Albert Einstein got it wrong. Not once, not twice, but countless times. He made subtle blunders, he made outright goofs, his oversights were glaring. Error infiltrated every aspect of his thinking. He was wrong about the universe, wrong about its contents, wrong about the workings of atoms. Yet Einstein’s mistakes could be compelling and instructive, and some were even essential to the progress of modern physics. “Most scientists would give their eyeteeth to make even one of Einstein’s mistakes,” says theoretical physicist Fred Goldhaber of the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
But they were still mistakes. In 1911 Einstein predicted how much the sun’s gravity would deflect nearby starlight and got it wrong by half. He rigged the equations of general relativity to explain why the cosmos was standing still when it wasn’t. Beginning in the mid-1920s, he churned out faulty unified field theories at a prodigious rate. American physicist Wolfgang Pauli complained that Einstein’s “tenacious energy guarantee[s] us on the average one theory per annum,” each of which “is usually considered by its author to be [the] ‘definitive solution.’ ” And, while other physicists built careers describing the random antics within atoms, Einstein never even allowed that God might play dice with the universe.
Einstein’s blunders reveal the unique mind behind his winning thoughts. Einstein’s mistakes get upstaged by a few of his good ideas. Still, his errors deserve scrutiny, and not just for the schadenfreude. “There is no logical path to these laws; only intuition . . . can reach them,” Einstein said. In retrospect, however, his discoveries seem eminently logical. Only his errors preserve the doubts, quirks, and prejudices that fed his intuition. If his triumphs describe how the universe works, then his mistakes describe how he worked.
In 1916 Einstein found what he considered a glitch in his new theory of general relativity. His equations showed that the contents of the universe should be moving— either expanding or contracting. But at the time, the universe seemed the very definition of stasis. All the data, facts, and phenomena known in the early 1900s said that the Milky Way was the cosmos itself and that its stars moved slowly, if at all. Einstein had presented the definitive version of the general theory of relativity to the Prussian Academy of Sciences the previous year, and he was not inclined to retract it. So he invented a fudge factor, called lambda, that could function mathematically to hold the universe at a standstill. The term implied that space itself had energy that resisted the contraction caused by gravity or the expansion from the stretching of space.
Lambda “was not justified by our actual knowledge of gravitation,” Einstein said. But he stood by the ideal of the unchanging heavens until the moment, in 1929, when American astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe is expanding.
