Even geniuses are 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 confidence in his own theories.
These doubts led him to make big (so-called) mistakes.
The Cosmological Constant
While working on his theory of general relativity, Einstein’s calculations suggested that gravity would cause the Universe to contract or expand, contrary to the then-accepted view that the Universe was static.
So in his 1917 paper on general relativity, Einstein inserted a “cosmological constant” into his equations to effectively counteract the impact of gravity, thereby subscribing to the orthodoxy that the Universe was static.
A decade later, scientists began gathering new evidence that the Universe wasn’t static at all. In fact, it was expanding.
Physicist George Gamow later wrote in his book My World Line: An Informal Autobiography that Einstein commented, in retrospect, that “the introduction of the cosmological term was the biggest mistake he made in his life.”
But there is another twist.
Scientists now have evidence that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating due to a mysterious “dark energy.”
Some believe that Einstein’s cosmological constant, originally introduced to counteract gravity in his equations, actually explain this energy, and therefore may not have been such a serious error after all..
Gravitational Lens
Einstein’s theory of general relativity also predicted another phenomenon: that the gravitational field of a massive object, such as a star, would bend light coming from a distant object behind it, acting like a giant magnifying lens.
Einstein thought the effect, known as gravitational lensing, would be too small to be seen. He had no intention of publishing his calculations until a Czech engineer named, RW Mandl, convinced him.
Referring to his own 1936 article in the journal Science, Einstein wrote to the editor: “Let me also thank you for your cooperation with the little publication that Herr Mandl forced out of me. It is of little value, but it makes the poor man happy.”
The value of this small publication has proven to be very significant for astronomy.
It allows the U.S. space agency NASA and the European Space Agency’s Hubble Telescope to capture details of very distant galaxies, magnified by enormous galaxy clusters closer to Earth.
Quantum Superposition
Einstein’s work, including his 1905 paper describing light as waves and particles, helped lay the foundation for an emerging branch of physics.
Quantum mechanics describes the strange, counterintuitive world of tiny subatomic particles.
For example, a quantum object exists in “superposition,” that is, in multiple states until it is observed and measured, at which point it is assigned a value.
This was famously illustrated by physicist Erwin Schrödinger in his paradox, according to which a cat in a box can be considered simultaneously alive and dead until someone opens the lid to check.
Einstein refused to accept this uncertainty. In 1926, he wrote to physicist Max Born: “[God] does not play dice.“
In a 1935 paper, written with scientists Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, he argued that if two objects in superposition were separated after having been linked in some way, a person observing the first object and assigning a value to it would instantly fix a value for the second object, without the latter ever being observed.
Although this thought experiment was intended to refute quantum superposition, it actually laid the groundwork, decades later, for the development of a key idea in quantum mechanics that we now call entanglement.
It suggests that two particles can remain connected and influence each other, even when separated by great distances.
So it seems that Einstein was brilliant in his theories and facilitated genius even in those aspects where he was sometimes wrong.