September 08, 2008

• 24. That bowl of matzo ball soup in the Faculty Dining Room, 1942. Oy, such indigestion!
• Way to go, Einstein. Srsly, tho -- a book like this has all the feel of a panel discussion at a comicon, with wisenheimers pointing out continuity errors on panel 36b of issue 138. Oy gevalt!
• That's the awesome thing about science. You can make a mistake, and then go back and figure out what you did wrong. Or you can figure out a mistake someone else made, and it's actually considered a good thing.
• I wish I was teh smarts so I could make the kinda mistakes Mr. E. made.
• Mistake #0: getting into the whole mistake biz in the first place. Shoulda just become a preacher. They never make mistakes.
• This doesn't say what the mistakes were, just that he made one (23 times). It's kinda like saying "Einstein made a mistake on March 3, 1904." Tell me what the mistake was! The vagueness makes it seem that either A) the mistakes were colossal, or B) the mistakes were so small, that many might even challenge calling it a mistake.
• It does say what the mistakes were, just doesn't go into detail on the context. I'm sure if the article did so, it would be pages long, as each point would entail explaining whole swathes of theoretical physics. I can look up each of these listings and find details about them; I suppose I should have linked relevant pages to each one, but I had been up for 36 hours due to insomnia at that point and frankly was rather lazy about this link. The point of the article is not to go into detail about the mistakes, but to point out that even Einstein was not infallible.
• Mr. K, my bet is on (C), "most general audiences would have trouble understanding the mistake without a ton of backstory."
• No 24: choice of barber.
• No. 25: not snogging Marilyn Monroe.
• Here's another mistake he regretted: "If I would be a young man again and had to decide how to make my living, I would not try to become a scientist or scholar or teacher. I would rather choose to be a plumber or a peddler in the hope to find that modest degree of independence still available under present circumstances." - Albert Einstein, The Reporter, November 18 1954
• Yeah, sure. Wait till he's wading around in a broken sewer pipe hole. The equation there is .....................2 PU=(poop)stink
• It doesn't say what the mistakes were at all. It jsut says what he was working on when he made it. Look at the last mistake. Was it a math error? a typo? grammar? or are calling out the whole concept of E=mc^2? The way it's put, they could be the equivalent of creationists or global warming deniers. All these mistakes could be that he didn't use the bible in each proof, or something else equally ridiculous. Especially when you look the ones where they say his mistake was interpretation of foo. Look at "1933 Mistakes in interpretation of quantum mechanics (Does God play dice?)". Scientists are still debating interpretations of quantum mechanics. You can't really call out anyone, saying they made a mistake in interpretation. We haven't determined what is and what isn't a mistake. Are these simple typos, huge blunders, or personal disagreements? They don't say. They don't describe the mistakes. Try this: Yesterday I made a mistake driving my car. "what was the mistake?" you say. "driving my car." "but what was the mistake?" you say. "driving my car." "YES, BUT WHAT WAS THE MISTAKE?!" It could be that I didn't use my blinker soon enough, that I ran over fifteen people, or that I took a different route to my destination. The article looks like it's taking the blinker mistake, or the different route "mistake", and is presenting it as running over fifteen people. Unless, you are saying that (in my case) the act of driving was the mistake, and (in Einstein's case) the act of proving/interpreting/et al was the mistake. That he should not have been doing that, therefore he made a mistake.
• What about fuzzy logic? The ability of machines to make mistakes and then correct for them is awesome for machines. Why not the same for men?