He works at the Space Telescope Science Institute that has been conducting the Space Program for the Hubble Telescope and they will conduct a Scientific Program for the upcoming james webb telesco. It is great to chat with you. Dr. Livio has published more than 500 scientific articles and has received Research Awards in recognition for teaching excellence and his books. His interests and our work broad range of physics from cosmetology in black kohls to extrasolar planets and the emergence of possible intelligent life in the universe. His popular book the golden ratio when the prize in 2003 in the international pythagoras to prize sunday is a well published author he is here to discuss his most recent book, brilliant blunders from darwin to einstein colossal mistakes by great scientists that changed our understanding of life and the universe released may 2013 in received excellent reviews from the new york times, the the wall street journal and washington post. Congratulations. I love your book brilliant blunders because it exposes the flaw of the great giants in science. But also theories they had completely wrong. Tell us about it. Guest it is part of the reason to show even the most blueberries can make big blunders. But it is also because this is the way science works see if it wanted to expose that part of it. Host people said dont talk about giants like this or have they learned from the examples that you give . Guest most people like this i told the in the process of writing what the book was about they would say i have chosen by a great scientist and a major blunder in they said that is a good idea. I did not get much resistance. Host those of us who had bad ideas. Some of the blunders are based on Bad Information at the time if you had to assign a number what percentage of your estimate were due to price . Guest just Bad Information they would dont call it a blunder unless the person that made the blunder did not understand they had that information as well. So i would say half but if they had the permission, that is not the part i kim to. What i cant is the realize it may have had that information. Fact a in roughly speaking i wanted five giants not anybody that nobody had heard of in i didnt want to go too far back in history. If you go too far back but with the middle of the 90s century with some thread to connect them into this particular case i decided the thread was evolution of life on earth, of the earth itself, the stars,. Host charles darwin, at lord kelvin brad wheel and Albert Einstein. Lets start with charles darwin. But as i in the stand that he never even used the term evolution in his original lighting. Guest it is true. In the original book he never used the word evolution. However it has devolved. It does appear there in the last word of the book. But to except that at the time of. Host he was known more for Natural Selection in that theory them that concept of evolution it became adopted by those that use the evolution theory or tell us for about what drove him. Guest Natural Evolution by means of Natural Selection so his theory was composed of a number of steps in it with the concept of evolution in its self. Hit changes with time and so on. And not that youd get one species but you have to wait hundreds of thousands of generations where you start with one thing and it splits and it splits that is how you get the diversity than the common ancestry what we see with all the species it came from an initial form of life. Then we have this one mechanism to support how does all of that work . Host and darwins great blunder is his lack of understanding of genetics. Tell us about that. Dar we debated genetics is a big mystery. I dont blame you for that however in the theory that existed at that meant he of a characteristic of the mother and father you mix them together. You take red and yellow the and you get a green and so on. That is the theory that everybody used. The problem was that darwin did not understand that with such a theory Natural Selection could not have reworked because imagine you have a population of a million like cats and one black cat and suppose that does provide a big advantage but with the planting theory you mix things like a gin and tonic the black cat mixes with the white you get a great men if they make you get another paler shade of gray and gets diluted and diluted then it disappears to never appear again so that was the blunder. The way genetics really works is more like shoveling ducks of cards decks of cards to it doesnt matter how long i shuffle i always have the ace being stowed change they can be transferred. This is what he did not get with the theory he was operating it could not have worked. Host he has a tremendous theory but it could not be applied in his mind did he leave this world confused and puzzled . Guest he was. It came close to come up with the correct theory of genetics. I begin the end that heredity is more like mixing and not like fusion. In another letter he has the insight that today sounds so trivial but how could nobody think about that . He says with if gbl has a child that child is male or female it is not a mixture or some intermediary. So he already understood that somehow genetics must work in other ways but he did not know either of mathematics of the probabilities and so on and could not come up with the correct theory. He did come up with the certain theory that was completely wrong believe in the wrong direction and so wide. Host it is interesting to read about darwin some time putting other aspects on hold to pursue science. What was he like . What made him tick . Guest he loved nature and spent five years on the ship filling journal after journal he laughed medical school to study nature he eventually married his cousin that when he was