View source for Einstein's Mistakes: The Human Failings of Genius' by Hans C. Ohanian MA453Fall2008walther - Rhea

From the Los Angeles Times, Sunday, October 12, 2008. See 
http://www.latimes.com/features/books/la-ca-hans-ohanian12-2008oct12,0,2289223.story

BOOK REVIEW

'Einstein's Mistakes: The Human Failings of Genius' by Hans C. 
Ohanian [W.W. Norton: 394 pp. $24.95]

Even the great genius of Albert Einstein stumbled when it came to calculations.

By George Johnson

WHEN Donald Crowhurst's abandoned sailboat was found adrift in the 
Atlantic in 1969, his captain's log recorded the ravings of a man 
whose mind had snapped. On page after page, he spouted fulminations 
and pseudoscience, finally ripping his chronometer from its mountings 
and throwing it and then himself into the drink.

During the voyage, an around-the-globe sailboat race, Crowhurst had 
been reading Einstein's book "Relativity: The Special and the General 
Theory." A chapter called "On the Idea of Time in Physics" seems to 
have pushed him over the edge.

Einstein was pondering what it means to say that two lightning bolts 
strike the ground simultaneously. For this to be true, he suggested, 
someone positioned halfway between the events would have to observe 
the flashes occurring at the same instant. That assumes that the two 
signals are traveling at the same speed -- a condition, Einstein 
wrote, rather oddly, that "is in reality neither a supposition nor a 
hypothesis about the physical nature of light, but a stipulation 
which I can make of my own free will in order to arrive at a 
definition of simultaneity."

"You can't do THAT!" Crowhurst, an electrical engineer, protested to 
his journal. "I thought, 'the swindler.' " From there he descended 
into madness.

Hans C. Ohanian, who tells this strange tale at the beginning of 
"Einstein's Mistakes: The Human Failings of Genius," sympathizes with 
poor Crowhurst.

"The speed of light is either constant or not, and only measurement 
can decide what it is," Ohanian writes. For Einstein to make a 
postulation rather than propose it as a hypothesis to be tested may 
seem like a fine distinction. (Earlier in his book, Einstein does 
cite an empirical basis for his assumption: the Dutch astronomer 
Willem de Sitter's paper, "An Astronomical Proof for the Constancy of 
the Speed of Light," which was based on observations of binary 
stars.) But to Ohanian, the act was as outrageous as when Indiana 
lawmakers tried to legislate the value for pi. And so he adds it to 
his roster of Einstein's mistakes.

Ohanian, the author of physics textbooks and a former associate 
editor of the American Journal of Physics, sometimes seems to be 
overreaching in his attempt to humble the great man, but the book's 
quixotic approach -- retelling Einstein's story by homing in on his 
blunders -- makes for good intellectual entertainment. Having read 
two books about Einstein just in the last year, I wasn't sure I could 
take another. But with his idiosyncratic style and cranky asides (at 
one point he calls the young Einstein "an incorrigible and tactless 
loudmouth"), Ohanian kept me eagerly turning the pages.

We have all heard that math wasn't Einstein's strong point, and 
Ohanian ruthlessly lays out the details. A 12-page marathon 
calculation in Einstein's doctoral dissertation, "A New Determination 
of the Molecular Size," was "a comedy of errors" based on "zany" 
physical assumptions, such as treating sugar molecules dissolved in 
water as though they were tiny spheres sitting at rest instead of 
spinning like tops.

"It is a total mystery why his thesis advisors overlooked this 
glaring mistake," Ohanian writes. "They were quite ordinary, dull 
professors at what was then a dull, second-rate university, but even 
the dullest of dull physics professors should not have been this 
blind. Einstein's dissertation should have been rejected."

Fumbling ever forward, Einstein went on to commit more errors in the 
suite of famous papers he wrote in 1905, what came to be called his 
miracle year. The miracle, as Ohanian tells it, is that Einstein 
could have been wrong on so many details while coming through, in the 
end, with some of the greatest insights of the century.

In his paper on the photoelectric effect, for example, he claimed to 
prove that a phenomenon called blackbody radiation behaves like a gas 
made of light particles, or photons. Not so fast, Ohanian objects: 
Though the theory worked for high-frequency photons, Einstein glossed 
over the fact that it didn't work for low-frequency ones, "like a 
tailor who tells the customer how beautifully the jacket fits at the 
shoulders, and pretends not to notice that the sleeves are much too 
long, ending somewhere near the knees."

Most of the errors Ohanian describes will be just as esoteric for 
many readers, but his exasperated outbursts make the book fun. E=mc2? 
Don't get him started. No matter what you have been told, it was not 
such an important equation, a trifle, really. And not even original. 
Nevertheless, in deriving the formula, Einstein left a hole in his 
argument "almost big enough for a truck to drive through." He proved 
the case for slow-moving bodies and then extrapolated, without 
justification, to fast-moving ones.

"The mistake is the sort of thing every amateur mathematician knows 
to watch out for," Ohanian scolds. Over the years, Einstein came up 
with more proofs; they all contained errors.

Einstein buffs have read numerous times about what he called his 
"biggest mistake" (introducing a fudge factor in general relativity 
to avoid the seeming absurdity of an expanding universe). Ohanian 
gives us Einstein's "zaniest mistake." In trying to nail down the 
equivalence between energy and mass, he engaged in a mathematical 
fraud as egregious as that "perpetrated by some sleazy Italian 
purveyors of olive oil, who pour a bottleful of genuine olive oil 
into a barrelful of vegetable oil of unknown provenance and then sell 
this mix as pure olive oil, extra vergine."

Sometimes, Einstein's friend Marcel Grossmann tried to help him with 
his figures but not always to good effect. When Einstein was trying 
to get his mind around curved space-time, one of Grossmann's bungled 
equations led him astray. Einstein didn't notice. "In a performance 
worthy of Elmer Fudd marching off to hunt 'wabbits' and failing to 
notice that Bugs Bunny is sitting on top of his hunting cap, Einstein 
failed to recognize the mistake." In going through Einstein's life, 
some of what Ohanian marks down as errors seem more like 
philosophical disputes. Einstein's quest to find a unified theory and 
to expunge quantum craziness from physics ultimately failed. But that 
doesn't mean it wasn't a noble attempt.

Ohanian assures us that his crankiness comes not out of 
schadenfreude, "[b]ut, rather, because these mistakes made Einstein 
appear so much more human. They brought him down from the Olympian 
heights of his great discoveries to my own level, where I could 
imagine talking to him as a colleague, and maybe bluntly say, in the 
give-and-take of a friendly discussion among colleagues, 'Albert, now 
that is really stupid!' "

We can imagine Einstein responding favorably. "We all must from time 
to time make a sacrifice at the altar of stupidity," he once wrote to 
his colleague Max Born, "for the entertainment of the deity and 
mankind." Most important, Ohanian notes, Einstein's instincts were 
dead on. Light is made of photons. Mass is equivalent to energy. 
Space-time is curved. Nothing can exceed the speed of light. 
Einstein, Ohanian writes, had "a mystical intuitive approach to 
physics" that led him to the right answers -- if not always by the 
right path.
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George Johnson's most recent book is "The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments."--[[User:Akcooper|Akcooper]] 17:36, 23 November 2008 (UTC)

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Thanks for this - I might have to buy this book.