"Einstein" has literally become a synonym for "genius" at this point in history. And rightly so. Einstein was so smart, he probably would have won a few more Nobel Prizes if he hadn't gotten sick of traveling to Norway all the time. But "genius" isn't a synonym for "perfect" — and Einstein proved that.
Take a look at the top ten scientific mistakes of Albert Einstein.
Top image: Albert Einstein Memorial in Washington D.C., photographed by Cristina Ciochina/Shutterstock.com
10. Einstein made a deliberate mistake with mass, and is credited with the correction
Relativity alters mass. When mass and energy are equivalent, when time stretches and shortens, and when distance changes, as they all do in special relativity, then Newtonian ideas of absolute mass are thrown out of whack.
Essentially, the faster a particle is moving, the more mass it has. What's more, that particle's speed is different for observers who are traveling at different speeds relative to it, and so its mass is different depending on who is observing it. And yet as part of his paper on special relativity, Einstein at one point uses the same particle mass for someone moving with a particle as he does for someone at rest and observing it — and he seemed to have done it deliberately.
Max Planck, a thoroughly nice guy, quietly figured out the actual way to calculate the mass depending on observation, but didn't humiliate Einstein, who was a relative (heh) newcomer to physics at the time of his paper. For his kindness, Planck has been repaid by only rarely being credited for the calculation he came up with.
Einstein made many practical contributions to the field of physics and chemistry — but if that was all he had done, no one except physics students would know him today. He became famous because he wanted to overturn views of reality, make connections (like speed and time, energy and mass) that no one else saw.
This shows in his early work, including papers he wrote in 1902 through 1904 without the same success, or correctness, as his later work. In one early paper, he attempted to connect the Second Law of Thermodynamics — that heat tended to flow from hot to cold, or that a small pocket of hot air would spread out to warm a room — with the laws of mechanics. He did this via probability, stating correctly that it is more probable that a pocket of hot air will warm a room instead of just staying by itself. The problem is, this doesn't have anything to do with mechanics. And a derivation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics from laws of mechanics had already been done.
8. Einstein separated time and space, and only bent one of them.
Working on General Relativity was a difficult thing for anyone — even Einstein, and he invented the damn thing. One of the first setbacks he had with the theory came via his old nemesis: math. Studying an equation for curved spacetime, he believed it indicated that particles with different velocities should fall at different accelerations. He recognized that they don't, but felt the only fix for the equation was that only time, and not space, was curved around massive objects.
What's more, he was working with a partner who was meant to be doing a great deal of the math (Einstein famously would regularly ask students in his classes to check his math), but who instead messed up more of the math. This overall wrong turn cost them three years of study, of equation manipulation, and of furious frustration, before they realized that they got their starting point wrong.
7. Einstein deliberately assumed that a gas and light are the same
One of Einstein's most brilliant moves was showing that quanta of light, instead of just waves, were possible. In fact provided the only explanation for the behavior of certain objects when exposed to light. Why do electrons in atoms respond only to certain waves of light, going 'dark' when other wavelengths, even higher-energy wavelengths, were applied? Einstein visualized the photon, and he visualized it a good decade before many other brilliant people could. However, in one paper, he visualized it very wrong.
Blackbodies are bodies that perfectly emit and absorb any radiation. Einstein recognized that these bodies would be giving off a lot of photons, which he at the time called quanta. He described the quanta of light coming off such a body as a 'gas of quanta.' A gas, in physics, behaves in a certain way, so Einstein was telling people to assume certain behaviors from the quanta. And so they should - from high-frequency light. Low-frequency light didn't do anywhere near the same thing, which Einstein knew at the time. Like his earlier trick with the mass, Einstein simply didn't recognize this other behavior, preferring the purity of his interpretation to the complexity of a more accurate one.
One of Einstein's most often-repeated lines was "God does not play dice with the universe." He was speaking, quite righteously, about his dislike of quantum mechanics, and its pesky way of playing peek-a-boo with researchers. The notion that objects could have properties that are well-and-truly undetermined — not just undiscovered, but genuinely not really 'there' until checked upon — was a great affront to Einstein.
He had furious debates with other scientists about it, absented himself for some time from the field, and eventually spent his time trying to find a grand unified theory to make it fit in with his (relatively orderly) universe again. To Einstein's credit, people have continued attempting the same feat, to this day. If anyone ever manages to do it — I'll happily change this list to 'The Top Nine Scientific Mistakes Made by Einstein.' Because that would be awesome.
5. Einstein's failed experiments in counter-intuitive reasoning
Time slows down for an object as it goes faster - that's ridiculous. But true. Water becomes less viscous as more sugar is put into it - that's ridiculous. And not so true, as anyone who has sampled syrup can tell you. A very young Einstein was attempting to submit a dissertation to his university. Already having one dissertation nearly rejected (he withdrew it before it could be rejected in order to re-collect the fee that students paid to submit their dissertations) he decided on a project to find a new way to calculate Avogadro's number - the number of atoms in a mole of a substance. This required a look at molecular size.