about to marry in his notebook he said he debates with himself to marry or word not to reenlists the pros and cons that you have a companion at old age, the better than a dog ian things like that. But i have less money to buy books or things like that. A few other things. It is a waste of time and waste your time. Eventually he decided to marry. He had a lot of notebooks he took a lot of notes. It is interesting Court Example he never published a real genealogy tree but in his notebooks he does have such a family tree. The only one thing that comes close he had won praise and gina diagram at the top he wrote i think. Even then he was not quite sure. Host we be more humble in history has given him. Guest if you read the last rays of his book the last phrase toward the end i forget the exact words the he basically says even superior humans now appear you still see in them how the science of their humble beginnings. Host it is almost poetic. Lord kelvin was a tremendous influence his head in science. He developed the scale to measure temperature but we dont talk about him much because we have replaced it with very tight and celsius. He in fahrenheit to. Tell us about him. Guest he was a mr. Know what all kind of person. Of course, with his sixth so are and sometimes you hear degrees in calvin but not in everyday life. He was as much a physicist as an engineer and mathematician. He was fantastic to take radius from physics and mathematics and actually applying them to a variety of things. He developed all kinds of work in thermal dynamics also responsible putting off the under ocean and cable in he invented the compass used by barriers. Sailors also electricity and magnetism with a lot of work of that. He was a person that almost worked with every branch of physics or injured during at the time. Host he had an understanding of the earth if it was a theory today would be popular in the entire field of astrophysics. Tell us about his understanding of the age of the year as compared to today. Guest first let me say the good things about him. He actually came up with the way to calculate the age. Think about even today how you go about calculating the age of the years . Even before radioactivity. He came up with the incredible idea that today with forensics they measure the temperature of a corpse in tel the time of death. That was his idea in a way. The earth started very hot indeed has been losing energy since been. If we would measure very accurately how the temperature changes with depth we would know it is like to take on a hot turkey from the of in and stick it in the freezer then by measuring how the temperature changes, you can basically calculate how long the earth has been in the freezer. It is like that. So the idea was fantastic. Host it was radical at the time. Guest really of break through the he could even do that. But he came up with the age of 100 million years which is a factor of 45 to shore it is 4. 5 billion years so the question is why . If he was so clever how did you get a wrong . Most people will say he neglected radioactivity. It is true because of the the original calculation radioactivity was not even discovered and it provides teaching to the earth so that it is the assumption that was formed once and cooling everything is not correct because it gets heat from radioactivity. But how it turns out that is not the major problem. Hall he did not take into account the possibility the heat transported inside the earth more e efficiently and in particular the interior acts more like a fluid the you can get convection in transporting the sheets like this light wheel in a pot. The colder stuff stinks and so one then you get the circulation in he did not take that into account and that is why he had such a bad age. Host in trying to measure the age of the earth he may have contributed to science just in that quest did he encourage other researchers to do the same and follow when he tried to do . Is that really the contribution . I cleaned it is even bigger than what you just have suggested. It is so fast a vast to cannot put a limit on it. No solid for the beginning war for the end. Coming up with a number that was too short for darwins theory of evolution the could not take place in just 100 million years or the geology. It was billions in billions of years it forced the geology and led to radioactive dating to determine the age of the earth to be part of the ears and that earth and that was the contribution of kelvin to try to calculate all this. Host thats great. We are with mario livio whos to book brilliant blunders is teaching us about flaws from the great scientist in history. We all the labelle calling from basic chemistry and physics but what did he do that was great and what did he do wrong . Guest almost certainly the greatest chemist of his generation someone say the greatest of all time the only person that got dead nobel price twice by himself without sharing one was for peace then one was for chemistry now what he did to identify the importance of the Hydrogen Bomb this is when the Hydrogen Bomb is shared between two others and that became a part of the molecules of life but the report in the he certainly was one of the first people is said at the end of the day there is nothing mysterious there are no vital forces just understand the chemistry will understand the molecules of life ian part of that he managed to find the main structure. That was not known before his time. Host fred hoyle maybe one of the lesser known in the United States but overseas he is well recognized to be one of the giants. Tell us who fred wheel was. Guest as you point out he was extremely well known in the u. K. Because he wrote many popular books and had a very Popular Radio Program and was known to the general public as well but