Einstein's Mistakes: The Human Failings of Genius (Hardcover)

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Key Phrases: grand duke, curved spacetime geometry, length contraction, Nobel Prize, Principle of Equivalence, United States (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Bookmarks Magazine

In Einstein's Mistakes, Hans C. Ohanian draws on his own background in physics to gleefully point out some of Einstein's more glaring errors. That part of the book is solid, and readers will find a capable guide in Ohanian. What might be less engaging is the author's fast-and-loose writing style (Van Gogh became a great artist "when he went bonkers") and a tendency to botch some of the historical facts (related to Einstein's research, his Nobel Prize, and so forth) that underpin much of the narrative. Still, the book's ambitious scope—when calling out Einstein, writers weak of heart need not apply—and Ohanian's self-assured reportage make this a worthwhile read. Bring your thinking cap.
Copyright 2008 Bookmarks Publishing LLC

From Booklist

*Starred Review* In this “forensic biography,” Ohanian shows astonished readers that the most brilliant scientist of the twentieth century was frequently found making—in his own words—“a sacrifice on the altar of stupidity.” The great physicist’s admirers may already know that Einstein foolishly defied the quantum revolution he helped launch. The well-informed may even know something of Einstein’s disastrous missteps in his personal life. But it will come as a revelation to most readers that scientists have identified serious flaws in four of the five papers that established Einstein’s reputation during his annus mirabilis of 1905. Ohanian drops an even bigger bombshell in documenting Einstein’s repeated failure to provide a valid proof for his most famous equation: E = mc2. More surprising than the number and severity of Einstein’s errors, however, is the mystifying way the Berne genius reached correct—even revolutionary—conclusions despite these mistakes. In strange ways, some of Einstein’s blunders (such as the synchronization error in his “Special Relativity” paper) actually helped him achieve theoretical breakthroughs. Drawing on Arthur Koestler’s provocative analysis of Kepler, Ohanian characterizes Einstein as a similarly charmed sleepwalker whose profound intuition guided him to epoch-making conclusions along tortured pathways. A compelling portrait of a titan who stumbled his way into immortality. --Bryce Christensen

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: W.W. Norton & Co. (September 17, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393062937
• ISBN-13: 978-0393062939
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #480,945 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting material hampered by attack-dog presentation, October 30, 2008

By	Clark B. Timmins "q-25" (West Jordan, UT USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

The text presents a mix of light biography, theory explanation, and analysis of errors in a blend appropriate to support the major thesis--that Einstein made mistakes. The text is well written, generally balanced in structure, and enjoyable. Early chapters develop Einstein's career in the greater field of physics, first presenting the advances of Galileo, Newton, Lorentz, and others. Einstein is then presented as a young man working as a patent clerk and desiring a university posting--a posting beyond his grasp due to mediocre grades, poor personal hygiene, and challenged interpersonal skills. The book then follows his entire career. The included biography however is spotty and highlights anecdotes, but does not attempt to explain the man in notable detail--though the text is not intended as a comprehensive biography. Throughout, Einstein is presented as self-promoting, prone to foibles, a lousy mathematician, excessively proud, human--and also intelligent in the arena of physics. The author clearly does not hold Einstein in the same fabled light favored by conventional wisdom, for example presenting Einstein's initial forays into general relatively as "a performance worthy of Elmer Fudd" (p. 196) and suggesting that many of Einstein's theoretical advances were either proposed earlier by others, co-discovered but not co-attributed, or were invalid in detail while only accidentally correct in the general case. These various issues form the bulk of what the text terms Einstein's mistakes, noting "Einstein made so many mistakes in his scientific work that it is hard to keep track of them" (p. 327). The text does not claim to discover any mistakes--they are all attributed to other sources in the two-dozen pages of endnotes. The text argues that Einstein's reputation remains untarnished not for lack of faults but because of professional courtesy: "...he did not label Einstein's mistake as such. This restraint has also been observed by later writers..." (p. 96).

The text presents most material in a roughly chronological order, considering theories and papers in the order they were published. It is apparent from the material included that Einstein's interests were wide and that he had a fundamental grasp on the significant questions of physics during his lifetime. However, Einstein is presented as, at best, a bumbling mathematician. Most of the chronicled mistakes are mathematical errors. Much of science typically works in a stepwise fashion, with theories being offered and then either modified or withdrawn. Einstein was no exception to this and many of his published theories were later modified, either by himself or others. These early theoretical excursions, when not substantively correct on the first presentation, are considered serious mistakes. When Einstein did not know of significant contemporaneous developments, his ignorance is also termed a mistake. Some of Einstein's personal foibles and some of his career moves are considered mistakes.

In all, Einstein's collected papers are said to comprise "about 180 original items. Of these, about 50 contain mistakes...It's a bad scorecard" (p. 327). While the close examination of Einstein's productivity makes fascinating reading, the text's unfortunate tone borders on gloating and is not consistently objective; Einstein's mistakes "were perfectly mundane, careless, and sometimes stupid lapses in logic and mathematics" (p. 332). And in fact, the tone of the title itself captures entirely the tone of the text. The text's greatest disappointment, however, lies in the conclusion "[w]hat lessons can we extract from Einstein's mistakes? Not many" (p. 332). Surely this is wrong--studying the failings of genius, after all, helps us understand our own average failings in an entirely different light. And even if the conclusion is after all correct, that nothing can be learned by examining Einstein's mistakes, then why write the book in the first place?