Einstein, according to everyone who looked at the paper, had a good grip on the concepts, but fell down the stairs when it came to practical math. He messed up coefficients, he made typos, he left out parts of equations, he wrote positive as negative, and as a result he came up with things like, 'adding a single sugar molecule lessens the viscosity of the water it is added to.' Einstein, as a student, considered the dissertation so bad that he actually laughed to other students about half-assing his way through it. When it was sent back to him to be lengthened, he added a single sentence. The professors, beaten down by persistence or perhaps not wanting him to withdraw another paper and lose another fee, approved the thing.
4. Einstein didn't believe black holes exist.
Just a bit after his paper on general relativity came out in 1916, Einstein received word from a German physicist named Karl Schwarzschild. Schwarzschild took Einstein's ideas and ran with them, applying them to how planets moved around stars. The geometry of space was curved. This meant that a star pulled down space the way a bowling ball pulled down the fabric of a blanket, and the planets orbiting the star simply followed the deformed curve of space. This predicted the behavior as well as Newton's models did.
Einstein was pleased with Schwarzschild's variations on his great ideas — until he noticed something strange. At the center of this curve, with enough matter and a strong enough pull of gravity, suddenly everything changed. There was a 'singularity,' where everything broke down. No, no, no, insisted Einstein. Yes, yes, yes, thought Schwarzschild, and eventually, when black holes were found out in space, the rest of the world agreed.
3. Einstein literally drove a man insane by not allowing clocks to be synchronized
Special Relativity deals with how an object's time slows down as the object speeds up. A fast-moving clock won't sync up with a slow-moving one. During his arguments in favor of this, Einstein mentioned that it wasn't possible to use clocks to measure the speed of light. Clocks were often synced with light signals, and light's speed was checked with clocks. Since these two things were bound up in each other and used to measure each other, Einstein claimed that an absolute measurement wasn't possible.
When a gentleman by the name of Donald Crowhurst read this while on an around-the-globe sailboat race in 1969, he wrote, "You can't do THAT!" in his logbook, made increasingly long rants against the theory, and at last threw himself into the sea. And he was right. You can't. Because, quite simply, there are plenty of other ways of syncing up clocks, including the simplest way, which is carrying a third clock between the two and checking that they were ticking along in a synchronized fashion. Einstein, bogged down in patents about synchronization procedures done with light signals, either assumed or pretended that that was the only way to do things.
2. Einstein didn't realize that none of the above insanity was necessary
Einstein's explanation of light being interconnected with synchronization of clocks was wrong and drove a man insane, but what was really messed up about all of that was that Einstein didn't need to synchronize his clocks at all. Not at all.
The synchronization argument was based on the Michelson-Morley experiment, which disproved the idea of the ether and indicated the constant speed of light. They did this by splitting a beam of light in perpendicular directions, assuming that the two different beams would reach their destination at different times, depending on whether they were flowing with or against the ether. Obviously, the two watches, the one at the beginning point and at the end point would have to be synced up to do this accurately. The problem is, the beginning point of the experiment was the endpoint. Both beams of light were bounced off mirrors and sent back to their starting point. In other words, there was only one 'watch,' to begin with. (Actually, the two beams of light were combined and their interference pattern would have been studied to see the differences in time, but that doesn't matter.) Nothing needed synchronization here.
1. Einstein thought he made a mistake, but he was wrong.
At last we come to what Einstein called "the greatest blunder of my life." In 1916 Einstein noticed a little problem with the theory of relativity. It turned out that, when everything was tallied up, the universe should be expanding. Other people noticed this about his equations, too. Clearly, though, that was a foolish thought. Einstein believed, with a fervor that was almost religious, that the universe was in stasis. There was no gradual dissolution of everything in creation.
Einstein bickered with the other scientists and with himself, trying to find flaws in their logic, seeking some way of juggling his various theories so they didn't mean what they seemed to mean. And at last he covered with a random constant that he called 'lambda.' When added to his calculations, lambda functioned to keep the universe from, on paper, flying apart. He gave no reason for it to be there. He simply stuck it in to make the figures work. He held fast to lambda until in 1929, definite evidence that the universe was expanding was waved in his face. At last he surrendered lambda and believed he was in error until he died.
In the last few years, though, a lambda has popped up again. Not only is the universe flying apart, physicists have noted, but the universe is flying apart faster and faster every day. To account for this, they've added in a 'cosmological constant,' which accounts for this acceleration to his equations.
So in the end, this muddle of right and wrong is Einstein's greatest blunder. His equations were right and the universe really was expanding — but then he made them wrong. Then the thing that made them wrong was used by modern physicists, in reverse, to make them right again. So . . . what exactly was he wrong about?
Curved Spacetime Image: NASA-JPL
Dice Image: Wiki Commons
Michelson Morley Image: American Libraries Internet Archive
Via Discover Magazine twice and Einstein's Mistakes.