in the u. S. Is not as wellknown. Wonder that he you biggest astrophysicist there is no doubt about that before period the of 25 years are really arguably the biggest that all the elements that you and i are made of or actually formed inside stars. At the beginning of the universe and everything that life depends on carbon, oxygen all of those elements inside the stars. There is the expression we are stardust literally. The material in our body inside some star and he was the person who came up with the theory of fact. Host is the most ironic because did it he believed the universe was constant and that it was set in time . Guest correct period even more ironic in the sense he coined the term big bang which is used today that our universe started with the big bang but he always objected to the big bang theory. He cleans the term but he objected to the theory. So basically instead of saying all the universe started today in one big bang he says no. It was always the same and will always stay the same so while a reading appears to change it is the universe at large that stays the same. He knew the universe was expanding because we knew that since the late 1920s how can it stayed the same if it is expanding for sure then he invented that it is created. Now won the you could not measure at a very slow rate one atom per century in a volume like the Empire State Building but matter is treated you would say this is great. You created out of nothing . Day know what hoyle would say . In the big bang you wanted everything to be created out once. Not one atom every century. Host it is amazing hall the is mines tried to quantify what no one else ever tried. I thank you are a child anything that cost more than 7 is a milliondollar. It is nebulous and abstract and has no meaning but many scientists attempted to do calculations on the change of energy, the size of the universe, the age of the earth. It seems that is one common driver and yet many of them made a giant blender as you point out in your book. Restocking to mario livio author of brilliant blunders and we will talk about Albert Einstein in the little bit about what happened in his life that led to his theory would become back. When we come back host we are back with dr. Mario livio and expert of buckles, cosmology, extrasol ar planets impossibility of intelligent life outside the universe. Were talking about his new book, brilliant blunders highly acclaimed that outlines the giant mistakes that science has made with certain individuals over the years. Talk about Albert Einstein when the the most popular scientist in the United States. An interesting character character, and many great positive stand also interesting negatives about his life. Kim you tell us what life was like for Albert Einstein . Guest he was you wish wish, but he was jewish it did in germany with the country that was to become not see some not see germany and he was recognized as a giant scientist but eventually left and came to the u. S. And worked at princeton for a good number of years like call life at the beginning of the 20th century was actually responsible for what we have witnessed some one year is known as his miracle year yet he has another miracle year in which he sets the foundations for much of modern physics and by that i mean the furious of general relativity the series of general relativity to set the foundation for Quantum Mechanics mechanics. But this is like putting the of particles in the water. There are atoms there that do things and so on. There is no aspect of physics that einstein did not to touch on. Of course you cannot blame him for writing the same physics that led to that. This includes the Nuclear Reactor for power and so on today. Many other things that we talk about. But you know, he was one that indicated it always led to a Nuclear Weapons. Can you comment upon the mentality that took place peace and the respect for life among the great scientists. You had einstein with his intense respect for human life. Is there something that they saw in nature and in humans and chemistry and physics that made them have a deep respect for human life . It is a good question. You know, i must say that i have not given it much thought in terms of this. Is there something particular to scientists that may be more of an advocate towards that direction. Einstein, by the way, they knew each other, they had met and they found out that the biggest mistake he ever did was writing this particular letter that led to this atomic bomb. Now maybe it is more a question of, you know, of the truly great scientists who kind of had an open mind and they really thought about the whole universe and what it means and what the earth and life on earth and all of these things and so on. Being a part of that open mind, they saw the danger as species becoming extinct in humans becoming extinct and so forth and so on. Therefore a number of them became pacifists. Now, this is not all scientists like Edward Teller and others, those advocating Nuclear Weapons and things of that nature. This is why i find it a bit hard to say that this is something that characterizes all sciences, that is certainly not the case. I think you will find more pacifists among scientists than maybe those among the population in general, that is my feeling. While some scientists could see what is inside humans to be molecules, others see the art and beauty of life and they appreciate that more. Yes, einstein was a musician as well. He really loved music and so forth and so on and there must have been some part that was played in that. He was clearly a genius by any definition. No question at all enact what he could not remember where he lived. He would forget his keys at times and there is a story where he went to get at the bus at penn state and