Brilliant Blunders News Today

A draft of an article for the New York Times by the physicist will go up for sale at Christie's in Shanghai on September 23.

Cambridge Core - Logic, Categories and Sets - The Joy of Abstraction

Astrophysicist at the hubble space science institute and the author of brilliant blunders. lets start there. why blunders? why are they productive? what was the goal of the book? >> so there were three goals to the book. one is to make us all feel a little bit better. namely that even the biggest geniuses make some serious blunders. second is to correct the misconception that some people think that science marches on a straight line from a to b when in fact it is really a zig zag path that encou...

And the main blunder really, in his case, is that just stubbornly refusing to accept even as evidence was mounting that the big bang was the correct theory. >> are you saying that he used the term "big boang" dericively? >> this was in a radio address. he wanted to create a mental picture for his listeners. basically he said on one hand we have this theory, and on the other, there are those who say it all started in one big bang. >> mario, youll be happy to know in all of my science classes i al...

But you do sort of go off route and find something else? some other wonderful discovery? >> well, yes. there are a number of such examples and discovery of penicillin is one such example. but, in fact, you will notice that i called the book "brilliant blunders" because of the reason that, in fact, all of the blunders i describe here eventually actually led to breakthroughs. i mean, the idea is that to make a really big discovery, you need to think outside the box. and to think outside the box re...