories, and informed him of his findings. Einstein responded by dismissing the ideas as nonsensical, only to have to eat his words when in the thirties the expansion was actually observed. Another consequence of his theory is the existence of black holes, and he wrote several erroneous texts on the subject, contending that the universe ends at the edge of a black hole. The existence of gravitational waves, for which we now have good indirect evidence,fn1 also followed from Einstein’s theories. Einstein wrote at first that these waves existed, but only before claiming that they did not – in effect misinterpreting his own theory – and then changing his mind again to accept the opposite, correct conclusion.

When he wrote his theory of special relativity, Einstein did not use the notion of spacetime. This notion, which is to say the concept of a four-dimensional continuum that includes both space and time, is really down to Hermann Minkowski, who used it to rewrite Einstein’s theory. When Einstein became aware of what Minkowski had done, he maintained that it was merely a useless mathematical complication of his theory – only to change his opinion completely, shortly afterwards, and use precisely the concept of spacetime in order to write the theory of general relativity.

On the issue of the role of mathematics in physics, Einstein repeatedly shifted his point of view, advocating in the course of his life various ideas that were in direct contradiction with each other.

Before writing the correct equations of his major work, the general theory of relativity, Einstein had published a series of articles, all wrong, each proposing a different incorrect equation. He even went so far as to publish a complex and detailed work to argue that the theory cannot have a certain symmetry … that he later chose as the foundation of his theory!

In the final years of his life, Einstein obstinately persisted in wanting to write a unified theory of gravity and electromagnetism, without realizing, as it would shortly be understood, that electromagnetism is a component of a larger theory (electroweak theory), and therefore that his project of unifying it with gravity was pointless.

Einstein also shifted his position repeatedly in the great debates about quantum mechanics. At first, he argued that the theory is contradictory. Then he accepted the idea that it wasn’t, confining himself to insisting that it must be incomplete and that it failed to describe all of nature.

Regarding general relativity, for a long time Einstein was convinced that the equations could not have solutions in the absence of matter, and therefore the gravitational field depended on matter – only to then change his mind when Willem de Sitter and others showed that he was wrong, ending up by interpreting the gravitational field as a separate, real entity that exists in its own right.

In the extraordinary work of 1917 in which he founded modern cosmology, Einstein understood that the universe can be a three-sphere and introduced the cosmological constant which has today been verified, and managed to add together an egregious error of physics – the idea that the universe must not change in time – and a resounding error in mathematics: he didn’t realize that the solution he wrote was unstable, and that it could not describe the real universe. As a result, the article is a strange mixture of major new and revolutionary ideas and a mass of serious errors.

Do all these mistakes and changes of opinion take something away from our admiration of Albert Einstein? Not at all. If anything, the opposite is the case. They teach us something instead, I believe, about the nature of intelligence. Intelligence is not about stubborn adherence to your own opinions. It requires readiness to change and even discard those opinions.

In order to understand the world, you need to have the courage to experiment with ideas not to fear failure, to constantly revise your opinions, to make them work better.

The Einstein who makes more errors than anyone else is precisely the same Einstein who succeeds in understanding more about nature than anyone else, and these are complementary and necessary aspects of the same profound intelligence: the audacity of thought, the courage to take risks, the lack of faith in received ideas – including, crucially, one’s own.

To have the courage to make mistakes, to change one’s ideas, not once but repeatedly, in order to discover. In order to arrive at understanding.

What’s important is not being right. It’s to try to understand.