he was fumbling through his change and he could not figure out how much to pay for the bus ride and the driver stopped and counted the coins for him and took the fair. Please tell us about this sort of extreme on both ends where you have this intense genius and someone who fumbles through some of the more simple things in life. I am not an expert on how the mind works that way. I have seen studies of genius and creativity. I remember that the conclusion of that particular study was an extremely creative individuals, they tend to have this they can occupy and they can be extreme with each other. Or they can be extremely humble and proud at the same time. Most people fall somewhere in the middle. They have the ability to host these extremes. And i think that probably that is part of it. From everyday life we also have a key concept. There must be Something Like that in their. Tell us about where he went wrong. We have a little bit of equation when it comes to that so if i now throw a small ball, we are moving this in a certain place. It has a space to curb like this and the planets and they move in this curb space and this is the essence. Gravity is really some sort of a curvature of space. So it causes the space to curb. I have a major part of the strong. So far the theory as far as we know it is correct but then their are some details and the details are the following. So einstein thought when he formulated the he thought that the university was stacked against him. But the university was in place. How can they not move. This universe is going to collapse under its own weight and basically it is what we would call today a fad factor and this was the term in the equation but that introduced this force which precisely balanced gravity at every point late in the 1920s, he discovered that the university has expanded. They said wait a second, if everything is not part of expending, i dont need this because all that gravity is going to do now is slow down the expansion the gravity of the earth slows them down. This is one of the terms in the equation that describes this. They entered another term and now he said that i dont need this because we have all of our gravity is slowing expansion down and we took it out. In 1998 we discovered that not only is her universe expanding, but it is speeding up accelerating. What is it that prepares and acceleration. We thought it should be slowing down. Instead it is beating up. You know what propels a . We think now that einstein status. So he had a real blunder that appeared to have been putting the terminal instead of putting it in. He could have predicted even way back then in 1917 that the University Extension should be speeding up which we now know from 1988. Is almost as if it was a placeholder for what he didnt understand. That is right. That you see some of these geniuses, even their placeholders where the blunders turned out to be, part of the insight. It is amazing. Its amazing because it seems that there are two lessons here. One is that when somebody has a master of a subject, we should listen to their wisdom. On the other hand, we have seen how they have made major mistakes and we need to question that wisdom. Tell us about the takehome messages from your research of these great scientists than what they have done right and wrong. Okay. So the main takehome message, i think, it is that science is not a headlong rush. It is not a direct path that leads from eight to be. Science progresses over time. This isnt a zags are caused by a variety of blunders and mistakes in so one you almost get the impression so what else could you have thought about. No, it is not like that at all. You notice. So he thought about this a long time. The number of false starts and so on and we came up with a correct theory and so on and within that we have these particular blunders. So that is one thing. Science progresses in some sense through the blunders. And even the biggest scientists make blunders. It is not surprising because the biggest have the biggest ideas. You can have a situation where they make blunders. You should always be aware of that. There is another lesson here which is in many cases of science, in particular in mathematics and theoretical physics and so on, sometimes you have a situation where people do their best work out sometimes as they grow older. And as they grow older they sometimes they are a bit reluctant to settle into a life of incremental science. Saying that i did this big thing we have blunders and those new areas as well. See would say, if im hearing you correctly, that many of these great scientists made their gigantic contributions relatively early in our lives and a younger part of their careers. After having these huge achievements, we can almost allow them to sort of wander into areas where we have a false confidence or a sense or a lack of direction or reveling in their previous victories and it can result in a misguided future. Yes, some of them. For some of them that is true. In the case of this, for example, there is no question the success was part of the original idea way back when, and then it took 13 years to check that. At the protein structure. That is right. And he came up with this structure. But he wasnt sure because there was one little point but not exactly agree. So he kept testing the individual Building Blocks and everything. It turned out that it was correct. And that the small discrepancy they couldnt explain, it had a different explanation that he didnt need to worry about. And then when he went and tried to do this model for dna, each had a false sense of confidence. And at that point he said, i learned that my original hunch was correct and the rest was detailed that had to be worked out somehow. So he worked for about one month on his project