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Ohanian's Mistakes, July 3, 2009

By	Joel M. Kauffman (Berwyn, PA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Ohanian does what the title says. Einstein made mistakes in most of his early journal papers even during his most productive years of 1905-1922 or so. But his intuition and insight, rather than his math ability, overcame the errors and made him famous. Many personal details are given, including a most interesting one of arranging to give the cash payment for his single Nobel Prize (for the explanation of the photoelectric effect) to his ex-wife #1 as a divorce settlement. Then he paid only about half of that.

It would have been appropriate to have explained, even on a half page, the significance of the work on the photoelectric effect, but I did not see it.

On p xi, a quotation from Einstein appears without comment: "What is essential in the life of a man of any kind lies in what he thinks and how he thinks, not in what he does or suffers." To me, this is a typical justification for Einstein's poor treatment of a number of people. Later Ohanian notes the number of times Einstein often failed to cite prior work to his own in order to fool people into thinking he discovered more than he did (p91).

On p1 there was a cute slip in a list of the things of which Germany was the biggest producer in 1905, which included church organs and canons. I would have thought cannons were meant.

On p9 Ohanian showed typical academic contempt for universal military service in Switzerland. One must note that the tiny country was never attacked by any of its larger neigbors.

More importantly, Ohanian desribed some of the experimental work that led to Einstein's most famous findings on relativity. This was the determination of the speed of light by A. A. Michelson and Morley in 1887 said to have a null result on p18 and a dozen other places. According to John O'Malley Bockris in The New Paradigm, 2005, p108ff, MM actually found a 20 km/sec difference depending on direction. And so did Prof. Dayton Miller, Univ. PA, in measurements he made from 1905-1931. As did Sagnac in 1913, M. Allais, and more recently by Ernest Silvertooth in 1987. These should not have been ignored, but listed, and the differences of null findings in other experiments explained. Moreover, Ohanian repeatedly called the null results, even of MM, "failures". This shows a dogmatic attitude. An honest experiment cannot ever be a "failure".

One other experimental finding that Ohanian did a better job on was the bending of starlight as it passes near the sun. In the four or so expeditions of 1919, two had bad weather, and the one with the astronomer Arthur Eddington made a measurment supporting Einstein's calculation, but also one supporting the smaller deflection predicted by Newton's work. The former was arbitrarily said to be correct. Ohanian gave no reason for this choice, and seemed completely accepting (p244). But on p254: "The 1919 eclipse expedition and Eddington's somewhat slanted data analysis were lucky breaks for Einstein."

On p28, the slowing of clocks moving at relativistic speeds was accepted. Since movement is relative, either of two clocks that moves has relative movement compared with the other, so any slowing of time by one would also be cancelled by slowing of the other, according to Bockris. This was explained away, but I could not follow the reasoning.

On p120 a sugar molecule is said to be 4x as large as a water molecule. Did this mean length? If so, a water molecule is 1.5 Å long, and a sugar molecule is about 18 Å long stretched out. Not 4x.

On p126 Einstein's explanation for the blue color of cloudless sky is beyond my understanding. I thought it was due to absorption of infrared rays by ozone and water vapor that did it.

On p167 there was the inevitable comparison of the energy from explosion of a kiloton of TNT compared with a kilo of uranium. Sloppily, the uranium isotope was not indicated, and the news that only some small fraction of the isotope is converted to energy by fission was missed, as is common. On p175 it is seen again: "But nuclear fusion reactions typically release a million times as much energy as chemical reactions..." presumably per unit mass consumed. It is never mentioned that only a tiny fraction of the "critical mass" of fission bomb material is converted.

Another bias is shown on p252: "But to call a physicist an engineer is not a compliment." Not in my book, since the engineer has the safety and fortune of many people in his hands. A failure generates lawsuits, but the failure of a physicist's theory does not. That should make you think.

On p253: "...each real electron or proton has exactly the same size as every other electron or proton, and its size never changes, no matter what you do to it." This seems at odds with shrinkage at relativistic speeds, which was described earlier.

Einstein's failures, lack of originality, and stubborness about quantum theory in his later years was duly noted. And his shrewdness about money.

Ohanian's writing was excellent by writer's standards, well-edited, and appeared to be well-referenced, but with gaps as noted above. Much personal information I never saw, not only about Einstein, but also on Newton, Galileo and Oppenheimer was fascinating. But many times an explanation would have been more comprehensible with use of diagrams or high-school algebra.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Something for everyone, November 2, 2008

By	Phelps Gates (Chapel Hill, NC USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I was worried that I'd need to brush up on my long-forgotten college math and physics to understand this book, but the book is itself a bit of a brush-up course. And what's especially remarkable is that it's understandable, at different levels, by people with almost any scientific background, or none at all. People who understand tensor calculus (or who know what it is!) would, I'm sure, get more out of the book than I did, but with only a layman's concept of relativity, I was able to follow a good many of the points he makes about Einstein's mistakes (such as his failure to consider tidal effects in the Equivalence Principle).

Except for E=mc squared (and Newton's F=ma), there's hardly an equation in sight. And a lot of the book is totally non-technical: many of Einstein's mistakes involved women, rather than math or physics, and this aspect of his life is not slighted. The book examines the "Einstein phenomenon" and how Einstein managed his well-deserved reputation as the scientist of the century. And (unless it's a hat) the author has the most marvelous haircut I've ever seen on a physicist!