Even geniuses are only human.
He may be the father of relativity and the physicist who explored and explained gravity and light, but even the great Albert Einstein sometimes lacked faith in his own theories.
This self-doubt led him to make some major mistakes.
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'The biggest mess'
While working on the general theory of relativity, Einstein's calculations indicated that gravity would cause the Universe to either expand or contract, contrary to the generally accepted view at the time that the Universe was static.
And so, in a 1917 paper on general relativity, Einstein inserted a "cosmological constant" into the equations to virtually nullify the influence of gravity, thereby adhering to the orthodox view that the Universe is static.
About a decade later, scientists began to gather new evidence that the Universe was not static at all.
Moreover, it was expanding.
Physicist George Gamow later wrote in his book My View of the World: An Informal Autobiography that Einstein commented, with hindsight, that "the introduction of the cosmological term was the biggest blunder he ever made in his life."
But there is another twist.
Scientists now have evidence that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating due to mysterious "dark energy."
Some believe that Einstein's cosmological constant, initially introduced to cancel out gravity in his equations, could actually have accounted for this energy and then ended up not being such a mistake after all.
Discovering distant galaxies
Einstein's general theory of relativity also predicted another phenomenon: that the gravitational field of a massive object such as a star would change the direction of light coming from a distant object behind it, essentially functioning like a giant magnifying glass.
Einstein believed that this effect, known as gravitational lensing, would be too small to be seen.
He had no intention of even publishing these personal calculations until a Czech engineer named RV Mandl persuaded him to do so.
Referring to his own 1936 article published in Science magazine, Einstein wrote to the editor: "Allow me to thank you for your cooperation with this little publication, which Mr. Mandl has squeezed out of me. It is of little value, but it makes this poor fellow happy."
The value of that small publication proved to be very important for astronomy.
It allows the US space agency NASA and the European Space Agency's Hubble telescope to record the details of far, far away galaxies, magnified by the vast clusters of galaxies closer to Earth.
'God doesn't roll dice'
Einstein's work, which included a 1905 paper on light as both a wave and a particle, helped lay the foundations for a new branch of physics.
Quantum mechanics describes a bizarre, counterintuitive world of tiny subatomic particles.
For example, a quantum object exists in a "superposition," which is in multiple states until it is observed and measured, when it is assigned a value.
This was famously illustrated by physicist Erwin Schrödinger in his paradox, in which a cat in a box can be considered both alive and dead until someone opens the lid to check.
Einstein refused to accept this uncertainty.
He wrote to physicist Max Born in 1926 that "God does not roll dice."
His 1935 paper, written with scientists Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, reasoned that if two objects in a superposition were separated after being somehow connected, a person who observed the first object and assigned a value to it would instantly correct the value for the second object, even if the second object had never been observed.
Although this thought experiment was intended as a refutation of quantum superposition, it practically paved the way decades later for the development of a key idea in quantum mechanics that we now call "entanglement."
It claims that two objects can be connected as one, even if they are far apart.
And so it seems that Einstein was brilliant in his theories and that he inspired brilliance in others even in things about which he was sometimes wrong.
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