of dna for bits in earnest and he turned out to be completely wrong. There were three strands instead of two, violating basic laws of chemistry and he wrote the book on that. You know, when it was regarded as part of these details. Its like we think the basic structure is part of this and you know, its very important that we can understand and we are not in a rush because of this. He barely knew about them. But he did know that both in london and the group cambridge, massachusetts, in general, Lawrence Bragg was the head of the group therefore example. That he was in london and he knew that they had better data and better xray data. So he was always very compact. So he was into the. There is this notion of bill gates has mentioned that success is a lousy teacher. It empowers the lucky to feel that they are actually smart. But it sounds like you have seen on. Yes, even though i would say we realized later that there was a sequence in it. Tell us a little bit about how we have learned from mistakes and science and what was the biggest blunder of the blunders are identified in your book. It was one of the great philosophers of science that basically said you can never prove a theory correct, you can only prove it wrong. Basically it is part of the possibility and is one of the hallmarks of a true scientific theory. If it is a real theory, we should be able to make predictions about other things that have not been done. And if they turn out not to agree, it means that there is something wrong with this. This is how the Scientific Method really works. So finding the mistakes are part and parcel of these kind of processes. It is not that we should do these things by being careless. We should be very careful and we hope to agree with all the facts at the time that would suggest it. But it is not, you know, it is part of how we find a better theory newtons theory of gravity was replaced by einsteins theory of relativity. But it simply means that if i throw it now, i would not be meeting up for such low speeds and so on. So it continues to remain part of general leavitt relativity and it is a case that was revolves around slow speeds and so forth. In some cases the theory turns out to be completely wrong. On the back of your book, there is a great saying that genius is defined as those that can make all the possible mistakes and waste amount of time. What is your idea about the way that science progresses today. There are so many different forces in science today. Back when darwyn wanted to take us around the world and he had to raise funding and today there is science and progress in government projects. We have many challengers that science has progressed a lot. Funding has become a serious problem in the fact that there are certain problems in science that require a lot of funding. It cost many billions of dollars and it was something that cannot be supported in certain ways. So there is no question that has become a problem. It is very ambitious but also a very costly program. Programs in medicine that costs a lot of money and so forth and so on. As a result of this, there is a certain fear for making mistakes. You know, things like that and so forth and so on. One of the things i wanted to encourage by writing this book to encourage thinking in terms of risktaking and again, i am not advocating. I want to make this very clear. Sometimes we like to say we have to think outside the box. Well, when you think outside the box, you might make a mistake. I would like all of our valuation processes, the funding processes, so on and so forth, to take some level into account of this calculated risktaking that allows for a potential big breakthroughs with situations where people say we know that this is risky. There is a potential for very high rewards and to allow for a certain amount of that. Sidebyside and incremental extraordinarily careful side. That is why i find this to be inspiring. Ive pointing out a large mistakes in the colossal mistakes that the scientific greats in history made and i think it inspires us to take some risks with Scientific Methods and there are a lot of implications for today. In your own field, do you see ive seen this in my field of medicine, do you see a theory getting a lot of attention and momentum and not sufficient questioning, and do you see great people and great theories where there is a giant wonder that might be underrecognized . You may know that we have it. And this is supposed to be a theory of everything, which is a theory that is supposed to be unifying all the forces of nature. Explain all of the particles that we see in all. And so on. It is the best candidate that we have at the moment. It is all of the forces of nature it could turn out the theory is in the wrong direction and it definitely could turn out. The greatest minds exist in this very. I think that they should continue to work. Could turn out to be something that we were meant to take completely different direction. Thank you for having me. Thank you it is interviewed by legislators and others. You can watch it Asif Ali Zardari online. Go to booktv. Org and click on after words in the booktv series and topics list on the upper right side of the page. Were you reading this summer . Heres what some of you had to say we want to know what you are reading this summer. Post a message or tweet us or send us an email. In 1936, five years before they published let us praise famous men, walker evans produced a Fortune Magazine article entitled cotton tenants. The 30,000 word article were never published but it was discovered decades later in a collection of manuscripts housed at the university of tennessee. During this event, editor john summers leads a Panel Discussion about the book and the work of walker evans. In the he drew the assignment